[mattbaker]

Graduated in ‘09, things were still chaotic post-crash, but I did find work in the end.

I joined a small local company, they had a codebase dating back to the 90s and they’d succeeded in becoming the dominant solution in a niche space. It was a far cry from the nifty places I read about on hacker news.

It wasn’t flashy, weird proprietary tooling, ancient version of .NET, little to no version control, no testing infrastructure, but man I learned so much. I was fresh out of school, everything was a learning experience!

I think it’s easy to forget that these stable, smaller, more “humble” options exist out there and they’re not necessarily slashing massive proportions of their staff.