I’m not going to say it’s the same, but I have a bit of a story here.
My first gig was at a small software retailer, straight out of high school and balancing study at uni. Picture a GameStop competitor but selling home/commercial software and licensing as well as games.
The owner’s approach was to employ a series of teenagers who saw this as an opportunity to get that elusive “foot in the door” first job experience despite being paid less than half minimum wage for the hours we were actually paid for (hard not to envy today’s junior Devs walking into jobs out of uni today, yet alone the eye watering salaries, but then again there’s something to be said with romanticised rear vision for working your way up the ladder during that golden age of the early modern web).
Two of us, while balancing sales and service to customers, and keeping the store running (receiving and unpacking stock, boxing up and posting customer orders, phone calls, stocktake, cleaning, directing the occasional casual staff), without any formal education, with tools that don’t match today (no especially useful libraries or tools, eg pre-jQuery, Ajax just catching on and feeling like magic, plain PHP, .NET 2.0 without an ORM etc.), built and maintained a website that in my view rivalled Amazon’s UX at the time (we developed some novel ways to group and present licensing and editions that surpassed Amazon in this space).
On top of this we developed and maintained a bespoke WinForms POS/inventory/accounting system that handled all sales and ordering etc., supporting tools to handle pricing/forecasting, automation scripts to keep customers updated etc., and a series of integrations with suppliers to pull near-live stock availability and pricing for perhaps 40k SKUs from around 80 suppliers (none of whom had APIs so we were screen scraping custom portals, parsing the odd PDF price list, or best case pulling CSV email attachments).
The net effect was with minimal operational effort we could effectively compete with far larger businesses and provide a better experience.
This included the ability, with near zero-touch, to surface a comprehensive catalogue of stock while maintaining minimal inventory, automatically take customer orders, place corresponding supplier orders based on the best price at that point in time (rationalising and aligning across price lists, with consideration of preferential contract terms or shipping timelines), publish near-live pricing and ETA changes, administer a customer loyalty program, and provide automatic updates to customers.
We just got stuff done because we didn’t know any better.
I know this is several scales lower in complexity than Amazon, eg fraud detection, volume of catalog and sales, reseller accounts etc. but again we were not 1000s of Stanford and MIT educated engineers.
Incidentally this has shaped my view of the undervalued power of having bespoke software supporting your core business operations, despite also driving home the risks and perils of reinventing the wheel.
My first software job was also right out of high school in June of 2006.
I was recruited by a small consulting firm that had a specific project in mind that aligned with a fake project I had on a resume. My resume was fake because there was a BCIS project in high school to create a resume and post it, but I forgot to take it down, but I didn't let them know that either.
I bluffed my way passed two interviews, was given a $30k salary and benefits. Within a month I was running the team, and within 6 months I had shipped my first product (an ocean shipping contract management system). This is after they had been trying to write this software for over 6 years with no success.
The company then decided that I was worth more than the rest of the team, took me into a meeting told me that I would be getting more responsibilities, and asked if I cared if they laid off the rest of the team. I agreed with them thinking that by laying them off I'd get a big raise... I did not, I just got longer hours and even some weekend work!
So after a month of that exploitation, I quit to focus on a couple of side projects that were almost making enough money for me since I still lived with my parents.
First jobs (especially in "industry")as an undereducated 18 year old kid are crazy exploitative. I didn't know the difference between salary and hourly, or the fact that salary means you work as long as we want you for the same pay as if you didn't work at all.
Sounds like a startup but then what happens? You start getting success so now you have a new salesperson but they need lots of help because they aren't as techie as you. You might even start needing 24 hour support and a dedicated returns line.
You then realise that you are the main part of the success so you now want your own office and a team to manage. Of course, they are not as sharp as you so you have lost your skill in return for trying to train and manage them - some don't even really want to be there.
Then the boss decides to get an investor to help scale the business - you need the support people on-board before you can start charging for support - and that person is now putting you under pressure because you are not updating the website quickly enough, there are bugs that people are complaining about etc.
It's a fairly classic story. You either stick, fold or go FANG!
> We just got stuff done because we didn’t know any better.
Despite knowing I'm more effective at avoiding major pitfalls, guiding the team in the right direction, building software that lasts.... I miss this feeling, so much.
My first gig was at a small software retailer, straight out of high school and balancing study at uni. Picture a GameStop competitor but selling home/commercial software and licensing as well as games.
The owner’s approach was to employ a series of teenagers who saw this as an opportunity to get that elusive “foot in the door” first job experience despite being paid less than half minimum wage for the hours we were actually paid for (hard not to envy today’s junior Devs walking into jobs out of uni today, yet alone the eye watering salaries, but then again there’s something to be said with romanticised rear vision for working your way up the ladder during that golden age of the early modern web).
Two of us, while balancing sales and service to customers, and keeping the store running (receiving and unpacking stock, boxing up and posting customer orders, phone calls, stocktake, cleaning, directing the occasional casual staff), without any formal education, with tools that don’t match today (no especially useful libraries or tools, eg pre-jQuery, Ajax just catching on and feeling like magic, plain PHP, .NET 2.0 without an ORM etc.), built and maintained a website that in my view rivalled Amazon’s UX at the time (we developed some novel ways to group and present licensing and editions that surpassed Amazon in this space).
On top of this we developed and maintained a bespoke WinForms POS/inventory/accounting system that handled all sales and ordering etc., supporting tools to handle pricing/forecasting, automation scripts to keep customers updated etc., and a series of integrations with suppliers to pull near-live stock availability and pricing for perhaps 40k SKUs from around 80 suppliers (none of whom had APIs so we were screen scraping custom portals, parsing the odd PDF price list, or best case pulling CSV email attachments).
The net effect was with minimal operational effort we could effectively compete with far larger businesses and provide a better experience.
This included the ability, with near zero-touch, to surface a comprehensive catalogue of stock while maintaining minimal inventory, automatically take customer orders, place corresponding supplier orders based on the best price at that point in time (rationalising and aligning across price lists, with consideration of preferential contract terms or shipping timelines), publish near-live pricing and ETA changes, administer a customer loyalty program, and provide automatic updates to customers.
We just got stuff done because we didn’t know any better.
I know this is several scales lower in complexity than Amazon, eg fraud detection, volume of catalog and sales, reseller accounts etc. but again we were not 1000s of Stanford and MIT educated engineers.
Incidentally this has shaped my view of the undervalued power of having bespoke software supporting your core business operations, despite also driving home the risks and perils of reinventing the wheel.