I’ve started a new job.

Along with everything else going on in my life, all through the fall and early winter I was sweating out the health of the company. It was in the middle of a reverse acquisition that took much longer to complete than expected, which left the company badly cash starved. (Lawyers suck). Payroll was usually a month or so late, then they’d make a payment, then they’d be late with the next one. They got almost caught up in December, then fell behind again. For a while, it felt like work and my mother were double-teaming me — when she got worse, it seemed like there would be some good news on the work front, and when she got better, work started looking more dire.

The acquisition went through in the middle of December, and we had expectations of getting paid, then they emailed us right before Christmas that funding was delayed due to the holidays, and that we wouldn’t be paid until the first week in January. Come the day, and there still wasn’t funding, and we found out that getting the funding wasn’t as cut and dried as we were led to believe. That’s the point I decided it was time to update my resume on Monster. One of my concerns was the fact that Mum still needs a lot of help, and it was convenient on that count to be working from home, so I was trying to find someplace else where I could work remote.

It didn’t take long. The morning after putting my resume on Monster, I got an email from a recruiter looking to fill a position for a company called Andela.

Andela connects engineers in Africa with employment in the US and the UK. Their motto is “Brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not”. They were looking for someone to join their internal teams. They have engineers in Africa, headquarters in New York City, and a small group of people in the Greater Boston area working remotely. I talked first with the VP of Engineering, and liked what he had to say, and then had interviews via Zoom with the engineering team and then the engineering managers, and got an offer in early February.

It was a little bittersweet leaving appScatter — Matt, my immediate manager, has been very good to me, and I’m grateful for the chance to see London. But the situation had become increasingly untenable, though I will add that they finally did get caught up and I have been paid in full what I was owed.

I started Andela on February 18th. I spent the first two weeks onboarding — learning their policies, and getting to know their corporate culture. After that, I started getting to know the codebase. It’s Angular, so it’s been pretty easy to get into the swing of things. They’re very heavily into Angular Material, so I’ve had to get into the swing of things with that. Like appScatter, there is a big time difference — currently 5 hours, while we are on DST and they are not, and 6 hours in the winter. They’ve been very accommodating in terms of rescheduling things for me. I’ve been trying to be online around 7:30 in order to maximize the time overlap.

So far, I’m liking it a lot. Everybody there is very sharp, but everyone wants to help. A lot of how they do things has been unfamiliar, but not so unfamiliar that I’m totally lost and frustrated, but rather, I’m learning a bunch of new toys. They started using Angular later than I did, so they’re using some of the newer features of the framework that I hadn’t known about since I first learned it while Angular was at version 2. Best of all, it’s taken a little while, but I’m starting to get to know and like the people I’m working with.