In a week, I’ll be changing jobs yet again. Except for the first gig, I’ve been working on progressively earlier stages during the live of a company: I worked for the publishing powerhouse Planeta Group, a big corporation with slow reflexes. Then, in the Barcelona office of Pivetal, a UK company with advanced automation and quality management products (don’t let their website fool you) for the telco industry. After that, came Polymita Technologies, a growth stage startup that sells a unique BPM platform that integrates all the infrastructure for today’s business applications. And next month, I’ll be joining an early stage startup. A web startup, in a way of speaking
I’ve enjoyed my stay at Polymita. I was currently in a support analyst position and, while not having the glamour of R&D or the hectic pace of the operations department (which I’m not sure I like anyway), it was rewarding all the same because everyday was different, I didn’t know beforehand what would the cases be like. But lately, with the product being so stable, my mad skillz were going unused (and please excuse my hubris, that’s how we geeks are). I hadn’t planned to leave or anything, but I was offered this new position last year and my inner engineer started to see lots of potential directions this tech could go to. Even so, at first I didn’t clearly see the way the technology could be monetized (that’s what reading TechCrunch will do to you). I didn’t hear back from this people until some weeks ago, where they presented me some changes that could make the product a hit. While I had figured out that my next job would involve Rails or Cocoa, looks like I’ll be sticking with Java (for the time being at least) on this new company. Still, the development platform of choice in the new company are MacBook Pro’s, so there’s still hope. I could do some internal tool with Cocoa or an iPhone client, who knows?
So, I decided to switch jobs in this crazy economic climate. I’m abandoning the stability and job security that Polymita provides me and diving head first into the dangerous waters and stressing climate of a true web startup. While some people have commented that I must be mad, some others have complimented me, and I think this is a golden opportunity to learn first-hand all an entrepreneur has to know. If the progression holds, my next job could be on my own company and I would need this knowledge. And anyway, I’ll get to work on lots of interesting stuff, there might even be some parsing involved (making this site’s motto relevant once more).
It could also be that this idea flops, but then again, I’m not overly stressed by this possibility. After a handful of interviews looking for new staff, I realized how difficult it is for companies to find competent engineers. I know that I wouldn’t be on the dole for too long.