If You Had 90 Days To Make A Dent In The Universe, What Would You Do?
Time is relative, and even more so when you love every minute of it…
We had a pandemic. Well, we still do, but I choose to be an optimist, and I would also like this article to age well. We saw economic uncertainty and recovery. We saw political scenes change overnight. Some fell, some got stronger. Electric cars are more of a thing than they ever were before, while Djokovic and Nadal are still rivals. We saw airplane pilots sign up for React courses on Udemy in droves, and office buildings so eerily deserted every time you turned a corner in the hallway, you expected to see the twins from The Shining with masks on. Some things change, others less so. The undeniable reality is though that the universe around us has changed. From macro to micro, on every possible level. Colloquially, we call it “life happens”.
But if I learned something back in 2011, is that being part of the universe gives us the unique opportunity to make a dent in it. It might not be visible from the moon, or even from across the street, but as long as it’s visible in the mirror every morning you wake up, it’s a dent that matters. Joining Prezi in 2022 is one of those dents for me and after 90 days of ripping daisy petals mumbling to myself “they’ll keep me, they’ll keep me not”, I felt like there’s no reason not to do my reflections on my first 90 days at Prezi, in public. I’m a software engineer, but I’m also a writer, and writers gotta write, right? 😀
When you’re dropped into a hackathon on day one
You know what happens when right after orientation you’re presented with a long list of juicy projects to choose from? You pick more than one. I ended up going for three, in true engineering fashion — because I could. I set my barely three-hour old new hire shyness aside and dove right in. I would have joined every single project on that long list. Honest to God, not a single one of them had less appeal than the other. Being my usual pragmatic self, I simply selected the ones that I knew I could contribute to from day one.
What became more apparent than anything else on day one in Prezi, was that everyone was happy to talk to me. I had to repeatedly mention that I am literally a day or two old in the company because I was made to feel as if I have been there since forever. I’m an introvert, the sense of belonging doesn’t happen to me easily, yet in Prezi somehow all that changed, and I can only point to the remarkable people who welcomed me with open arms from day one and since then, every single day.
An organic welcoming culture nurtured by incredibly talented individuals.
The coder in me never felt happier
Let me put it this way. I worked on some React code in TypeScript as part of a Zoom integration. I refactored a considerable chunk of a Scala service as part of a Google Drive integration. I got to prove out an entire concept in PHP while looking into a possible Moodle integration. And that’s just code I, personally, touched!
But there are so many other things going on. An active accessibility group, a functional programming workshop in Scala. In parallel, engineers are self-organising to prove out a lean full-stack Javascript stack, and I am barely scratching the surface. Excellent product initiatives paired with ambitious, innovation-oriented teams.
As an engineer, you feel like you’ve been given the widest ever highway to sprint on to success.
Engineer-to-engineer interaction is another aspect that I found to be on an entirely different level to what I was used to. Requesting changes in a code review is not taboo, asking for and appreciating feedback is the norm and there is space given to pragmatism in every conversation. When I took on the Scala service refactoring work, I was quite new to Scala, yet my colleagues, even from other teams, came together to enable my success.
When one engineer cares about another’s success, you know you’re in (a) good company.
The mission, gosh… saved me from an impeding burn-out
I know, I know. Not everyone out there cares about a company’s mission. Some like to just come in, build stuff, move on. I am not one of those people. I stayed in ed-tech for seven years because I wanted to give back to what enabled my career many years ago. Getting to the point last year where I felt like maybe I’ve paid my dues and I should look at where else I can make a dent, Prezi, especially at what now looks like the tail-end of a pandemic, felt like a natural migration.
I get to make meetings better. I mean, how cool is that? The very thing that frustrated me throughout the last few years, I now have an opportunity to improve and do so radically. And not just that, but also bring the Prezi tools where people do their best work, make it part of their natural workflows in the ecosystems they’re already comfortable in. The Barney Stinson in me was like, “Challenge accepted!”. Someone, please get me a yellow ducky tie already! It’s been sitting in my wish-list for nine years.
Seeing the Prezi mission unfold in front of my eyes, under my fingertips as I code, document and collaborate with anyone and everyone involved, is akin to a rebirth. The last time I felt this excited about development was when I wrote my first “hello world” in C, and it compiled!
A new, meaningful mission can rejuvenate your career like nothing else!
I didn’t think it could get better, until it did
Let’s get really frank for a second. Everyone at every interview tries to sell themselves. True for both sides of the conversation. Even if done unconsciously, everyone wants to impress, even if just by being themselves. Candidates, myself included, we’re often skeptics. Recruiters desperately try to convince us that their company actually does have all the perks they talk about, that there is good work-life balance, flexibility, the donuts are healthy, the water on tap comes directly from the Swiss Alps, and unlimited holiday is a real thing. Half of that we tend to straight-off not believe. I am here to say that I found a place where the perks are actually real.
Truth be told, when joining Prezi, the only perk I really cared about was good work-life balance. Turns out, unlimited time off is not a myth, and a low-pressure environment is not as an elusive unicorn in tech companies as many like to claim. I was met with a culture where teams decide their deadlines, where no-meeting-Wednesdays are a thing; your child, pet, action-figure is more than welcome at the daily standup, and if you need time to go break up or get back together with your ex at say 3PM on any random day, then you do that. I never thought async work can work this well, until I experienced it first-hand at Prezi, and I think it works this well because everyone wants to make it work, and sees the benefits of a genuine remote-first working style.
Life doesn’t get in the way of work. Work doesn’t get in the way of life. At Prezi, life and work happens organically.
Now obviously the daily daisy-petals-ripping analogy from the beginning was a joke because from my perspective it wasn’t an “I’m gonna stay, I’m gonna leave”, it was a straight-through “I’m gonna stay, I’m gonna stay, I’m gonna stay every day”, and yeah, after six years at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, my new home is Prezi, and I’m here to get really comfortable. Bring on all the Prezi hoodies you got! I’ll wear them out and ask for more. 😆
The last couple of years have been a series of bad news for much of the world. The good news is, though, those who wanted to change things, did. You can make a dent in the universe too wherever you may be, but just in case you feel you need a nurturing space to do that, well, give Prezi a shot, if for no other reason than just to work with people as inspiring as me. That’s gotta count for something, right? 😉
