Image by Eric GreerWorking at a startup is both very exciting and challenging as it allows you significant freedom to explore new spaces and new technologies and at the same time introduces you to new skills and area of business operations that you normally wouldn’t see at a larger company. I am a developer who likes these challenges.
Background
I began developing software professionally right out of school at a large company near Boston, I was poached from there to join a startup back at my hometown which was great for my quality of life as it dropped my commute to 10 minutes and allowed me freedom to run the software development strategy for the company.
Fast forward four years and I was leading a a dev team of ten members that I had helped grow and was spending more of my time with politics and managing people then coding, and then I get a text from Henry: ‘How much do you like your job?’ That is an important question everyone should ask themselves and for me was an opportunity to reflect on what I enjoyed about my job and what I really wanted for the future.
Interviewing
As a candidate the interview process can be a stressful time: I had to update my resume which hadn’t been touched in four years, I didn’t know what to expect as the interview was digital and not in person. My first interview was two days after the initial text, the second round technical interview took place later that night and a follow up business interview took place the next day. Four days after that initial text and I had an offer to work at Apsis. Perfect timing for me to surprise my boss on a long weekend and let him know we had to talk.
You know what is harder than interviewing? Quitting a job where you are respected and have been working for several years, but I was confident that I was making a great choice. Apsis gave me an opportunity to work at a small company again, respected my time for work / life balance, and gave me the opportunity to explore new technology and situations.
Life at Apsis
Working for Apsis is different from your typically company, you pick your hours so if Monday mornings aren’t your thing, you don’t need to force yourself to get into the office. Want to go for a hike in the afternoon? Go for it. Apsis currently has members on the east and west coasts (and somewhere in the middle) so we can spread our days to cover any of our clients’ needs as well as there is generally someone else on sooner or later. Being on the east coast, I get the morning to focus on getting stuff done with no interruptions, I’ll have a more relaxed afternoon for meetings when the rest of the company gets on-line, and then be done before the West Coast even gets lunch (but I’ll still play League with them).
At Apsis we work in a very agile flow, we plan out our work on Monday and reflect on Friday about how it went. Because we work with multiple clients who have their own sprints and deadlines our sprints focus on how we will allocate our time to satisfy the needs of our clients, but also our own interests. We focus on allocating projects to the developer that finds it most interesting or wants to learn a new skill, which works out because of the diverse nature of our projects.
Consulting
A question that comes to me quite frequently is ‘Do you like being a consultant?’ One of the things I thought I would miss out on as a consultant is not being able to impact a project over the long term, however with the clients we work with there are large projects that last over several months giving you the chance to really be part of their team and develop a product from an idea into a production level technology. The inverse joy is that we also do one off projects as well so you can take a project work on it and then hand it off to the client’s team for long term support and modification, freeing you to take on the next project. It gives a great sense of joy to lay out a framework that is high quality that others will be using for years to support their business knowing you made an impact. So overall I like consulting and supporting whatever tasks a client needs doing, and for myself I took my time outside of Apsis to create a project that was truly my own.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading my tale of how I joined Apsis, I hope that you were able to gain insight into our company and why we enjoy the work we do. We are always looking for new people to join the team, or if you have an idea that you think we could help with we would love to hear from you.