TL;DR
The author left Innoteam to work at Quix as a Front End Engineer, working on projects for a large automotive client. After six months, the author left due to the company's failure to live up to their values, which was a valuable lesson in evaluating companies during interviews.
I selected Quix as my subsequent company after Innoteam because I desired to maintain the experience of working as a consultant.
🤌🏽 Why Quix?
Quix impressed me during my search for a new company due to the values and clients in their portfolio.
They have big clients in different industries, from fashion, food, and automotive.
🏢 How it was structured
They have separate business units dedicated to each service they provide.
Typically, each team works with different clients, concentrating on the specific industry they belong to.
👨🏽💻 My role
I was hired as a Front End Engineer with the expectation of being promoted to Senior within six months.
My most significant responsibility involved collaborating with the company's Front End Lead.
Although he was part of the R&D team, we worked together on client projects.
I had the pleasure of working with him to enhance their scaffolding project for all the SPAs they were developing.
Additionally, we were tasked with introducing NgRx as a state manager in most of the projects and their shared library.
We also made improvements to their existing design system.
💼 Customers
I worked for one of their largest clients in the automotive industry.
The project involved developing a mobile app intended for internal use only.
Since we were exclusively using Angular, the app was built on Ionic, which presented one of our most significant challenges to overcome.
One of these challenges was integrating with sensors, such as FaceID or fingerprint recognition.
🚪The end of my adventure
I departed after six months; yes, that's right, six months.
You might be curious as to why... well, allow me to elaborate.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I selected Quix for their values...
It turned out that most of them were merely buzzwords.
At various points during my time there, I observed that they promoted a narrative filled with these values, but most of them were not genuinely implemented.
On multiple occasions, I had to work overtime because they either altered our estimates or disregarded them entirely, as the clients required the project to be completed by a specific deadline.
✅ Lessons learned
My lessons from this experience were quite straightforward: I didn't have enough experience in interviews, as I was deceived by their storytelling about the values and all the positive things they said.
There were various incidents that led me to acknowledge the fact that I had to leave, as my values were not aligned with theirs.
Although most of them were the same, and they had this "Tree of Values" painted on the wall.
❌ Errors I did
As explained before, I did a big mistake in evaluation during the interviews.
Their clients and projects were awesome and they had a lot of challenges, however they were managed so bad.
👀 Looking back
I consider this experience a mistake I made during my career.
Although it was still quite useful due to the engineers there (spoiler: all the leads of the R&D team left a few months after me), I can't say I didn't learn anything.
I acknowledge the mistake, and as we know, we learn more from our errors than our achievements.
I hope you enjoyed this article, the fourth of six (for now) about my career.
This series will be a prequel to others focusing on specific topics, so stay tuned and let me know in the comments if you want to discuss a specific section or topic.
🕺🏽 Your lovely neighborhood dancing engineer 🕺🏽