Pros
Picture a company where your boss asks you where you want be in a few years. You tell them, outlining how you plan to get there. Now imagine them providing feedback and shifting your workload to help you become the person you strive to be. Sounds like a dream, right? It also sounds like the years I spent at Koda Digital under the leadership and guidance of Austin Heerwagen. My work with Koda Digital started through freelance work over the course of a couple months. The quality of my work was recognized and I was offered an internship with terms that were more than fair. Over the three-month course of that internship I was able to elevate my skills as a front-end developer. I also found myself pushed outside of my comfort zone by being delegated more tasks and responsibility—but never to a point I couldn’t handle. If it became overwhelming, I was always able to get support from the company, tapping into another developer or being given the leeway to educate myself to solve the problem. When I joined the company I wanted to program but wasn’t sure what direction to take. As I spent more time in front-end technologies I had the opportunity to tackle implementations within the back-end. A more technical and foreign realm to me at the time but my coworker was more experienced. His guidance helped kickstart my personal development alongside the development of the project at the time. Around a year later after delving into back-end technologies I was promoted to Technical Lead and was responsible for nearly all development aspects of the company. That included what technologies to use, project estimations and coordinating with other developers. If I worked at a more typical company, this advancement would have taken years. Without the experience and guidance I was given at Koda Digital I can say with utmost certainty I would not be anywhere near where I am today. I owe my progress, success, and in some ways my life, to the company and its founder Austin Heerwagen.
Cons
Nothing at the current time.