It will be a story based on my own experience of transition from a big company to a small one.

I (left) and my new teammate Eugene (center) during our first bike ride after joining Epicmax

Every young specialist in IT-sphere goes through three steps (two last steps will repeat from time to time):

- starting a career,

- period of inspiration and doubts,

- thoughts about development in other direction.

Let’s analyze how it works today and walk around each step.

Everybody remembers his/her university years? At first it is a feeling of freedom, a will to touch and try everything but after two years of the studying you stand face-to-face with a problem of employment. Parties and clubs give way to learning programming and English. Many students send their curriculum vitae with only one hope: to find a job and to become independent.

After a lot of attempts students finally get a vacation. Most often they become employees of a big company — a big family with open heart to newcomers but with short memory for your existence and achievements. What a wonderful feeling — your first salary, your first real project with customer, first team-building and office party! Don’t get your hopes up, everything interesting lies ahead.

After a working year or a little bit more (it depends) the delight passes and you realize your place and value in the company. Movements from team to team started, salary growth now depends not only on your professional skills but also on your insistence and communication with group manager. Your preferences about stack of programming technologies are not taken into the view — your loyalty equated to the benefits to the company.

A typical situation of this loyalty — when you haven’t assigned yet on any project and wait on the bench wasting your own time and money sources of the company. Meanwhile, big companies with such employees are main suppliers of free hands to the IT-market.

It is necessary to say about open-space offices in big companies — hundreds of people, who are working in one room and separated from each other by partitions. You feel as a bee in a hive: noize, formal and informal conversations around, feeling that everybody is watching on you, queue in meeting-rooms. Though it promotes social skills and increases stress resistance, after a long period of time you start to get tired of people that affects your concentration.

Usually a period of doubts starts when you spend a lot of time on a project. What happened on my last project on my previous job: the atmosphere in my team was getting more and more nervous. The customer continued to add new features to scope ignoring code freeze — there was a feeling that he wants to delay the release for as long as possible. QA seeing constantly changing customer’s requirements started to describe their own logic for some modules. Developers got contradictory requirements from customer and QA and often felt disappointed. The whole view of PM indicated that he didn’t care about endless release postpones, because the company continued to get money from customers.

There are three variants of the path under such circumstances:

- to stay on the project and check your nerves for strength. Mentality of Belarusians attaches to it.

- to try to speak with your group-manager about changing the project. Who knows, maybe he will be understanding? However, this can be perceived negatively by your team and your colleges.

- to leave the company: open or join a startup, found your own company or migrate to other company, change your sphere, etc.

Have you ever heard about six degree of separation theory? I didn’t believe in it before I had an invitation from Andrei, the leader of Epicmax team (he was my groupmate at university). Last spring Andrei was looking for young specialists from our specialization and asked for help to my university teacher, with whom we are keeping in touch. She knew that I was working with junior courses so she asked me for advice about smart students. My recommendations brought the result: one of the candidates got into Andrei’s team on a trial period.

To be honest, I didn’t think a lot about changing my job though I was quite worried about the project situation. Almost a month after these recommendations Andrei wrote me and suggested to come for an interview to Epicmax. As I got to know after, that student who came to Epicmax gave a nice comment about me. By the way, now he is working on an open-source project, Vuestic Admin.

I had no doubts — I understood that it can be my chance to escape from the big company hell. I wasn’t sure about my perfect developer skills, but I decided to risk. I passed all interview steps and finally Andrei made me an offer (I still don’t understand, why he believed in me:)). The same day I realized that I wanted to join the team — they left a good impression of themselves.

I knew that project and group managers didn’t allow me to leave the company so easily. I needed a strong argument to leave job — after a lot of thoughts I decided to use a fake story. I’ve played some roles in school plays, but this plan required from me great actor skills.

Month of lies eventually ended. While I left office I hadn’t got any regrets — I didn’t notice changes for the better in my project, it even became worse. Hope that my previous team will find powers to overcome all difficulties.

Now I work in a small cozy office on the thirteenth floor of a tower with a view of Minsk. My new team is not so big but all of them are qualified specialists and motivated people ready to help each other in difficult situations. Whoever said anything, in our time it’s very important to be a human — human with opened heart and clear mind ready to changes.

The level of my own responsibility has changed: in small companies your wrong decisions and actions can lead to a general failure. You should control everything — from your programming code to communication and behaviour. Is seems difficult but makes your pleasure of feeling really important.

In some way I had to study again but I don’t think that it is a step back: just experience and knowledge accumulation before something great. I’ve already worked on an open-source project, had an experience of working with a foreign customer and it is only the beginning.

This is what I would like to convey: sometimes if you want to achieve something or simply continue to move forward, you should leave all disturbing factors behind. One decision done on time can change all your life.

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