Project Description

Today, I walked away from a job I loved

Published: August 16, 2013

In January 2012, I was looking for an internship. I spent the previous summer as an intern writing code in a cubicle farm, and I was in desperate need of change.

At UNO, my advisor had been aggressive about notifying me, along with every other student in the College of IS&T, about potential job opportunities in the Omaha area. Getting two dozen or more such emails from my adviser in a single week was not uncommon. I did my best to read each email before trashing it, but at a certain point they started to feel like spam, so more than a few were sentenced to the trash before my gaze could reach a verdict. For some reason, in the middle of one of these delete-every-mass-email-sent-by-my-adviser spells, I stopped to read one that contained a job description for a mobile development internship with a company I had never heard of called CRi.

Serendipity.

I was excited by the opportunity to work on mobile technology. It’s a field that, at the time, I knew almost nothing about, but it’s a field I found interesting and one I knew was growing. Additionally, smart phones were things my friends and (most) family members understood. If I got the job at CRi, it’d be a nice change for those close to me to no longer have to feign interest in my work–iOS app development is a genuinely interesting thing to a lot of people. The internship was definitely something I wanted to pursue.

I submitted my resume, was interviewed, was interviewed a second time, and fortunately, was offered the internship.

What’s a CRi?

CRi is an IT consulting firm that’s been operating in Omaha since 1999. In 2010/2011, to supplement its consulting work, CRi established a small internal development team nicknamed the Dev Center specializing in mobile and emerging technologies. When I arrived, the Dev Center was operating with something like 10 full-time employees.

First impressions

I didn’t ask about dress code before my first day of work, so I played it safe by showing up in a shirt and tie. My last job was a slacks and collared shirt kind of place, and I expected CRi to be the same. I was wrong. It only took a minute to learn the rules governing the things employees wore in the Dev Center. Rule one, put something on your feet. Rule two, don’t offend your coworkers. That was it. Needless to say, my first day was the only day I wore a tie to work.

I was freed from the oppression of dress clothes, and I was glad.

After a quick discussion about how uncomfortable ties are, my boss walked me over to the office fridge 20 feet from my desk, and showed me that it was fully stocked with all kinds of beer. Beer for the employees to drink. While working.

I was allowed to drink beer at work, and even though beer isn’t and wasn’t my jam, I was glad.

Next, I learned that my work hours were extremely flexible. I was expected to be in the office Monday through Friday 10am to 3pm. Those were my core hours. Outside of those, I had freedom to choose when I wanted to work as long as I reached 40 by the end of the week. If I wanted to roll into work at 10am every morning, and stay until 7pm, cool. If I wanted to show up at 10am, take off at 3pm, and work the remaining hours on Saturday, that was cool too.

I was given control over my time, and I was glad.

All these things added up to something that felt like genuine trust and respect between my boss and me. It was nice, and I was glad.

Lessons learned

For 16 months, I worked as an intern in the Dev Center developing iOS, mobile web, and Ruby applications. It’s pretty remarkable how much I’ve grown as a developer in the last 16 months, and I attribute much of this growth to the diverse projects I was able to work on and the talented people I was able to work with while at CRi.

One. I learned that I enjoy working in an open environment much more than one with a lot of physical barriers separating people. Everyone in the Dev Center worked in the same room, and shared the same space. No walls existed between developers, which made everyone easily and equally accessible, including managers and senior developers. This kind of environment encouraged communication and greatly fostered my learning.

Two. I learned how to ask meaningful questions. At my previous internship, I sat in a cubicle all day. Also, my coworkers sat in cubicles all day. Oh, and my managers sat in offices all day. To ask a question, I had to knock on doors, and physically enter someone else’s “space”. In that environment, when I asked questions, I always felt like I was an interruption. That feeling wasn’t a nice one, so after a few days, I simply refrained from asking questions as much as I could even though it slowed my learning.

At CRi I had no such reservations about seeking help, and I asked questions about everything. After a few weeks of asking everything the top two pages of Google results couldn’t tell me, I learned to see the differences between meaningful questions and questions born out of laziness. I learned these differences through a brute force approach I had felt discouraged from pursuing at previous jobs. At CRi, I learned to stop asking the lazy questions.

Three. I learned a lot of new languages and technologies, and I learned how to pick them up reasonably quickly. At CRi, I was given many opportunities to develop applications independently. During these periods of development, the rest of the Dev Center was available to field my questions and provide guidance when asked, but mostly I was left to succeed or fail by my own creative and technical decisions. There were many times a more experienced developer could have intervened, and precluded me from approaching a problem in the less-than-optimum way I was approaching it. While these interventions might have saved some development time, they would have robbed me of valuable learning experiences.

If you work in technology, then you know how fast things change. You never stop learning. Being allowed to work through complicated (at least for me) problems on my own gave me strong confidence in my learning abilities. A confidence I didn’t have before CRi. There are a lot of things I don’t know, but what I don’t know doesn’t worry me anymore. I obviously don’t know everything, but I now feel like I’m capable of learning anything.

Four. I learned that I enjoy working on smaller projects on smaller teams. I want to see the impact my contributions have on the projects I work on. On a project that requires dozens of developers for multiple years, it’s difficult to take ownership of one’s work because the impact one’s work has is often not obvious. At CRi, the average team was 2-3 developers, and the average project lasted 1-3 months. If I started slacking off, the project suffered noticeably. If I did something cool, the project was noticeably better because of it. The small team size made me feel like the work I did was valuable. It was easy to take pride in my work because I could clearly see the impact my work had.

Moving on

A few months ago, I had to choose between attending grad school and accepting a full-time developer position at CRi. You already know I chose grad school. Honestly though, the job offer from CRi was hard to walk away from, and it almost kept me from pursuing grad school altogether.

I’m walking away from a job I love, but I’m walking away with full confidence that leaving CRi now will open up job opportunities I’ll love even more in the future. Goodbye CRi. I had a fantastic time working there. The people, projects, and environment will truly be missed.

Cheers.

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Image credit: Aneta Ivanova