Oh it had nothing to do with principle. My manager, the CTO was the best manager I ever had. He was new to the company when I was hired in 2018 and they were bringing development in house from a contracting shop and he tapped me to lead cloud initiatives even though he knew I didn’t know anything about cloud.
I would have left anyway over the next year. By the time the paycut came, I had already basically purposely “put myself out of job”. I trained other coworkers. Put processes in place and I had nothing left to do but normal CRUD development.
They were pivoting to selling various microservices to large health care providers and he wanted to move away from VMs to Fargate (serverless Docker) and Lambda along with some other projects.
He was a great mentor and he was very straightforward and unapologetically blunt (after we got to know each other).
3 months after I left, they gave everyone additional equity to make up for the paycut and they restored everything a month later.
When they got bought out six months later for 10x, everyone made a decent amount of money from $50K - $200K (we aren’t talking a tech hub), the founders gave everyone bonuses and they reached out to someone who had been there for years and who had left and gave them an extra “thank you” bonus.
I would have stayed, but a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position. I didn’t want to be an SWE at any large company, I didn’t want to relocate, and I wasn’t about to spend months “grinding LeetCode”.
We kept talking and she suggested I apply for a fully remote position at AWS ProServe as a consultant specializing in enterprise app dev + “devOps”.
It was too good of opportunity to pass up.
The rest of the story with the startup. Soon after it got acquired, the CTO left and most of the best employees went with him to a new startup in the same space.
If I were working anywhere else and he could afford me, I would definitely work with him again. I still give him free advice from time to time when he calls and we meet for lunch every now and then.
