I have been hired and completed the first two weeks at a start-up and I could not be happier!
I had been searching in the faltering Toronto tech industry for over a year and a half, and was feeling quite depressed about it when an opportunity landed in my lap, finally, and a great friend of mine helped me have the confidence to take on the interview process.
Apparently it worked, because I impressed the team and the new workplace and team are fantastic so far. I’m having the typical struggles with getting a new build system to actually work the way the team says it does, because usually people will go through these problems without thinking to document them. It could also be that the systems once worked, but as the IT team tries to harden the security of our technology stack, some things break in the installation and provisioning process.
I was fully expecting to get a Thinkpad of some kind, but I was given an M4 MBP to work on, so I get to be the guinea pig for that developer image as well.
I’m a Senior Software Developer on the team, but I’ve also been doing quite a bit of documentation of the CI/CD, dev laptop provisioning, network, and dev stack setup. I’m trying to make sure that as we hire new people that nobody has to go through the same struggles.
That’s part of the fun of being in a start-up; I get to wear many hats and solve many kinds of problems, and am generally trusted to apply my expertise where it is needed. It’s a wonderful feeling and hearkens back to the feelings of working in a smaller marketing firm for my first real gig in Peterborough.