Hello! 6th November 2020 was my last working day in DataArt. 9th November I started work in IDEXX. IDEXX company is working on development, manufacture, and distribution of products and services for animal veterinary and other things. I'm working on Neo project - CRM system for veterinary practices.

Job change

I seriously decided to change a job, when my main project in DatArt was finished. Unfortunately, new project wasn't suitable for me. Then next career opportunities were also weird. I started to find a new job with such criteria:

• Technically interesting project.
• Framework based project(Symfony, Laravel, Yii2). I didn't want to work with Magento or any other CMS.
• Strong development team. In the same time, it should be comfortable to work there.
• International, american or european company.
• 100% remote job.
• Work as a Personal Entrepreneur, USD contract.
• Hourly model, rate about 30$/h, fulltime.

Finally, I got what I needed. I spent about 2 months for finding a suitable project. From that 2 months I spend about a month to multistep interviewing. I found that project via LinkedIn. I didn't opened CV, but actively check all incoming messages. I only considered projects, that accept for my criteria. So, there were not so many projects. I passed interviews to 3 companies.

Previous work summary

I worked in DA more that one and half years. There are main achievements for that time:

• I worked in large serious and interesting project, in the strong team for one and half year. We were developing ERP system for large Ecommerce.
• I came into new created team, made first onboarding, kicked off development processes.
• Within a large team we launched a project. We also made some adoption of exiting legacy code. In general, we launched large project from scratch in the short time.
• I took solid experience working with Symfony, Doctrine, RabitMQ and (micro)service architecture.
• Worked onsite in the client's company office in europe.
• Facilitated Magento 2 training, also made some tasks related with Magento.
• Learned a lot of things about work and processes in a large product and outsource companies.

Review

DA is a pretty good company. It's a nice place to start work for foreign clients. It is also remote friendly company(that was actual before pandemic).

Things that I like:

• Good main project
• There is quite good work organisation. There is all necessary infrastructure, smooth working processes.
• Remote friendly company(that was actual before pandemic), quite liberty atmosphere.
• USD contract, quite good salary etc.
• Accounting by the employee, but help provided.
• Regular business trips to europe(before pandemic).
• Good(mainly) relationships between employees.
• Vacations, day offs, bench etc.
• Responsible HR politics in pandemic period

Things that I don't like:

• Finally, I received not suitable project
• THere are not so much perspective for PHP developer(company focused on other technologies), not so many good projects for PHP. Strange project searching process(PHP). Unclear compensation review process. Unclear personal growth processes in general.
• Sometimes there were quite unpleasant teammates and nervous working atmosphere
• Corporate limits. There is a strange NDA, very general, not adopted for specific project. Corporate policy regarding pet-projects. Strange conferences policy, required medical insurance etc.

Initially I was happy to work in DA. However, after about a year of work I had more and more questions without an answer. Then pandemic started and good project finished. There were a lot of changes in general everywhere. I finally decided to leave when I realized that new project is completely not suitable for me, and there are no growth perspective. Then I realized that I needed to move on.

That's all for today. Thank you for your attention!