| > At a small co. you get to wear a lot of hats and have a much more holistic feel for the business I like the hats. Once, a (junior) coworker asked what I expect from the job. I figured it was 6 things: - Money, of course - Interesting work - Learning, or at least putting good stuff on my resume - Ego, wanting to say "_I_ built that" - Control, wanting to say "I built that _with my tools_" or getting to work on "_my_" projects - Socialization I ranked them in order of how concretely the company offered them to employees. Money is the most concrete, it's in every contract. Socialization is the most abstract, the company can't make any promises about that. The middle ones were fuzzy. The company's product is somewhat interesting, and won't change often, but learning, ego, and control were not in any contract. These were things I quietly extracted under the table because I just really wanted them. I would like to reify them. I'd like to say to my manager "I'm going to work on some pointless internal tool nobody needs, just so I can play with this new language. Then when I realize we could never deploy it, I'll feel better about using an older language on our real product. I can't control my inner child, and letting me play with blocks and Play-Doh is cheaper for us than hiring a company therapist or firing me." A couple times my boss' boss teased us about "10% time, like Google does", and it never manifested. I've just been taking it anyway. Probably less than 10%. My last performance review was great and every month they give me money, so I haven't been caught. Maybe it works because, unlike Google, I'm not trying to write a new chat app every time I need a promotion. I'm just occasionally doing things nobody told me to do, based on my intuition, to satisfy some sub-conscious wannabe hacker drive. |
So I wonder, maybe if I ever stop liking my company, it doesn't mean the company's bad, it means I just need to find another startup and ride it for 4 or 5 years until it gets too big again.