My first year at Yahoo!
Exactly one year ago, I left my safe, stable job at the brazilian federal government to join Yahoo! in São Paulo.
There were many reasons behind this decision, but speaking at the Agile Denver group in August 2010 (thanks Lisa and Somnath for the opportunity) was really important and decisive to me. During that talk, we reflected on successful and not so successful attempts to achieve agility in different contexts. After the talk, one of the attendees said that “if you can not change the company, change the company”, and so I did.
Working at my previous job was not bad at all. In fact, most brazilians share the dream of working for the government. It just wasn’t my thing at that point of my career. I had the opportunity to work with great people there as our testing group was formed, grew and got respect from other teams. It was a really nice experience, but required a lot of energy to deal with bureaucracy.
Things are very different and fast-paced at Yahoo!. In less than one year, I got to work on four of the biggest products on the Yahoo! portfolio, used a lot of different technology stacks and tackled on many interesting technical challenges. Being in such an awesome agile team that is not afraid of dealing with any problem we might face is the kind of experience I was looking for. Quoting Chad Fowler’s “The Passionate Programmer”:
Be the worst guy in every band you’re in. Being the worst guy in the band means always playing with people who are better than you.
By surrounding yourself with great, talented people, there is no way to go home without learning at least one new thing every day. From programming related stuff to random social facts, any quick conversation can be enlightening.
I’m really excited about the years to come and I hope to get back to updating the blog with some of the stuff I have been working with.
What about you? Are you happy with your career? Where do you want to be next? Take some time to think about this.
By the way, we are hiring!
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