I've just started a new job! For the past two and a half years, I've been with L3Harris Technologies. I started out as an intern during there and it was a great opportunity for me to grow in my development while going to college at the same time. I then transitioned to a full time position due to my great performance there and have been with them in a full-time capacity for just over a year.
Recently though, I've felt that my career was going in another direction, and that it was the right time to try something else. It felt a little wrong leaving my current position before 'two years' as a full-time software engineer but I believe that it was the right decision for my career.
This was truly a great place to learn full-stack development. My only prior experience to this job was working at a job at my university (which wasn't just any university job, it was in more of a tech company setting), and there I learned Vue.JS. Prior to that I had built applications with Flask, vanilla JavaScript, and a bit of Angular (which I really didn't like).
In this job, I put my team in a direction of utilizing more modern development tools with Vue.JS and Node (and some Golang), getting away from Vanilla JS and PHP. Since I was pretty much the only developer, I relied on my prior experience to start with and learned a great deal of skills. Ground everywhere was covered. Just a list of things:
...and many more. This was basically the jumpstart that I needed to get myself rolling as a developer. I picked up on a ton of skills, and because I was basically a 'solo dev', I became a jack of all trades covering all areas from full-stack development to DevOps and even getting into the realm of sysadmin (which should be more of an IT position). Having to do pipelines as an intern with barely any full-stack experience! Imagine that.
Being a jack of all trades is cool and means you can build an entire system as one person, which is an amazing skill. I've utilized that pretty extensively for my own personal projects. However, it gets old...
While a great opportunity for learning, eventually things capped out. I was working alone in my full-stack field, being assisted by others working in data and analytics, building the same dashboards over and over again, and there was little to no variety in what we were doing. I wasn't learning anything new, just finding more ways to build the same pages more efficiently so I wouldn't have to waste time doing menial tasks. I was looking for something more, a larger team and effort to be a part of.
It didn't help that I had worked my ass off for the past year, and in March I got a terrible pay raise. For all my work, the merit rewards I had received were extremely underwhelming. There was no clear direction on my future in the company in terms of growth, and I could see that if I didn't change anything, I would just be stuck at the same easy job for the next year, or even few years. Something had to change.
My new job will be working as a full-stack software engineer at Carvana.
I'll be real; it's a little harrowing going into a new job like the one at Carvana literally right after they just laid off 12% of their workforce. And yes, I've seen their stock price.
But I'm excited regardless of this. I'll be going to a company with a good culture, modern environment, faster pace, and most importantly, working on a team of software engineers. There's experience and mentorship that I've been lacking at this point in my career, and it'll be nice to learn from someone else from a change.
Regardless, I'm out of the defense industry and into the tech industry. I'm glad that I'll be working closer to the latest and greatest for once, and working alongside other people that actually care about the stuff I do.