I’m currently making big decisions, the life changing ones. I wanted to write a little about it just to get some things out of my head.

During the life changing process I’m going through I’ve learned a thing or two about tech companies, the ones that are “growing” but don’t know how. In the past year or so I’ve been blessed with a lot of opportunities to do fun small and large projects in a day to day basis. This is great because I’ve acquired a lot of experience that I may have not been able to acquire if I worked in a bigger company, where my role would have been minimized to very specific tasks. I’m not going on a tangent here; this is very related to the growth of a company though. The lesson learned was:

The more your software developers venture themselves in projects that go outside their comfort zone, the more they grow professionally, hence the company does too.

In my case I’ve been able to do so and with that I was able to help the company grow and produce cool things, gave exposure to my team within the company and most of all I made an impact in my team. I reaffirmed myself that learning is the first step to be a great developer, personally is the most important thing that should never stop happening in your career, and that teaching what you know is the second most important thing in order to be the best. Today, I follow great developers everywhere and see this trend. You’ll see it in between the lines (I should say tweets). Sadly though, I also see the opposite and for better or worse, it happens due to ignorance or maybe lack of effort, perhaps even lack of good management.

Software developers in the present day are hot commodities, and most companies, specially in the Valley and Bay area get this. They seem to attract the best and keep them. How do they do that? you may say: “it’s the salaries” or “it’s the perks”… yes that drives developers a little, but the truth though is that this developers go and stay in this companies because their managers and people making decisions are like-minded. They think the same, they are just as technical and are not afraid of rewarding their developers for being awesome.

As final thought, I want to say that my dream is very similar to that of many people, “be your own boss have your own company”, this however is a long shot that for some of us is worth the try. Having learned from my experiences these past couple of years, I can say that if I ever do achieve that dream, I will make the growth of my company driven by the growth of my developers. If my developers are awesome, my product will be awesome and everything else pretty much will do itself.

Javier