My engineering journey to date
It all started when my father let me play with a soldering iron for the first time. Together we made a simple buzzer out of an old relay. Basically, if you apply an AC current to a relay, it will buzz, so we just wrapped it in a plastic box and soldered in two wires. I took it to my school and was showing it to everyone I knew. I was in the second grade.
My desk at the first Upsilon IT officeUpsilon had a pretty rough start: we didn’t have enough experience for the jobs we were taking, we didn’t know anything about hiring, and couldn’t hire people we needed, we didn’t know how to deal with customers. We had to overcompensate with immense amounts of work and resourcefulness. A few times we were running into situations when every client delayed payment, and on a payday, we had 0 on our bank account, so we had to borrow money from relatives to pay out salaries. We survived, everything stabilized eventually, and now Upsilon IT is a happy, ~50 people company, offering all sorts of web engineering.
Nothing has taught me as much as Upsilon yet. Besides the engineering skills, it showed me how to deal with the real world stuff, not fake challenges from the university or competitions. I’ve learned how to communicate with people, how to understand what they actually want (and need), how to convey thoughts, how to hire, how to fire. University wasn’t teaching any of these.
Outsourcing was of course interesting and well paying, but we always wanted something bigger — our own product.
Oslo, during the trip to the clientIn 2014 I participated in the US diversity lottery, and suddenly won a green card. We had a lot of discussion with my wife, but the conclusion was that if we go — we go to the Silicon Valley, to learn how the real IT industry works, and how people build real stuff.
We moved to the USA in spring 2015. I wanted to try working for a startup as a full-time employee, so I sold my half of Upsilon IT to Andrew, as I wasn’t helping the company anymore. After temporarily settling in Santa Clara I began my job hunt. Big companies never attracted me, so I was never seriously considering them, though I tried my luck with a few. I wanted to observe things from a close distance, and my real goal was a “late early” stage startup with a hundred people or so.
I started going through interviews, and quickly realized that it wasn’t what I expected! I thought that they would consist mostly of conversations about my experience, but people were asking me algorithms! It’s somehow assumed here that by asking a person RMQ and LCA, you are testing for problem-solving skills. But I haven’t done that for years! After failing first few interviews, I spent two or three weeks just brushing up what I was doing back in high school. That quickly paid off — whiteboard interviews became a breeze, I’ve passed an on-site with Google, but even before I knew the result, I’ve already accepted an offer from ThoughtSpot — a prominent BI startup from Palo Alto. I knew nothing about BI, but the engineering interview was so in-depth, and people were so smart, that I was eager to start working with them immediately.
OneBar team in the Minsk officeAs I mentioned before, Andrew and I always wanted to build a real software product that would be serving real people’s needs. I always considered my move to the Silicon Valley as a learning trip, not a career destination, and a year ago I started to feel that there’s enough learning — it’s time for action! We picked an area where we had the most experience — communication in large distributed teams. Communication and knowledge sharing is the essence of any company productivity, and yet it wasn’t right at any project, we had to deal with before. We’ve assembled a four people team (of me, Andrew, and two more Upsilon guys), tried out one idea, which didn’t quite work, and right now working on the second one, which we feel has a much higher potential. I’m on my own again, and everything feels new and exciting. I have a lot of enthusiasm for our new project, and I’m again learning!
Recently I had to temporarily return to ThoughtSpot as a part-time contractor so that I can support my life here in Silicon Valley, but I’m still dedicating most of my time to the project. I’m picking up lots of new skills, which I would never need, had a been a regular software engineer: design, marketing, talking on the phone (!), writing, presenting, telling stories, and many more. Even though it doesn’t pay me back in money (yet), I’m already considering the whole idea a success, as it’s all essentially a way way better learning experience than any top university.
With that, I’m going to conclude my story for now, and go back to working on OneBar. Looking forward to writing the next article about all the learnings we’ve gained in the process of building it!
I encourage you, the brave reader, who’ve reached to the bottom of this article, to go and check out what we’re building here, and consider signing up for a beta if your team actively uses Slack.
Thank you!
Good luck, and peace!
My engineering journey to date was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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