Change

What is it about change, that is both, thrilling and scary at the same time? yet, if you decide to actually move forward with the change, more often than not, you’ll notice that you have now adapted to your new reality, it has become part of you, part of your new routine, part of your new habits, until you’re face to face to a new choice that offers yet another change, and it all starts over again.

I confess that I’m a person that tends to prefer the status quo rather than eagerly look for change, but sometimes we can’t avoid it or end up lacking reasons to avoid it.

A couple of months ago, I started to get curious about remote working, not that it was a new concept for me to grasp nor that I was entirely unfamiliar with it, after all, my own wife has been working remotely for a good four years now, and I’ve been working from home since 2020 like many others do now. I believe there’s a difference between working from home and remote working, I mean, if I wanted, I could go back to the office, which for me, it would amount to an 8 minitues bike ride (one of the reasons I miss going to the office) whereas my wife can’t go to her office since its located on a different country, but we can’t deny that there may be more similarities between the two concepts than there are differences, that made me feel ready to actively look for remote work opportunities.

After working for almost 12 years at the same company, (not all in one run to be honest; I had a one and a half year break which could probably be on a different devtime story). It was hard for me to find ways the describe “why” I was leaving, after all, 12 years is more than enough time to make friends with your collegues and even with high ranking positions at the company, on top of that, it was also not easy to answer that question for my self. I had a good position, an interesting project with edge technologies that touched on topics that were really appealing to me, and I also had a good salary, I mean, did I want a better salary? sure, who doesn’t, but it was good none the less. So what exactly made me curious on remote working? what is it that I’m trying to achieve in the long run?

I’ll start with the easy one; like I said, who doesn’t want a better salary?. I got a couple of messages from a friend who lives in USA, he told me that the company he worked for at that time was looking for developers, however, he also mentioned that the “company” was actually a well funded charity, but a charity none the less, so he said to me upfront that the pay wasn’t great. However, and as expected, that “not so great” payment was around the same amount of money I was making; It was expected to me, since I live in Bolivia, where, like in many southamerican countries, the basic income is far lower than the one in USA, still it caught my attention to say the least.

I considered his offer for two main reasons, one of them was that he described the job as “simple” and not so demanding, which could open the door for me to work one of the many ideas I’m sure every developer has, not to mention that it was the opposite of my current job, despite how exciting I’ve already mentioned it was. And the second reason came up after I naively asked him about the possibility of getting a working visa through this position, which he replied that it may be possible, (a naive answer for a naive question, it’s only fitting). Long story short, it’s not as easy as we both thought it would be.

While I was waiting for his official response on the visa and though I was hoping for the best, it did got me curious, after all I was making a “not so great” but good enough salary for the USA, could I get better offers, with or without the visa?. LinkedIn is probaly the one social platform that has an actual purpose to me, and despite the fact that I’ve negleted my account for years, I was still receiving job offers every week, so, I started to pay attention to those messages and replying to some of them, that’s how it all started.

Eventually, I got the, by then, expected negative answer regarding the visa, and I already had two interviews with what I could describe as “recruiting companies”, since they don’t offer a job directly but get you in contact with possible “matching” contractors. I’ll be writing about this process on a future devtime story, but for now I’d like to stay in the same topic, what else did make me take this decision?

So, I’ve already wrote about the salary, but there are some other reasons that made me choose the path I’ve taken.

The illusion of ownership, I don’t mean it in a bad way, quite the opposite, I think that having a sense of ownership on the project you’re working on, goes a long way, but it’s really hard to get there, and once you get there, it’s even harder to keep it up. Unless you’re the real owner of the project, it’s truly an illusion of ownership, but I could argue that you will own the decisions that were made and the knowledge and experience that it brought to you and each of your team members, you can also own most of the granular pieces of ideas than can be applied on different projects, perhaps one that you really own.

I started to realize that I was lacking this sense of ownership, despite that fact that we (the team) were actively suggesting ideas, options or different directions for the projects, those were being politely ignored, or at least that’s how I felt it. Perhaps this is also a good time to mention that I’ll be using we more often now, not as if I’m speaking of behalf of a team, but only as my own personal impression of what the team thought or felt, collectively.

What’s the point of putting together a team of seasoned developers (that’s how we sometimes described our selves and those with similar amount of experience) if you’re not willing to truly listen to them?

To be fair, it wasn’t always like that, there was a time were we felt heard, where the ideas we promoted where being actively applied, and with a very good success rate, and we felt we owned those projects, we made it ours to nurture and we care for them, that feeling is priceless, a perfect illusion of ownership.

It just so happend that when my sense of ownership was low, this all started to happen around me, things could’ve been different, for better of for worse, but in the end, I chose this change for me, I’ve decided it was worthy to leave my comfort zone, so that I can find a new one for what it may last, there’s no guarantees at all that I’ll get to feel as I once did, but, on the brigth side, there’s nothing to make me think that I can’t get to feel even better, and that’s what gives change a reason, hope.