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Identifying and Evolving with Red Flags

Authors

en | ptBR

Introduction

Red flags are important alerts to watch out for before starting a company and at my first opportunity I didn't know that, serving as an experience and allowing you to replicate questions to measure whether an environment is good or not in future opportunities, which made it possible to predict and be certain expectations of new environments.

Red flags on my first job

My first opportunity was at a Startup and it was as follows: in the selection process, I had to develop a landing page for a EAD medicine platform and a student panel page for this platform, the Home in this case. I hadn't suspected it at first, but this type of test isn't very common. This test was a REAL project of the company, used in the selection process. I won't discuss the possible other intentions of this, but in my case, when I joined the company, I saw that what I developed in the selection process was an extremely late large project that I had to develop in two weeks.

Another point is that I was the first developer. It was the only front-end dev and development flow I had to introduce myself. My superior, who knew some PHP stuff, never messed with GitHub and everything was saved in Google Drive. In conclusion, overall it was quite stressful.

Red Flags:

  • no space for evolution
  • developer only
  • bizarre deadlines
  • techs that didn't climb
  • bad communication
  • poor organization.

Questions I asked in my second interview

I recently wrote a article telling how I managed to receive a proposal just by writing what I studied.

I asked about:

  • Development team: the team is important because with more experienced people than you, it is possible to evolve.

  • Delivery time: if the company is very new or has projects behind schedule, this may impact its development.

  • Timetable - if the company has sufficient flexibility to maintain its schedules, if it is a student, etc.

  • Evolution space - environment that allows you to study useful things for the company in the long term

If you are a minor, some companies may create contracts, as I did. Also be mindful of this and I strongly recommend that a lawyer read everything first. It may have some holes and this review will avoid problems.

How did the bad environment make me a better developer?

Depending on your mood, accept working even in bad environments.

I learned:

  • Better organization
  • Self knowledge
  • Sense of leadership
  • Deal with deadlines
  • Organize problem solving

Evidently I'm still under construction and it doesn't mean that the aforementioned points are complete in me, just that I improved and developed them better. Expose yourself to get out of your comfort zone and evolve, apply Skin in the Game.

With all this, you will learn from your mistakes and gain experience. If you don't have a specific situation, you probably don't have much to lose. Leaving my first job allowed me incredible things because without risk you don't win or lose.

• See on GitHub