Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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