25 Years in Tech: Different Places, Different Trade-offs
In August, I hit 25 years of having full-time contracts in the IT industry.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been asked a few times what I think about the different types of organisations I’ve worked in, from government and academia, through NGOs and nonprofits, to corporates, SaaS companies, scale-ups and startups.
I’ve been pretty fortunate to have worked across so many different sectors and industries, met and worked with a lot of amazing people along the way. But this “sector-jumping” has probably been one of the problems with my CV, as I’ve never really followed a straight path.
But after 25 years, I think I’ve got a reasonable view of the pros and cons of each. Below are my own views from my experiences. Let me know if you agree or have had a different experience?
Government
I’ve worked in the government sector mainly as a contractor, and one thing I always noticed was the sense of a shared mission.
Some of the most creative engineers I’ve met have worked in the government sector as you often are constrained by budgets and resources, but you still need to get the job done.
Historically, the UK has also produced some amazing technology through government or government-owned organisations. The old UK Post Office is a great example and there is still a huge amount of knowledge and intellect within the government.
The downside… Things can be incredibly slow.
Everyone knows their role but accountability can sometimes be a little fuzzy, and when governments change, priorities and policies change with them. If you're working on something like public services, that can be incredibly frustrating. You can see better technical solutions, but you can't necessarily implement them because they don't fit with an existing policy, process or agreement. There were times when I found myself thinking: "As a taxpayer, I'm partly paying for this, and surely there must be a better way."
Academia
Academia felt quite similar in some ways. There are some incredibly innovative and intelligent people, particularly people who have come through the institution with master's degrees or PhDs.
There's also a strong mission. People generally want to give others the best possible education, often for free, and I really liked that.
I also loved the conversations I had with people from completely different disciplines. They might need something as simple as a website to promote their research, or something more complex technically, but they all brought a different perspective.
The downside was again budgets and speed. Things moved slowly, and I sometimes felt that while I was working there, my peers in commercial organisations were moving much faster and learning new technologies before I had even had a chance to look at them.
NGOs and nonprofits
Of all the sectors I've worked in, I probably found the mission strongest in NGOs.
You really felt that everyone was there for a reason, and I found myself happy to adapt to whatever the organisation needed.
They were generally a little more tech-savvy than the government and academic environments I'd worked in, although there was still a noticeable lag when it came to adopting new technology.
But there was one thing that all three of these environments had in common… Stability.
During those years, I never really worried about being laid off. I don’t think I remember any sort of re-org. It felt that teams or organisations never really changed, there was generally a feeling that your job was pretty secure, for the individual this was nice, but for the business this didn’t help their innovation all the time. I am not saying that layoffs don’t happen in these sectors or there’s no restructuring efforts, but in my experience it didn’t happen and it seems that the frequency of these events is a lot less than the corporate world.
The personal trade-off was salary. At various points, I was earning around four times less than friends doing similar IT work in commercial organisations. And honestly, I was fine with that, I believed in what I was doing, I was comfortable, and I felt privileged to be in a position where I could make that choice.
Corporate IT
My commercial experience started with a large enterprise organisation.
In fact, my first full-time position 25 years ago was at an organisation that, within my first few weeks, announced it was letting around 30,000 people go. So I got to experience corporate layoffs pretty much immediately.
I also learnt that my own innovation can have consequences for other people's jobs. At one point I automated some monitoring services, which reduced the number of support tickets being created. Great from a technical and business perspective. But fewer tickets meant fewer people were needed to support the ticketing service. That was quite an eye-opener early in my career.
It was a great place to learn, there was money and resources. I did, however, have around 800 servers/mainframes to play with, which was pretty amazing. Technically, I felt much closer to the cutting edge than I had in the nonprofit world. There was a real focus on technology and, importantly, on its financial value.
The downside was the constant awareness of layoffs. There was also bureaucracy, at that scale, getting a new machine could be a process. Even getting paper for the printer could sometimes feel like a pain.
Enterprise SaaS
Enterprise SaaS companies have probably been some of the most exciting places I've worked.
In my experience these orgs try to create an entrepreneurial environment inside a large organisation. Teams become almost like little startups, with the freedom to build and ship things.
