What’s it like to be a programmer at an Internet startup for five years?

Let’s listen to some of the most experienced employees talk about their “first experience” at the company.

I was 30 and stuck in my career and wanted a change of scene. A former colleague coincidentally asked me to start my own business and promised me to be cTO. Only after I arrived did I realize that CTO = sole backend development.

The boss took pity on me and recruited several interns, who called me “Teacher” in accordance with the school’s custom. Then the whole company knew me as “Teacher Chang”.

So I led the interns to quickly build the first system, the level of the design: to log in or not to log in, to interface without interface.

The most stable thing about this system is that it breaks every weekend. Because there is no alarm system, when the users are not able to use it on weekends, they first call the sole operator, who calls the product, and then the product asks me to deal with it. In the first year, I did not dare to go out on weekends. I had to stay at home to deal with problems. Once I went swimming and left my phone in the drawer. I sank into the pool and felt the world was clean.

Why is the interface so ugly that there is no front end? There were actually two front-end developers, but they were writing apps. They were pure front-end developers without app. At that time, the cost of app recruitment was too high. What should they do? Had to take a book, one to learn Android, one to learn iOS. The guy who wrote fast also learned the backend and built the server himself.

Starting a company requires not only physical strength, but also learning. Later, this “original front end” with strong learning ability became a full stack engineer, pk me from “quasi-technical director” to become the real technical director, of course, this is a later story.

At that time, I came to the interview after work from the previous company. The company did not have a receptionist, so I went directly into the office and saw a few computers and hardware facilities. The light was dim, like a black Internet bar.

I thought I was in the wrong place, so I walked out the door and looked up at the sign. Since I came to the first interview, one side is the development of the face, the second face is the product face, three years is the boss face. At that time still feel this start-up company is quite formal, development product eldest brother all saw one side, recruitment attitude is sincere, so I came.

I later learned that I had already met a third of the company during the interview. My first task is to test and launch a new system within two days. It was a system written by interns, and it was so crappy, I couldn’t wait to write code! The first day I work overtime into the night, to know that the day before I was off work at six o ‘clock in the state-owned enterprise.

I don’t know how I came over those two days. The company was so shabby that it didn’t even have a system to manage bugs. I took screenshots of the problems for development while I was testing them, and he made crazy changes. The next night we agreed to go online first, and then quickly fix any problems. It’s a constant race against the clock in a startup, and the relentless pace behind rapid product iteration. I went from a traditional industry to an Internet startup, and the first few months were painful, almost by gritting my teeth. After three months, I said to the leader, let’s recruit another test. Three months later, with bloodshot eyes, the new guy said he wanted to hire more people. So ten men were summoned with a roar, and at last we could catch our breath.

My former boss brought me here. The first day I came to the company, I saw a big man with a loud voice and a toolkit on his waist. See a suit and tie again, hair wax black bright elder brothers loudly talking on the phone: aunt you pick up so-and-so shop. I am confused, this is not an Internet company? And saw a few young men in big shorts writing code, hanging heart put down. The company began to do hotel management business, bruiser is the implementation of the post, the work content is to repair the lock. He was a lobby manager in a suit, in charge of a bunch of cleaning ladies. In this way, I started my entrepreneurial journey: generally, WHEN I saw the good functions of competing products, I immediately wrote requirements to the boss for review. After the boss agreed, the development entered the development and the test went online. There is no decent platform online, is the development package thrown to the server. Because most developers are interns, afraid of accidents caused by improper operation, so they proposed a simple version of the “separation of powers” : the tools to connect to the server are only in the computer of the product, when online, the regular staff development operation, testing and product need to supervise, after online testing and product verification. Later, this simple system was standardized by the process. Startups start out with chaotic systems, but the painful process of teasing out the chaos is necessary for companies to survive.

Looking back over the years, important personal growth moments and the company have overlapped. It was a sleepless night for the extranet, and it wasn’t until 6am that the system successfully ran its first test ticket. Everyone’s exhaustion is gone, there are cheers and hugs. My wife called to tell me I was pregnant. I excitedly took off my shirt and ran around the office while my colleagues roared with laughter.

I still have that picture on my phone, the first version of the website on my monitor in my humble office, and everyone is laughing.

Now that most of the people in the photo have left, the site we worked so hard on has been sold at a low price to competing products.

For the first year, it was 996 or 997. Every time a big project came online, it was hard, often until 3 or 4 in the morning. Once on line unexpectedly smooth, rare early off work, MY heart faint some premonition.

At nine o ‘clock in the evening just arrived home, the wife said we go to the hospital.

Until now I still feel the magic of fate, everything has been arranged in the dark.

Now my child is three years old and thriving, and the company is my second child. I watched it grow from a few people to hundreds, from one system to dozens of systems, and it got better and better.

With many capable developers joining the team, the first developer was left behind and moved on to become cTO at another startup.

The first product is now the product director, who does not need to write requirements, but often loses sleep over the company’s product development direction.

The first tester is now the test director, leading a group of test girls to bully the development.

The first operator and the first salesman left the company and started a business together. When the business failed, they split up and went to another company.

For five years the company came and went, some accompanied a short journey and then left, a few stuck with it, some left for a while and came back.

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