Last year I wrote a post, career chutes and ladders, where I proposed that a linear climb to the C-suite is not the only approach to a satisfying career. At the end of the post, I mentioned I was stepping off the ladder to take on an IC role.

Hedge hog typing on a keyboard

After over a year of being on a personally funded sabbatical, I started a new job at PostHog as a Senior Product Engineer. This week is my orientation where I get to drink from the firehose once again.

What is PostHog?

Apart from being a company that seems to really love cute hedgehogs, PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform. They have a set of tools to help product engineers build better products. Each product can be used as a standalone tool, but they’re designed to level-up when you put them together.

In particular, I’ve started on the Feature Flags team. Yesterday was my first day of onboarding and so far I really like my team.

Today is day two and I’ve already submitted a small fix for my first pull request!

Why PostHog?

When I was looking around at companies, an old buddy from GitHub who worked at PostHog reached out to me and suggested I take a look at this company. He said it reminded him of the good parts of working at GitHub.

Their company handbook really impressed me. What it communicates to me is that this is a remote-friendly company that values transparency, autonomy, and trust. It’s a company that treats its employees like adults and tries to minimize overhead.

Not only that, they’ve embraced a lot of employee-friendly practices. For example, a while back my friend Zach wrote about his distaste for the 90 day exercise window. PostHog provides a 10-year window. Not only that, they offer employes double trigger acceleration!

Double trigger acceleration, which means if you are let go or forced to leave due to the company being acquired, you receive all of your options at that time

This is a perk usually only offerered to executives.

I should mention we’re hiring! Please mention me if you apply. If we’ve worked together, let me know so I can provide feedback internally.

I’m excited to be part of a company that’s small, but growing. The company is at a stage similar to the stage GitHub was at when I joined. This is a team with a strong product engineering culture and I’m excited to contribute what I can and learn from them.

The Challenge

The other part that’s exciting for me is that I’ll be working in a stack that I don’t have a huge amount of experience with. The front-end is React with TypeScript and the back-end is Django with Python. I’ve done a bit of work in all these technologies except Django. However, I believe my experience with ASP.NET MVC will help me pick up Django quickly.

Not to mention, I’ve always taken the stance that I’m a software engineer, not just a .NET developer. Don’t get me wrong, I love working in .NET. But at the same time, I think it’s healthy for me to get production experience in other stacks. It’ll be an area of personal growth. Not to mention, they don’t quite have a .NET Client SDK yet so once I get settled in, that’s something I’m interested in getting started on.

The Future

I’ll share more about my experience here as I get settled in. In the meanwhile, wish me luck!