Comment by ehnto
6 years ago
I find a lot of joy in smaller, industry niche companies. Like 1-20 employees small. Not VC funded startups, but long running companies with proven value in an industry outside of the startup bubble.
There is a lot of them, and they can be very rewarding to work at. While they'll have less compensation, it's in real money and they're often located in smaller cities with lower cost of living. You get to work directly with clients/customers to provide value to them with your skillset. The pace is steady, and what you work on can have a lot of longevity which is nice. Software can feel somewhat ephemeral at times, written one month, thrown away the next. Working on a long term project means it feels worthwhile to go the extra mile.
Just curious can you give examples of this?
A few examples of ones I have worked at or friends have:
A company that created a novel commercial solar estimation algorithm, and ran a B2B SaaS with it.
A small platform specific agency, 10-20 people specializing in a specific eCommerce platform.
A company that had been producing IoT software and devices for farmers.
A slightly bigger company that produced backbone software for bank management, I think they had closer to 100 employees eventually but the dev team was still relatively small. Bank software takes a lot of extra curricular activity it turns out!