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Leaving eyeo

Thirteen blog posts later, this one notes my departure from eyeo after 4 years and 3 months.

I joined eyeo around the headcount of 80 employees, and now I think there's just over 250 people there.

My role coming in was as operations manager, doing a mix of infrastructure engineering and technical project management. I later on took on organizational development to help the company deal with its growing pains. We introduced cross-functional teams, departments (kind of like guilds), new leadership structures, goal-setting frameworks, onboarding processes and career frameworks. 

And all of this in a rapidly growing distributed company. I'm proud and happy that for a long time I knew every employee by name and got to meet every single new-hire through training them on company structure and processes. 

At some point, we had enough experienced leaders and organizational developers that I could zoom back in on working in one team, consulting them on Git and continuous integration, and coaching them on mediation, trust, team work, listening and more.

This kept me busy for the last two years. My team grew from a team of 8 into a business unit with over 40 people. Teams have grown and split and grown and split again. I've facilitated and led more retrospectives, virtual team days and workshops than I can count, some on-site in Cologne and during one team-week in Prague, but mostly distributed from as far west as California, across Europe and as far east as Vietnam.

Through this time, a feeling grew that I was approaching a crossroads for my own career.  

The natural path was for me to continue developing as a coach to higher levels. I thought this was what I wanted for a long time, but the further I went down this path, the less time I had for software engineering and I missed it more and more. 

At the same time, I felt my impact and contribution as a coach was falling below my personal potential. I realized I wanted be a software developer again, with coaching as a my secondary proficiency rather than the other way around.

One option would've been to find a more technical role within eyeo, but I wasn't able to find one matching the kind of backend/server-side development work I'm experienced with and interested in.

So I began to search outside of eyeo. I activated my network and ramped up a speedy but structured process of applying to a set of companies in parallel. Long story short, I'm going back to software development, and I will again be working out of an office in Bonn, as soon as the conditions allow for it at least. More about that in a future post.

It's definitely been a wild ride at eyeo, and I'm grateful to all the people I worked with there and learned so much from. I hope they succeed on their mission for a safer and saner Internet, as that will benefit us all.

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Comments

  1. Thommy Bommen18/2/21 10:56

    A nice read! Wish you all the best and good luck! We should hook up and discuss experiences soon! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. tfnico27/2/21 00:53

      Let's do it! Sent you a private message.

      Delete
  2. OlafLewitz26/2/21 11:33

    It was a great time. thank you for inviting me to be part of it. all the best for your next challenges!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. tfnico27/2/21 00:52

      Thank you, Olaf! I'm sure our paths will cross again :)

      Delete

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