Moving from a Start Up to a Big Tech Company
For 2022 I made a goal to get a new job. I loved working at Hippo Education. The team was like working with a family, and I loved getting to work on a project doing good in the world with highly-passionate individuals. While it was a bit hectic at times, I enjoyed the many hats that came with the role. But I was ready for something new.
There were several things that I was looking for in a new role. I wanted to be able to focus on technical challenges. I wanted something that gave me the opportunity to learn how to build excellent software. And, of course, I wanted something with better benefits as well. All these things don’t tend to go hand-in-hand with an engineer/tech lead/manager role at a start up.
I ended up at GitHub and I couldn’t be happier. I’m a few months in, now, and I have learned a few things during the transition that I thought may be worth sharing.
Impact
Working at a larger tech company like GitHub, with a product that gets used by millions of developers every day, a lot of people will see your work. Both your wins and your bugs will be very present and will get much more attention than they did when your user numbers were a few orders of magnitude lower.
As a result, you have many more opportunities to learn about scaling your product. This can be both good and bad. I’ve learned a lot more about infrastructure like Kubernetes than I ever had to know before. That’s both the good and the bad part.
Pace
At a start up, your most important job is to push out features and finish projects as fast as possible. Larger companies can’t move like that, though. Having lots of customers relying on your product means that you have to be more careful with changes.
Adjusting to the slower pace of doing work was a bit of a challenge for me. I actually enjoy moving fast. There’s a thrill associated with finishing a project before the deadline.
I’m starting to appreciate this new pace, though. It has given me the time to better understand my domain and the changes that are happening in it. I have more time to better understand the technologies I’m using day-to-day. And having better confidence in these things has given me a new psychological safety for making changes that I didn’t have before.
Mentorship
It’s a bit of a given that larger tech companies have more engineers than start ups. This allows for many more mentorship opportunities, both as a mentee and a mentor.
GitHub is huge and full of lots of very smart people. I love having the opportunity to learn from so many people. Many of the engineers that work at GitHub built the technologies that we build GitHub with. And that is super cool.
There’s also a formal mentorship program within the engineering team. That program has allowed me to get more one-on-one time with mentors from around the world that are extremely insightful. This is the sort of thing that can only happen at larger companies that have enough people present to power it.
Attention
Another by-product of working in such a large place with so many passionate engineers is the amount of content and discussions that are available to you. It took me a long time to build a system that would allow me to filter through this content to the things that I felt were most important to me and my role.
Your attention is one of the most valuable things you own. You can either passively absorb everything that comes your way, or actively seek out the information that you find important. I’ve chosen the latter. Actively sorting through the information that I consume is helpful to my own learning and career goals. I have outlined the process that I use here.
I’ve been extremely happy with my move to GitHub and all that I’ve learned since being here. While working at a larger tech company has definitely been an adjustment, I’m finding that it’s exactly what I need at this point in my career and my life.