A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

I knew before I started my new job that it was going to be ‘fast paced’ – that’s pretty much how it was sold to me. I found myself excited to be part of a team that would constantly push the limits of my brain and leverage the cutting edge technology that the world is constantly bombarded with. It’s not that my previous job was a cake-walk – the last year consisted of pushing out a system that high-priced consultants said would be impossible. Six months of sixty hour weeks and a huge team effort, we were able to successfully implement the system. I knew I was ready for the next step.

After my first week at the new company, I knew what they meant by fast-paced. In daily stand-up meetings (where we actually do have the meeting standing up – a part of the Extreme Programming methodology) it was not out of the ordinary to hear people saying things like, “we managed to get it working at 3:00 last night”. And these people don’t say it as if it was a bad thing, or in a comlaining tone. They like it. This was one of the main reasons I wanted in this company – they only hire developers who are genuinely passionate about technology. Everyone is always running around. My team lead will usually stop by my office to see how things are going. After talking for about ten minutes or so he’ll finish his last sentence while running out of my office cause he has to be somewhere else. Seriously, this happens every time.

With my previous company, I never had any code I wrote actually go into production for at least three years. Not that it wasn’t good enough or anything, but just because the projects were so large and controlled. At my new place, I had stuff go to production in less than three weeks. We release software patches and upgrades weekly. And now, I have a major issue assigned to me that has to be ready for 6:00 pm Monday. For a guy who is still trying to figure out where scratch pads are stocked, that’s quite a bit of pressure. But it does feel good to jump right into everything and get something accomplished.

It is definitely like night and day between the two companies. I don’t think one way is better than the other, but they are just very different. It will definitely be cool to be doing things that are pretty much the same, but just in a completely different manner.