Last year I’ve made a decision, a decision that remove myself from the comfort zone that I’m in for the past 2 years.
Working in Vase is an experience that I would value for the rest of my life. Seeing how my company’s founders work with their blood and sweat. Building it piece by piece from mere 5 employees all the way to 20+ employees. Working painstakingly to get the company moving at the right direction and making sure that we are well feed and productive.
I’m in awe.
I was impressed and afraid. Afraid of starting a company myself, which I did before joining the company because I could understand their pain, at least part of it.
Starting a company is easy, maintaining and growing one is crazily hard.
What I wanted to write in this article wasn’t about Vase, nor is it about my life in startup. Instead, the differences and process that I go through from startup to corporate.
In a startup you get to see up and close on how the company is being run. How the founders manage and hustle between tasks. From cold calling client, to presenting in our town hall session, to getting our toilet fix, to the late night delivery that need to get into the hand of client tomorrow morning.
It was tough, it was fun, but it was all worth it.
In corporate you see none of that (minus the occasional late night crunch 😂), but instead you get to see how systems and process manage 100s of peoples working toward a single goal and project. The intricate system that connects all the effort in getting things done. This is what I learnt in the past 2 month, the most productive 2 months I had for a while.
But processes gets in the way, even simple things like doing a version bump on a package.json requires approval from the UK team. Things that could be easily deployed gets delayed. Improvement and tech that should be built being moved down to the next sprint. Business priorities and delivery have the utmost importance.
I’m glad that I joined. Finally I’m able to not miss deadlines and feeling happier in this 3 years of professional coding life.
Even though the total code or technical knowledge gained is definitely lesser than of working in a startup. The way they manage us through Jira and SAP timesheet as well as the sprint planning, daily standup, retrospection wasn’t something new or innovative but it manage to manage me.
I’m able to delivery, I felt happier by the end of the day. I can’t slack the whole day and tell them I had a bad day. I had to log my time against a task be it a bugfix or a feature delivery.
Let me reiterate, if you are into getting all the technical knowledge in building a product by all mean join a startup. You learn how to build things out of nothingness. If you are into improving yourself, manage yourself, learn and observe how and why things are being done in such way in big corporate MNC by all means join the corporate that best align to your vision or that it could propel you further in your career.
I’m glad I left my previous job, but I’m gracious for what I have been thought in Vase. Thank you Asy, Zhen and Julie.
PS: Vase is always hiring and I can assure you that they really do appreciate talented individual. BAE Systems too is hiring just drop me a mail if you are interested.