Leaving the agency

I never planned to move

I'd been at the same agency for eight years. I wasn't looking.

Someone suggested I go and have a chat. Not an interview — a chat. No CV rewrite, no practising answers in the car, no "where do you see yourself in five years". I went along mostly out of curiosity.. ..and came out with a job offer.

Which is a very strange thing to do to a Tuesday.

Why I said yes

Eight years is a long time. Long enough to know every corner of the codebase, every client, every quirk of the server. Long enough to be the person everyone asks. That feels good, for a while.

The problem is that in a small company you eventually hit the ceiling, and the ceiling isn't a promotion you missed — it's the work itself. I had gone as far as I was going to go there. I wasn't learning anything any more. I was fast, I was useful, and I was standing still.

Nobody tells you that comfortable and stuck look identical from the inside.

It was scary

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. Moving away from the thing you know how to do, to a bigger company, with a bigger product and people who've been doing it properly for years — that's a leap of faith, and it doesn't feel brave at the time. It mostly feels like a mistake you haven't finished making yet.

And this was 2020, which added its own flavour to everything.

The learning curve

My tech knowledge was years out of date, and I found that out very quickly.

Agency work rewards getting it done. Deadline, client, launch, next. You don't get a lot of time to go and learn how everyone else is doing it, so you keep doing it the way you've always done it, and it keeps working, so you never find out you've fallen behind.

Then you sit down in a proper development team and discover the tooling has moved, the standards have moved, the tests actually run, and other people are going to read your code.

So I worked hard. Evenings, weekends, a lot of asking questions I felt I should already know the answer to. That last bit turned out to be the important one.

Six months on

I've never really looked back.

I'm learning again, which I hadn't realised I'd been missing until it started happening. The work is harder and the code is better, and I'm surrounded by people who know things I don't, which is exactly where you want to be if you're not finished yet.

If you're sat where I was — comfortable, quick, and quietly bored — go for the chat. It's only a chat.