After my wife and I moved from the country place back to the burbs ( The Egg and Us ) I found that I had a lot of time on my hands since I no longer had the upkeep of the 10-acre property and 1-1/2 acre garden to keep me busy. So I decided that I needed to get a job. After a false start or two I ran across an ad in the paper from a small software startup (let's call it Nestling Inc which, hopefully, isn't the name of a real company) that was looking for a chief programmer. Since I had only worked for large companies in the past, I thought it might be fun to work at a startup.
So I called the number in the ad and made an appointment for a telephone interview with the Chief Technical Officer. The phone interview went well and the CTO said that he would like to take things to the next step. Even though I was interviewing for a high-level position, the CTO asked if I would be willing to take the same programming test that the software developers were required to pass. He justified that by explaining that I would be the programmers' boss and they would want to know that I understood the technologies they were using. He told me that normally they would ask me to come in to take the test, but given that I was interviewing for the chief programmer position, they would be happy to email it to me and let me take it at home and then send it back, if I would rather do that. I told them that that would work better for me, since I was in the process of moving into a new house and had a lot of balls in the air at the moment. So the CTO sent me a copy of the test. His asked me to take it without using any reference material. As soon as I looked at the test I knew I couldn't do that, however, so I just researched what I needed off the Internet and used that info to take the test. Then I sent it back. That might seem a little dishonest, but I had 30 years of high tech experience under my belt by that point and I was used to coming up to speed quickly on technology with which I was unfamiliar, so it was just business as usual for me.
The folks at Nestling Inc must have been happy with the test results because they invited me to come in the next week for a face-to-face interview with the officers and a meeting with the software engineers. I wasn't surprised at the interview with the company officers but I was curious about the meeting with the programmers. The CTO explained that, since the firm was small, they had to be sure to hire someone who would fit in well with the other employees. I could only guess what the other members of Nestling Inc would be like, but I used the time between the phone call and the face-to-face interview to brush up on the technology they were using so I could carry on an intelligent conversation about it.
Meeting the staff of Nestling Inc was quite an experience. The founders were all younger than my kids. In fact, I have clothes older than most of the people that worked there. We met for lunch at an iconic local restaurant. I let the programmers lead the conversation and we mostly chatted about the latest developments in the high tech industry. After lunch we drove to Nestling Inc's office. I drove myself so that the company officers and staff could discuss whether I would fit in without the need to do that in front of me.
When we reached the office I huddled with the CTO and the other two founders. They told me that the programmers approved of me and that they wanted to hire me as Chief Programmer. Now here's where working for a small startup is different from working for a large high tech company. I told the founders that I would rather be Director of Development than Chief Programmer and, without a moment's hesitation, they agreed. We talked a bit more about salary and duties. They couldn't afford to pay the salary that I wanted so they sweetened the deal by offering more stock options than we had originally agreed upon. I asked what they thought my duties should be and they told me that they weren't sure about that and the CTO and I would have to work that out as we went along. That wasn't a problem for me because the first item in the performance plan for most of the jobs I had had for the previous twenty years was “Figure out what your duties should be”. So I was pretty comfortable with that. All of this was done verbally, by the way. The only paperwork I filled out that day was the form necessary to get the third party payroll company to cut a check for me twice a month. I left the office after filling out the paperwork and started work the next morning.
Working at Nestling Inc was a continual source of amazement to me because it was so different from working for a large, long-established high tech company. For starters, there were fewer people in the whole company than I had had in first-level development departments that I had managed at the large company where I had previously worked. So everyone in the company knew everyone else and the atmosphere was much more informal and egalitarian than I was used to. This had pluses and minuses. On the one hand, if you needed someone to help with a technical problem, you just asked them. On the other hand, a programmer might quit working on a critical component of the production system to help another employee resolve a trivial and non-critical problem. It could also happen (and did) that the programmers would get tired of working heads down to meet a critical deadline and they would all decide to take a break for several hours for an impromptu foosball tournament or to drive across town for pork chile rellenos at their favorite Tex-Mex restaurant. It wasn't that the programmers didn't work hard and smart. They did. They just didn't think about the timing of breaks or whether one person taking some time off on the spur of the moment might cause a critical component to be late that would set off a chain reaction and cause a major checkpoint to be missed. There
was also a lot design on the fly by committee with little or no documentation, which made it hard to regress if the new design had flaws. So one of the first things that the CTO and I talked about was putting a little more rigor and formality into the development process. Surprisingly the programmers were in favor of it. They just didn't want to take time away from product development to work out the processes. So I got that job.
That was the way it went for the whole time I was with Nestling Inc. I would see problems that were more procedural than technical and the CTO and I would agree that I would address them while he resolved the technical problems. That's how we determined the split between what he did and what I did. It worked out really well for me and I was a happy camper. Yeah, I was making less money than before I retired from a large company, but I had a bigger impact and I enjoyed the small company atmosphere. I was able to mentor the programmers and I also learned a lot from them and on my own about the technologies they were using and the advantages of development in a small company with a close-knit staff. I felt like this was what a retirement job should be.
Of course, in the dynamic world of high-tech startups things can change rapidly. Stay tuned for the next installment to find out what happened next.
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