4 months ago i resigned from Chubb and joined Kaara. here are the differences I felt.
Chubb was an extremely good place to start your career, especially for engineering quality. the amount of good tech being built, the way it was being built, and being part of that process taught me a lot.
you’re constantly learning from really talented senior engineers around you. i learnt how to build products that scale to thousands of users, software engineering fundamentals, writing scalable code, understanding the problem first, and designing systems end to end. i’m so grateful i got to learn all this by building products first hand.
the people i interacted with there were also incredibly sharp. startup founders turned PMs, founders who got acquired by YC, and so on. you pick up a ton just by being around people like that.
at Kaara, speed sometimes wins over engineering quality. i worked on the product here too, obviously, but there was no one to mentor me or learn good engineering from. i was the sole backend engineer on TruHome Finance. i still learnt a lot here, just different things.
every decision has its pros and cons.
along the way i noticed a pattern in myself. whenever i feel like i’m not learning or growing, i get hit by a sudden wave of depression and self-disappointment. like, what even am i doing? i constantly need to learn something new, grow, and build. the second that stops, my brain starts calling me a loser.
the only thing that helps is to just go build something. when i feel stuck, the fix is never to sit and think about it, it’s to execute and take action. at Kaara i had plenty of ideas to ship, and i wanted to get better at engineering on the side too, so i kept myself busy with both.
i’ve since left Kaara, and i’m headed to TU Dortmund to do my masters in data science, something i’ve wanted to pursue for a long time.
new place, same plan. keep building :)
