Three month of rocking whole industry

Motivation

More then four moths passed since I decided to ride the wind of changes which gave me enough momentum to jump out of gravity well and three months with my new team. Next anniversary near but I didn't wrote anything about this. Really changing the workplace is all about will, first and success contact I get in some hours. I got 6 hours of interview in next two week indeed. But first one was great: remote work (so I can stay near taiga and mountains and snow) on foreign (why shoult you limit yourself with one city or even country) startup (big corporation and bodyshops is leaching you passion and energy) and last but not least was IDEA behind company: changing the whole industry of insurance - it was thrilling.


My previous work has backing idea too. Great idea, but we was one of many: somehow better, somehow not but we lost idea of changing world. More of that I dont believe in SIP, I felt this as transiotional technology which was forged by old analogous telephony man to harness digital age. I see no place for this in mobile, ad-hoc future. Skype, Hangout, Viber and so on will wipe it. I got my passion on my first work - preserve people time. I witness the quantificator: on hour of mine saved dozens for people. I missed this for a years. At least killing old tech was fun but I'm not married on my work. The time has come to move forward - I was one of the last dev of first generation. One of my friend told: code became legacy after changing of two generations of developers - I was sitting with third.

What was changed

What you see first is byorhytm changing: I living now in MSK timezone - great for owls and also I'm the eastenrmost. This is because of distributed team nature - we shoud synchronize our worktimes and talk on daily meetings. We go home, NY go work with only hour overlap. At least I have free time in the first part of day, before I have to ask for leave to visit some institution beacuse everyone work till 6 pm.

After that you notice huge difference in people behaviour and language. I cannot express this feeling. It is like before we fighting for our lifes in savage garden, in this situation you hardly need the inspirational talks and funny jokes, either you have enough thirst to live and fight or you already dead. And after that you magically teleported to some paradise beach - how would you feel yourself?

Next you see you capacity dramatically dropped 20-30%. You have to spend many time on team synchronization (overhead costs), and for three month I have only two or three days overtime and only because of interesting tasks. You became mobile: you dont worry to lose team perfomance on remote work and can work anywhere good Internet is. Actually I slightly moved and sitting in the neighbour room I was sitting half year ago. But I tryed to work from my parents home in neighbour country and I even did not have to take days-off, my perfomance was stable. Vacations is another big difference - averybody takes one or two days-off to move to another place. No one waits half of year to negotiate two week vacation. Just notice in a week or two.

Completely new domain model. Consume two hundreds pages of specification no an easy task. Groovy and huge Grails ecosystem new for me constantly give me insights and food for thoughts. Hardcore security and availabiluty requirements, cloud orientation strongly change workflow. Live specification and rich prototype was absolutely wonderful for me. Agile fast moving team without strong planning burden was the fresh breath of air.

The hardest parts was the administrative tasks I have to do: bank, tax department and another public authorithies - one huge waste of time, black hole sucking your time and money. I hit his even before I start actual work. But after month or two this tasks became much less demanding. As a good part I began to plan my life and use calendar to organize tasks flow.

Who knows what lies ahead?