It may come as a surprise, but not every single professional move has calculated steps. At least for me.

Here is the story on how I left a multinational well renowned software company after 12 years (!!) to work for the best open source scheduling solution company.

You may relate to this or not, it depends on whether you had the chance and the desire to take similar positions as I did, and the kind of positions you can grow to in your current company. The thing is I grew to be a technical leader after some time as a mere front-end developer in this software factory company, and after that, grew to some sort of engineering manager with multiple teams. And not long after, I missed coding.

Having to deal with people in a team to deliver value to the end user is a blessing and also a curse. There’s a bunch of work to try to make everyone happy to certain degree, making sure the client is also happy, having happy end users, and any other stakeholder. Not to mention your own leader. Being a developer means having the responsibility of delivering value to the end user fulfilling tickets and that’s pretty much it. And having to solve technical problems to get there. That’s almost pure joy.

So, when the chance materialized, I took the developer path again, but in a very unorthodox way, according to my playbook at least.

I was already desiring to go back to a developer path, maybe a Software Matter Expert path, having to code and solve technical problems almost exclusively instead of having to deal with team issues almost exclusively. But hey, I’m a resourceful guy, I can work on side projects to keep my dev side active somewhere. Although, we all know a side project without the right motivation will end up archived or abandoned soon enough. So I expanded my horizons.

At the time, my client and the company I worked for had very different ways to schedule meetings, one used Microsoft accounts and the other Google accounts. Scheduling was always a mess, having to sync calendars manually, or have a script run in Google Cloud to sync calendars, an untenable situation. So I was on the lookout for calendar solution that would facilitate merging different account in a single place. And in that quest I found Cal.com. It was Open Source, could be installable into your own server, had plenty of ways to customize your experience. Made my account, my ideal username was marked as premium, so I chose the next best thing. Cool app!

Investigating deeper into Cal.com, I found their Twitter account (it was still called Twitter back then) and saw a tweet about a raffle. You could win a premium user for lifetime! I wanted mine! So I entered the raffle. Guess what? I won! Well, technically, me and like 50 other people.

Such a nice app, solving a real problem I had, now gives me a lifetime premium username. Let’s dig into their code. Oh, they use a monorepo, cool! React with Next.js, that’s a stack I need to expand my knowledge… this needs to be my side project, collaborating to open source! I satisfy my need to code and solve technical problems and continue to step up in the leadership ladder in the software factory company.

Little did I knew, Cal.com offered me a full time position as a Full Stack developer some months later.

I started working on adding and improving the apps in their apps store, and then I got the chance to work on a particular part of the Cal.com app to introduce the ability to schedule recurring events in their main app. It was a major task, and it served as my resumé later on. So I started small, added value, followed their style of doing things, and then I got contacted to work on something bigger with major impact for the end users, which felt really good. The ideal side project if you ask me.

But then, something happened, the planets aligned themselves to force me to take a leap of faith. The client I was working with in the software factory had to size down the teams, keep essential people only (budget issues, you guessed right), so there I was, being impacted by that decision looking for other clients within the company to work with. After a reasonable time and within common sense, you get to choose where you want to work, so I was trying to get to find an opportunity inside the newly created blockchain area in the company without much success and boom, got the offer from Cal.com.

Of course that I took it, and worked there for almost an year and a half. The way they handled feedback of your work wasn’t good, and the way they handled layoffs was also not good. People came to work with the core team and some weeks later they were gone. They were proud to use a method called Lean Hire, where people could be put to the test while also contributing to the product and if things fit well, they were hired. But the people that got to the core team and were gone very quickly was not following that method. They were part of the core and were presented as such. Anyway, I felt in a weird spot, knew how they handle wierd spots and even though I was assured I was working well and pushing through major stuff that came my way, the situation was untenable. A short period passed and got to the engineering manager / architect position again in another software factory company. Luckily my current position already comes with coding needs 😆