Why I left a huge software firm to join a startup
- 2 minsWhy I left a huge software firm to join a startup
Today is my last day at Engineering S.P.A, one of the biggest software firms in Italy. I worked here for over a decade. In a so long stretch of time, there have been good, bad and very bad moments. I came here to develop a huge developer oriented source generator/framework. In all these years I learned a lot of stuff, mostly on my own, for my own sake, driven by the hunger for knowledge. I developed high profile skills in application security and system integration and I had the chance to develop huge products for the top financial players in my country. This is the kind of opportunity that only a big software firm can put on the table. There have been tough times. I worked really hard to build bridges between old legacy systems and brand new solutions. Just a few years ago I had the opportunity to work on a very important project and we did an awesome job. It has been how working in a big company should be. We develop a foundation technology in order to easily integrate a particular kind of legacy systems at a more abstract level. This stuff has been used for years now in different products and even extended multiple times with very little effort. It is a damn good design piece of software. It will be my little legacy in this place. So why am I leaving? Because that amazing product did not make history, it did not become the standard way of managing projects. This seemed to become more and hastier. I’m sorry to say so, probably in a company with thousands of employees is a necessary evil, but still, it makes day to day work really grinding. The “problem” is that the banking sector has been one of the first field being heavily digitalized. Now we have a huge volume of legacy system that can not sustain the volume and the business needs of the modern financial industry. That’s fine but I need a change, I need to work on something new that is not a big rewrite of a legacy product that has to look like exactly as the old one. I will join a vibrant young company in pursuit of my dream of becoming a better software engineer, not just an experienced developer, a living reference guide for tools and libraries. I will work with friends that are skilled professionals, exchanging knowledge and jokes, the team is driven by a mission I believe in: to build a software that simplifies people jobs with the help of Machine learning techniques. I will write more about my new job soon. I will work in an international environment which is something I always dreamed of. Life is full of uncertain, but from the uncertain comes possibility and from possibility comes development. And, at the end of the day, I’m a developer!