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Comment by jorblume | Hacker News Reader

I'm the only developer in my ad agency of about 80 people. It's super cool to write all my own code, make all my own stack choices. To know that I wrote everything here is a really cool feeling.

At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. And given my extremely young age (only a few years out of school) sometimes it can be hard to be sure I'm making the most efficient choices. There's a lot of times I ask myself...why is this stupid and what am I going to break?

It definitely has its ups and downs. I think the most valuable lesson has been self reliance. No one is fixing this, it's on me. No one is going to refactor this, except for me.

edit: spelling :(

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I did that for 4 years. Beware! Being the only tech at an "agency" will quickly atrophy your core engineering skills, if you're not careful. You will get _good_ at delivering working solutions quickly, but these will tend to be one-off fixes, often data deliverables, but not finished products. You will also gradually slip on testing, and QA in general.

Working in an engineering team environment has all sorts of benefits. After I moved to my next gig, I think I learned more about dev in my first 3 months at product team, than I had in my last 4 years at previous gig, all thanks to simple code reviews and pairing. It's amazing to hear the thought process of other developers and how they would approach a particular problem.

Enjoy it. Learn everything you can, but keep in mind that you're not getting the full picture. Full software product lifecycle might be very different beast than what you're doing right now.

In retrospect, I was at an agency for two years before moving to my most recent job at a product – I agree with you that being at a product gets you back to your core engineering skills, however, in the right environment, an agency can expose you to a lot of things you would not otherwise explore in a very short amount of time.

You're entirely right that you get used to delivering working solutions that are ultimately one-off fixes, but at the same time you also discover how to use technologies that speed up your production in a more pragmatic fashion. It's definitely not a product lifecycle, it's a project lifecycle – different but not any less valuable.

Although, it is unfortunate you have no coworkers. The thing I miss most about working at an agency is being able to poll my many developer colleagues to research and discover different approaches to problems. The fast pace of an agency often means that you aren't the first to discover a problem that occurs on a project, and your colleagues are a highly valuable commodity that you don't necessarily get at a product.

I've been a researcher for 8 years now, and definitely feel that. The freedom is great, but I'm not sure I could ever transition into a SDE role.

I'm the same way at a recruiting firm. I worked at a company with a larger dev shop before landing here for about a year and a half thankfully but even so, there's a lot of work that goes into being a single man dev shop.

Communication: Keeping both the recruiters and management in the know about what is going on. This means I need to be decent about planning, bug tracking, tool choices, etc.

No one else is really technical here at all so occasionally you run into the hurdle of "It doesn't look like anything is getting done!". It really means I have to be very good at communicating complex topics to the layman. Not a bad skill to add the repertoire by any stretch of the means though.

Building a small team: There was a fresh grad on the social media team with a Comp Sci degree from NYU. "What's he doing in social media" I exclaimed! Get him over here!". I guess he focused on music instead of computer science at school but he's picking things up.

There's a lot to being a one man team.

> At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs.

I'm in the same position, it's really lonely being the only technical resource. Just someone to bounce ideas off of. On the other side, everything works and when it doesn't I know exactly why within moments because I wrote it all.

I had this problem for years. And then I picked an open source project that uses the same language and tools and started contributing to it. I made some great friends and the mailing list was always live with discussion that was often much broader than the thing we were building. Over the years we also met live on a couple of conferences, had drings/dinners together and it really helped me fill the void of working alone on commercial side.

This!

Since there are no more upvote-points, we can't know how many people agree with the comment, so "this" are again required (or show alternative).

I do not need to know how many people agree with something to know whether I agree or disagree with it.

There's no need to show upvote points; just order it so I'm more likely to read the things that other people think are worth reading. I can judge it myself without seeing N "this" comments or upvote points beside it.

Whoooosh

My comment is at +15 currently. ;)

I hear that, the convos at some dev shops leaves a lot to be desired when you're bombarded with work. Hanging out on IRC with like-minded people who like Lisp/Scheme, more hardcore javascript coding than plain old jQuery and Free Software is far more fun than talking to marketing heh.

Yeah, and if you build it using some wonky code built from legacy PHP, I'm sure the next person in will love you for it.

(Not saying you do it, I see it all the time).

I would have to say your in a much different place than these guys were. The internet, open source (the amount of it at least), the FOTM chat client...

If you want to talk shop you are more than welcome to contribute to one of the open source projects out there (I'm sure you have a few in the stack). I will say it isn't the same as having a partner in crime at work, but you can get your self exposed to new ideas and thinking if you so choose!

Oh totally, it's a completely different world. I mean look at Stackoverflow. Literally one google search can solve even the more complex problems a programmer might encounter. Like you said, github, meetups, skype...just reading through source code on github helps me immensely.

I wish more people would understand this. If you are have one or two developers, you can not act like google. Management does not understand this.

Same here, I really want to scream at them, fast product delivery is really not a thing for sole developer.

I have a similar version of this - being the only ops guy in a small sea of devs. I'd love to be able to bounce ops-related ideas off people in-house, but no-one is interested, because it's not what they do or what they're interested in. I sometimes wonder how many weird ops habits I have picked up, since they don't get to be aired out much...

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