JedFonner.com

Last Thursday was a pretty good day at work. It was one of those days where I’m really glad I work at a small tech company. If you’ve spent your life working for big companies, you might not realize the benefits of working for a small company.

• More responsibility, faster: since there are less people, a small company usually expects employees to step up faster and take on more responsibility. This is great for people who constantly want to be challenged.
• Broaden your horizons: a small company usually has a flat organizational hierarchy and departments are willing to seek and give help when appropriate. Because of this, you get to help out with projects that might not normally have fallen within your realm of expertise
• Change is good: small companies are always looking for ways to use their small size (read: adaptability) as a benefit to counteract their lack of manpower and bottomless pits of money. So they’re naturally open to new ideas (even risky ones) and they’re more likely to shift the way things are done.

So what was so special about Thursday?

First, I had volunteered to act as the liaison between Tech and Recruiting to help brainstorm ideas for our upcoming fall college recruiting effort. That meant I got to spend time working with the heads of recruiting and other departments to come up with cool ideas for our recruiting website, career fair booth, newspaper ads, swag to give out, etc etc. I really enjoy stepping outside of my normal responsibilities and getting to do new things like this and be creative in new ways.

Second,when not working with Recruiting, I was working with my team to roll out new features to our constantly-improving on-demand SaaS site. I’m the engineering manager for the team responsible for deploying my company’s new foray into SaaS, and that’s pretty cool. We’re always thinking of new ways to improve the product and make the experience cooler for our users. On Thursday, one of our latest features really came together, and being able to really play with it online was pretty rewarding.

Lastly, my boss likes to throw out new ideas just to see what people think, and before heading home he emailed me to ask (no promises) what I thought about getting new iMacs for all of our developers to make them more productive and happier at work. A pretty crazy idea at first glance, but once I thought about it a little, I realized there were a few real positives. So I don’t know if anything like this will ever happen, but I think it’s awesome that those at a higher paygrade than me are actually thinking about things like this.

Anyway, everyone has bad days at work and a lot of the time the good days go by unnoticed. But that’s what a good work day for me is like. What’s a good work day like for you?

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