At the beginning of their career, not every programmer understands what format of work suits them. As a result, they often change jobs until they find the ideal company. Where and why is it better to work – in a small startup, in a company that creates software for itself, or in a team that specializes in development for external organizations?

Finding the ideal environment in which to work day in and day out is the main task of a programmer. To understand which environment is closer to you, let’s look at a few common business strategies.

Small teams of people working on their own project
Startup teams usually consist of executives and sales managers. The project necessarily has one or two technically competent specialists or even programmers who are responsible for the overall organization of product development and distribute tasks between the freelancers involved.

If a programmer is hired on a full-time basis, this means that he or she is considered an important asset. He or she will be expected to be fully immersed in the project and provide a great output. When agreeing to this format of work, the specialist must be prepared for the fact that the overall result will depend on his ability to “put a team together” and make it work. Freelancers are usually poorly organized and have no idea how the entire process of product development is built. They need to be constantly supervised: to formulate tasks, set deadlines, correct actions.

A full-time developer at a startup performs tasks related to building software architecture, as well as the technical implementation of the ideas of management and sales managers. This is a great opportunity to develop the potential of an IT specialist. Especially if he has already gained sufficient experience in the profession and is burning desire to create a new product. The job is ideal for a programmer who likes to communicate not only with his “colleagues on the shop floor”, but also with managers. This will help to develop managerial skills.

The main advantage of such teams is that they usually welcome the introduction of new approaches, technologies, development languages and frameworks. You can experiment and learn, develop skills to solve non-standard tasks quickly.

It sounds tempting, but the statistics are inexorable: many startups quickly disappear. The team squanders investments, but never finds a cost-effective application of their product. A programmer needs to be prepared for instability: frequent changes of course, irregular salaries. And, most importantly, understand that the real users may never see the project, in which they have invested so much effort and resources. Perhaps this is the main disadvantage of startups.

Companies that do projects on demand
Sometimes startups get completely frustrated with their business idea, but after retaining the backbone of their staff and gaining good development experience, they start taking on custom projects. Stable financing appears, and a more or less permanent team is formed. But not everything runs smoothly here either. The market dictates its terms: almost all customers need a completely finished product “yesterday. In addition, working with customers is always stressful: you have to be patient, you have to learn to justify your position, to work with objections.

Routine begins for a programmer. Today he is busy with his project, and tomorrow he is trying to help his colleagues, who are not able to finish the product in time. And in rare free minutes one has to estimate the time needed for the next potential project, and not to work with the code, but with Excel spreadsheets. New technologies are welcomed only if they help to reduce the amount of routine and automate standard processes. You rarely get to sit down and think about the efficiency of the code. Perfectionists will have a hard time in such an environment.

Still, there is an upside: the programmer will learn to do everything. Of course, it will be hard to switch from backend to frontend at first, and to design databases during the breaks. But there will be a chance to make developments for the future – to accumulate a lot of templates-project blanks for any tasks. Another advantage: working at such a pace, you will have to constantly keep up with the development of current languages and frameworks.

Companies that work on their own economically successful project
More often than not, such a product takes years to create. It is logical that a developer company accumulates a huge amount of code for its product – clumsy and boring, but stable and predictable.

The programmer doesn’t have to do anything in a hurry: all tasks are deep, at attention. The processes have been fine-tuned for a long time. You just have to painstakingly implement intelligent functionality, improve performance, and deal with product scaling. Run tests and think about monitoring. This is where a developer will need a fundamental knowledge of algorithms and mathematics. It would be better to thoroughly study one direction or a framework and use it most efficiently.