But there is a downside (depending on your mindset)… the teams can compete with each other. Sometimes it's friendly competition. Sometimes it's not, and you need to accept that if you want to work in that environment, competition is going to be part of it, for budgets, recognition, career progression and sometimes even your job.
Ultimately, corporate SaaS companies have a board, shareholders and a goal… to make money, they normally do this by making a product that makes their customers happy and to grow.
You get a piece of that pie through salary, bonuses, RSUs or other benefits, and generally that means considerably more money than working in the nonprofit world.
But there is always the risk that you become a number on a spreadsheet. I've seen people laid off because the numbers didn't tell the whole story. In one case, someone was working on a sabbatical at another site, so their contribution to their home location showed as zero and they were let go after 20+ years.
Interestingly, I think I learned the most in enterprise SaaS. The competition meant that people challenged each other. We pushed ideas around, disagreed, experimented and generally tried to build the best thing we could. Some of the best products I've worked on came out of those environments. But there was a price; late nights, long days, weekend work and travel. When you're surrounded by competitive, ambitious people, it's very easy to keep pushing.
I learnt also that when you have a family, you need to be careful that you don't let that become your entire life all the time.
Scale-ups
Scale-ups are probably one of my favourite environments. There's usually a real sense of urgency. You need to know what your runway looks like. You need to understand the next investment round, profitability, customer acquisition and churn. But you also need to stay focused and build what needs to be built. You need to focus on getting customers, keeping customers and growing.
I've seen scale-ups stagnate when they lose that focus, particularly as they move away from their early startup phase. But when they get it right, something quite special happens. You can have 150 or 200 people and still know everyone's name and you can understand how your work contributes to the organisation.
And, if you can keep people motivated, you can maintain a surprising amount of innovation without all the bureaucracy of a large enterprise. Of course, there's risk; lose a few key customers or run out of runway or a new competitor appears or maybe the market changes and suddenly, things can look very different.
Startups
And then there's the startup. When you're only a handful of people, it's beyond fun. It's also completely chaotic and every day is a rollercoaster. At a startup you wear every hat. You might be coding in the morning, talking to a customer at lunchtime, helping with marketing in the afternoon and trying to close a deal in the evening.
Everyone is an entrepreneur, whether they realise it or not and because everyone is just trying to make things work, you need a huge amount of empathy for the people around you. You won’t seek perfection but you seek value.
There's also an awareness of the runway but I think the one main concern is the customer satisfaction as one customer might be the difference between having another six months of runway or running out of money. You know that that one contract that hasn't been signed yet might determine whether someone gets paid next month. In a large enterprise, losing one customer might barely register. In a startup, it can be everything.
Your contribution and impact are massive. But they come at a cost too, the context switching, the hours and the uncertainty and also to be honest the salary.
But personally, I think the commitment and the fun can massively outweigh those things.
So, after 25 years, what have I learned?
I don't think there's a perfect sector or organisation to work for.
- Government gives you mission and stability, but can be frustratingly slow.
- Academia gives you incredibly interesting people and a strong purpose, but often lacks the resources and speed.
- NGOs can give you a huge sense of purpose, but again, budgets can limit what you can do.
- Enterprise gives you scale, technology and money, but brings bureaucracy and the possibility of becoming a number.
- SaaS gives you some of the most exciting technical challenges and some great people to learn from, but competition and pressure can be intense.
- Scale-ups give you impact, ownership and a great balance of chaos and structure, but the risks are very real.
- Startups? They're probably the most fun I've had. But they can bring stress. So, you need to learn how to deal with it if you want to work there.
I think the important thing is understanding what trade-offs you're willing to make at that particular point in your life.
Twenty-five years ago, I might have prioritised learning and excitement. At another point, stability and family mattered more and at other times, I've been happy to take the risk because I wanted to build something interesting. All in all, I think one of the main things that works is if you believe in the mission of the company.
Maybe that's the real benefit of having 25 years behind you is that you start to realise that it's not about finding the "best" place to work. It's about finding the right place for you, right now and that might be a 50k person government office or a 6 person startup.