• Multi-national conglomerate
• ~300k employees
• ~20% of South Korea's GDP
• 20+ year old

Tier 2 Social Media Support

• Indirect Auto Lender
• 200 employees; 80% in Greenville, SC
• $2B in loans outstanding of the $1.3T
• 5 year old VC backend M&A

Technical Analyst I

Projects

• Migrate LOS from CMSI (OracleDb SP/XML) to DEFI (JS)
• Automate testing for decisioning (Python)
• Self-service password resets for various tools (C#)

• Software Consulting Company
• ~15 employees; 50% in Greenville, SC
• ~100 customers across the US
• 25+ yrs old

Developer

Sample of Projects

(50+ projects grand total)

• Conference Room Reservation System
• Benefit Tracking System
• Call Center System

Lead Engineer

• Wellness Provider
• ~100 employees; fully distributed in US
• $40M in VC funding
• 5 year old start up

Backend Engineer

🏝 Work remotely

⛺️ Unlimited Paid Time-off

📈  Company Stock options

Team Lead

• Email Security
• ~40 employees; fully distributed US, CA, NL, BG
• No VC Funding
• 5 year old start up

Staff Engineer

Lessons/Thoughts

Good Code ↛ Success

• You can make your org fail with bad code, but you can't succeed on your own.
• The code you're not proud of will stay around forever, because it works, so no one touches it.

Soft Skills are Hard

• Companies that value written communication above oral communication are rare and nearly always winners.
• Low trust environments require lots of communication. If people need to talk a lot to get "alignment", it's because everyone is new or everyone distrusts each other.

Your Specific Skill of X is not Valuable across Companies

• You can find jobs as just a C# person, but this is also true of COBOL
• Learn to have your skills translate across tech stacks

Old Tech ↛ Bad Tech

1993

1990

Success feels Boring

$40M in funding

unprofitable

5 years old

Customers in US

1 DC Center

40 engineers

No funding

profitable

5 years old

Customers worldwide

4 DC Regions

10 engineers

Relationships Last Across Jobs

More Pithy One Liners

• Broke gets fixed; crappy is forever
• Code ages like fish; data ages like wine
• Today's experimental greenfield is tomorrow's legacy deathtrap
• Every company generally believes they're following best practices
• Quantity of outstanding bugs is a function of usage throughput