Because startup and many hats
Because in a startup, when the entire dev team consists of one associate level frontend (me), one senior frontend (contracted by software agency), one senior backend, and one junior backend.. you kinda have to be the middle layer in the system that is beginning to find its pieces of the gears that start turning.
I was the fourth person to be hired. I gave my resume for a senior position, and the company accepted me. What did I have in my belt? Just two years of experience .. being a junior, in a company that was just about to get interesting until FBI investigation shut us down (story for another time). But that meant I knew how to be agile, how to work, how to follow Software Development Life Cycle.
So not entirely blind leading the blind, but I kinda became that person that ended up onboarding people, whilst the senior developers were doing mission critical foundational work. Remember this was a startup. So we had no product. Literally nothing. Our vision, to create a video surveillance software in the cloud. What we decided to build out: authentication, a login page, and email notification microservice.
It might have been something that developers might have not enjoyed, but for some reason I loved that aspect of my unspoken role. To document. To guide a junior level person to get onboarded, to get assimilated, to get the ball rolling, to make the person fit in our culture.
One could have thought this would be eating away the time to be productive, to increase KPI, to lose the opportunity to do the fun projects. Well, yeah in a way that did happen. I guess I got handed the unfavorable tasks. Maybe I grudged out.
However, what I hate about my past experiences growing up in three different continents is being the new guy. To be uprooted and replanted in a new culture, school, college, grad school was always hard for an introvert like me. My first job out of grad school was nerve wrecking - every code, every comment I left was something I had to double check. I second guessed everything - my gestures, what I said that day, etc. And I was semi playfully hazed (just tables being locked so I can’t get into my chair, so it was kinda weak), which wasn’t that bad but still, I could see it might rub off wrong in other people.
I guess I’m just too sensitive. To have other people go through things that I went through, and the wish that someone could’ve came to me when I was the new guy, to be that trustful person who could’ve held my hand and led me through the path to be successful in my environment - I just couldn’t bare having being at that position and not be that guy.
Unintentionally Becoming
I still remember our first new batch of hires - all juniors. Heck all I felt was more friends to eat lunch with!
They were all backend so we had an awesome senior person that onboarded them. I actually learned a lot from him too, because by example he created a culture, which he learned from working in a FAANG company.
He set coding styles/guidelines, early model of a barebones branching strategy, a basic direction of what we should work on, became the mentor for Golang, told us amazing stories of what life was like in a FAANG company - the merges, the levels, and the Silicon Valley lifestyle. Super smart in every way.
Under his guidance the junior backend developers started to become equipped enough to be dangerous. They hit the pavement and started developing microservices in Golang. How they went through architecture discussions, managed documentations were all rubbing off on me.
That night when we found who we are, what we want
Then came near Christmas time. All the senior devs were off either on business trips and personal trips. Our superstar senior developer was also out. I was part of a squad that was building out the billing architecture - pretty important since we are a SaaS company. So me as a frontend developer, and two other backend junior level developers were huddled in a room in WeWork working on a piece of the architecture that was quite puzzling.
Yup, our archaic vendor had two sets of API - a much developed SOAP API and a nascent RESTful API which didn’t do much. We were at a point to have to decide how to proceed. After much of discussion, we came to a point where we felt was something that can work.
That night was where I felt leadership. This is servant leadership. Can I say that I led? No. I facilitated the points that the two junior level developers were making. Of course I had my own thoughts, but given that I was just an associate with no heavy architecture experience under my belt, luckily I wasn’t at any position to say that my plan works. Knowing that I have a natural tendency to be arrogant - this was a blessing, forcing me to be humble and just listen.
And MAYBE sometimes just be the tie breaker between them. But the group dynamic was where I felt something. Something clicked. Congealed. The spirit of a startup, if you will. Remember in that room, that night where a key piece of architecture idea was born - there were no veterans in that room. The longest amount of years in professional development work was me which was two years.
But three of us diagramed, passionately argued our points, sometimes heated discussions, but at the end we ended up with something that worked! I documented all of the architecture decisions, and then we got to work. Well they got to work, and I kept on doing frontend work.
Non-seniors being at the position to decide for ourselves, the fate of the crucial piece of architecture of a startup. How awesome is that! I think all of us felt what it was to be an employee in that company. How having an idea and running with it, to be in control, is an exhilarating thought.
Was it naive that yeah.. we worked overtime without pay? Perhaps. No yeah we were naive. But more so - it was pure fun. To team up with brilliant people and create something meaningful, and be production code immediately, was something amazing.
All in all that night - we found out our powers. We learned how to break down a problem into parts, and think of ways get it working.
In hindsight did we cringe at the solution we made? HELL YEAH. We cringed because that architecture was in play for close to a year, chugging along creating billing for us - until one of the developer that night found time to finally go back and fix it for good.
He did it, again - without anyone assigning a task to him to do it explicitly.
That, is the trait a startup needs in everyone. And that was the start of a possibility - that perhaps we can build a company, be impactful, and still train juniors.
For me personally, that night gave me the chance to be a facilitating leader. To change from being told what to do, to become a person who can guide and nudge others to a goal. It was scary because I realized I can herd others off a cliff I don’t be careful and stay humble. But the sense of feeling that I’m making an impact, that we are making something toward a goal, that all of us are in that moment in time, building something together, and we trust each other - was an amazing memory I still have. That fingerprint, that trait of what happened that night, kept happening in the company, as we started hiring more and more people.
Then one day, it finally happened: another frontend developer!