--- title: "I have a new job at a Silicon Valley Startup!" description: "Read more here: https://timbenniks.dev/writings/i-turned-my-career-on-its-head/ 2021 is starting well! I have a new Job at a silicon valley startup. In this video I discuss what the job is, why I like it and also why I moved away from the safe career path I was on at Valtech." date: "2021-02-01T09:27:12.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/tim/056-hcthe5pwhvm" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCThe5pWhvM" playlist: "tim" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HCThe5pWhvM/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["composable-architecture", "cms", "api-design", "personalization", "frontend"] --- # I have a new job at a Silicon Valley Startup! Read more here: https://timbenniks.dev/writings/i-turned-my-career-on-its-head/ 2021 is starting well! I have a new Job at a silicon valley startup. In this video I discuss what the job is, why I like it and also why I moved away from the safe career path I was on at Valtech. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCThe5pWhvM ## Transcript what is up welcome back so exciting news for 2021 i have a new job oh [ __ ] it's gonna be awesome i'll be starting um in march of 2021 and it's going to be at a startup so i have no idea what my life is gonna look like now that we're gonna go full force ahead and disrupt some markets all right stick around and we're gonna talk about what it is why i chose to go there and you know maybe you can do the same because i didn't go up but i went sideways [Music] why the heck am i wearing headphones for a talking hat video wait i just got too excited to make this video okay i'm gonna try to talk slowly that's how how much fun i'm having with this anyways so let's talk about the fact first of all where i'm going what that job is but then also why i didn't choose to go into my current career path that was going so well and so perfect right but i chose to do something else so first of all what i'm going to be doing is i will be a principal developer advocate at a company called uniform uniform is a startup based in the us in san francisco and they're doing really really cool modern stuff inside the enterprise arena shall we say right in enterprise you have all these big monolithical systems that work on huge scale they do that really well but as a developer i've been working for years at agencies where we try to have this global skill huge systems but with super modern front-end tech right without being held back by fender lock-in things like that so we always had to like try to force the systems to do things that we wanted to do and you know what the guys at uniform had a plan they executed it got funding and they did it right they managed to be able to have gemstack in front of all these huge systems where you don't have to get rid of the huge system because that's hard you know contracts sla security whatever you can still keep it but your front end is now actually jam stack or something in between right so they're kind of the glue between all the new systems and the old stuff with that in mind they also started to do personalization which is generally really hard to do it's either too slow or too hard on content management and so uniform created an engine an intent engine as they call it that does personalization and connects to a whole bunch of cmss and then even in gemstack they on the edge of the cdn are able to render the personalized content for the user so it's like 20x faster right so i will be developer advocate at that company and you know what it was like it fits like a glove because i've worked in enterprise my whole career always huge platforms huge campaigns 60 market e-commerce this kind of stuff right and then i've also worked my whole career at agencies i've worked and led teams or worked with and led teams or worked in teams that would work on those big systems that would now use the uniform software and i actually know the technology i'm in the community we work a lot together there's all these new tools that i keep on using and making videos about so kind of i knew all of that and now i with all that information and knowledge and experience i can actually help developers to understand uniform see how cool it is things like that you know documentation demos anyways that's what i'll be doing and i couldn't be more excited um so now let's talk about that career path right my career path was i started an agency i'm a front-end developer i become a senior developer i become a principal front-end developer i change countries i become a technical delivery manager i become a tech lead then i change companies i become i think another tech lead and then i was front-end director of a whole office and then the next step was actually to become the technical director of front-end technology for the global organization as in 40 offices 3 000 people different cultures different projects being responsible for all that so i've worked towards that for about a year right because you cannot just get that job people need to know you things like that otherwise where's the trust between cultures that's a bit hard sometimes so we've worked really hard to get there what that meant for me was i would be working on different pitches with different technology different offices different clients just so they saw me but i also started to make youtube videos doing conference talks all of that stuff like stuff that you are looking at right now that's what i started doing and during that whole year where i worked so much i actually found out there's a lot more to the job than just being a developer in an agency doing great stuff there's a whole other world out there right it's not all in the enterprise there's also like a whole different layer where amazing work is done and so i kind of learned that there's more so i enriched kind of my own career i went into all the paths and i went deep into them and then i started getting offers from startups if i wanted to work with them either as let's say their cto or maybe help them organize their engineering teams or to make content for them and at one point i was talking to the people at uniform because i admired them so much all the good people that i knew in the in the you know our community went there was like oh this is there's a special thing going on there and they didn't actually ask me because that's not really cool to do when you still work in another agency but we got to the conclusion together that this fits me so well i just had to go for it so i decided not take my really nicely organized career path that would be secure and awesome and a lot of money i decided to not go there and go wider rather than higher i went horizontally to another job where i would learn other stuff and i would bring a lot of value that's different from what i used to do so anyways long story short 2021 is going to be awesome because i will be working remotely from front for an international company making content helping developers speaking at conferences it's my dream job and anyways um i just wanted to tell you all this because you can do the same i made my own career different while working on something i realized there's much more out there being in tech is a really wide range so if you come from a different background than me a white guy with a beard who is a like a nerd that's a relatively easy path right but when you're different there is so much out there so this is the message from uncle tim look around and there there is some sort of path for you in tech and you can easily change to it because it's such a young job anyways thanks for watching and i'll see you next time cheers