Hi, my name is Anna. I am 25. I am a linguist and today I will tell about my first 3 months in IT company. I’ve learned a lot during those 90 days and would like to share this knowledge with you. In order not to make this post too long I decided to pick up 7 most important things. So let’s go!
1. Working for a small company is much-much better than for a huge corporation
5 years ago, being a student and looking for my first job I dreamt of becoming an employee of a big company. I’ve got my chances. Being one of hundreds of employees was a good experience, I cannot complain. But now being a member of 40-people team is just awesome. You know each guy in the company personally. You know whom of them directly to ask if you need any help. And in both cases it contributes to smoother and faster communication.
2. Railsware means freedom of your ideas
Big company usually means a lot of bureaucracy on the way of establishing something new. The same works when you try to promote your ideas. For the idea to become a reality you need 10 people to approve it and in 99,9% of cases there’s always a guy who doubts it will work. In Railsware my ideas are welcomed. We have brainstorming sessions to generate more possible solutions and you have no right to keep your ideas unspoken! Which is pretty cool – you feel you can bring some value. The only thing I wish now is to have more hours in a day and days in a week to take all those ideas out of the Icebox and make them working already.
3. Agility and flexibility
I am not going to tell you about ability to pivot fast and without much pain. What I mean has nothing to do with the app development process (which is really well-established at Railsware, by the way). To explain the notion I will tell you a short and very simple story.
When I joined Railsware my first move was to polish company pages up – that’s exactly what I was working on previously. Soon I noticed that our website was missing an open graph markup and because of that content shared to social pages didn’t look in the best way. I did small research, sent the link to one of our engineers with a general question “Is it possible?” and after about 10 minutes I got a reply “Done”.. Woooow! No big deal? For me it is, I was used to waiting for at least few days for a minor issue to be resolved. If you have not yet, check this blog post shared on our Facebook or Twitter – it works!
4. Diverse responsibilities
I don’t mean multitasking but variety of tasks. Maybe this is not an issue for you but I really need to switch tasks to stay productive. And you cannot avoid this at Railsware. Which is a big luck for me. Of course, there is some routine, still even this routine is different each time (e.g. managing social media is all about creating NEW content). But in general I am involved in so many marketing, sales and recruitment activities that my days hardly look alike. It may be tough sometimes but I enjoy challenges.
5. Possibility to learn
At Railsware you learn stuff and get paid for this. Of course, it’s a joke. But still… Let me explain it with a real example. I came to Railsware to work in Sales and Marketing with little experience in the field, a few ideas on social media and a strong desire to learn. My thirst for knowledge I prove with my constant questions. Each time I get patient replies. But there is a thing Railsware taught me for sure: before asking a question try and do some research in the Internet. Often the answer is much closer and easier than you think.
6. Shifting to IT is super hard
My university background is linguistics. I worked in airlines company and everything-for-your-home chain of stores. Then I switched to IT. Well, with each job I was changing the field, no biggie, yeah? But with airlines you can learn international flight regulations and with stores the assortment – and here you are, already in the context. With IT it will never work like this.
Even if you are not a programmer and are not supposed to write code, you need to follow technical news, try trending technologies, be aware of every change in tools you use. Context is constantly changing. I read books at home, articles guys share at the office, listen to podcasts on my way home or to the office. And still there’s always news on something I cannot understand at once. Well, I demanded explanations on why “S3 is down” is such a terrible news))). Guys say I need at least a year to get to some point of understanding. And I am on my way.
7. Remote work and travel policy
Flexible hours and remote work are quite popular practices in many companies. But at Railsware I tried it for the first time. Same with remote work. Any day you can stay at home or get to your favourite cafe and work remotely. And you do not need any reason for this: it’s raining heavily or sun is shining too brightly, anyway. In my case it saved me a day when I almost caught cold.
But the coolest thing is travel policy. You can travel wherever you want and work from there as long as you want (be sure you’ll find internet connection)). I am already planning to work few weeks from Porto this summer!
These are my top 7 things I wanted to share with you, guys. And it’s after only 3 months in the company. I still have to tell you a lot about Railsware. And will have even more soon because I am constantly learning. Hope my story was an interesting and inspiring read. But I need to wrap up here and meet my next challenges. The most interesting of them I will definitely describe in my next posts. So if you want to learn more, follow our blog or… join Railsware!