Do I know what working in a team feels like?

Date: May 24th, 2026

Every time I have switched employers I have switched to the language and framework used by the employer's engineering team.

I never had any options to it, I guess I am malleable that way, whether that is a good thing or bad, I hope to figure that out by the end of this journal entry.

I began my career with csharp and asp.net, then during that period, in my spare time off work, I was being tutored in F# by Ian Russel with his book. The language is truly amazing once I got used to the white space and ordering requirement of the language. Then in that present employer, I chose to switch teams because I move between states and the new state I was in, the language in the project being developed was TypeScript with Nest. The senior engineer was nice and shared what he could when he had the time(he was contracted to work on the project) so his time was not much. He reviewed my PRs gave me feedback, taught me how to model domain, see data flow and mentally visulize state change within the system.

Then once that project was done and handed over to the client, there a project drought. I wanted to be a software engineer but without incoming projects could I become one. I then started working on an F# project using the content of the blog planetgeek.ch The project was open sourced, so I saw how the apis were skecthed out. It was unlike anything I have experienced, both in training and during employment, but it was fun solving this challenge alone.

Time went by, I was doing pre-sales engineering activities to meet my monthly kpis stated within my department. Luckily, a project came in and I was drafted (hooray), after the team was assembled, the Engineering manager briefed all of us, told us the application domain, and the language and framework we would use to ensure the engineering team on the client's end that maintain and support the application once handover is complete. He decided to use csharp and asp.net. I was able to work on this project with the same senior contract engineer from the other project mentioned.

The project had its usual ups and downs, client changed the requirements and new business ideas came up and it had to be applied to the application. We did some and pushed back on some to a later phase to not make the sprint planning we had mapped out to be ineffective.

For the 2 projects I work on at this employer, my team mates were competent software mercenaries. The only staffs were the Engineering Manger and I, the other team mates were contracted for the duration of the project. We worked virtually as we were distributed across multiple states so we never really saw each other in person only during daily morning stand ups.

Fast forward a couple of months(I started learning OCaml on December 26th of 2024 using advent of code) and a couple of more pre-sales engineering activities.

I switched employers, this one used TypeScript, I was able to convince the existing engineer to use nest.js framework on the new greenfield project we were about to build. The project was quite complex, not in the technical sense, but in the business information needed to make the technical solution work. There were a lot of unknown unknowns that were not provide by the project owners, it was a figure it out yourself environment, not just the technical but the business and financial too.

There were demos to the project owners to show what assumption we use for that week speint planning which not in anyway influenced by the project owners as they were not project managers. The engineers were developing the application and still project managing the application.

The organisation was not organised, is a subtle way I would put it, the existing engineer I mentioned was a remote staff. On the bright side, I had 2 in-person colleagues, we saw occasionally when our work from office days coincided or we have a demo day. It was a life learning experience. I learnt kafka, read kafka documentation, queues, streams, heartbeat scheduling etc. In all, I learnt ask questions to employers, they do not have all the answers, most of them are looking to learn as much as the engineer is looking to earn. But when the organisation is not organised, it may be wise to leave.

Which is what I did and in this third and present employer we use kotlin and springboot. But again, the backend team organisation is not there.The individual engineers are brillaint, I can vouch for them. But I feel we are not a team, as here, it is one engineer per project. Unless the project has a hard deadline we have one main engineer and one supporting engineer. There is no graphic designer, LLM is perceived a cheaper alternative, Some projects have wonderful project managers those ones are revenue generating projects. The non revenue generating ones are more of the bazaar approach than the cathedral approach. But that bazaar approach with just one engineer is quite tiring.

As a concesus is never reached before an implementation is done, therefore front-end are sending you messages asking for what changes were made and it the experience the back end designed matches the experience the Front end engineer designed. This difference causes multiple front and back till we settle on one that works for both of us.

I am on a performance improvement plan, maybe saying this out here might make some recruiters or employers have doubts. I do not know what to say than, 3 employers, 3 different technology stack, fast pace environment that is most often unorganised.

But the colleagues I work with give me hope each day. I am in progress of building both a personal and professional relationship with my team mates in this present employer as we all see each other in the office twice a week mandatory.

This is a draft of what I wanted to say to get things off my chest and to improve my writing. I have been consuming the content of blainsmith.com.

I enjoy every piece of it. His writing both personal and professional are really inspiring, I really to write at that level. Hence I am writing for my personal website, to write and get feedback.

I learnt I can add bluesky comments to my blog using the open source repo of Noah Bogart.

The blogs I enjoy are Jyn.dev Blaine Smith Brandon Irizarry Haskell for all.