I realized that exactly a year ago I got a job at my current work, so the second year has started unnoticed. If someone doesn't know, I'm tech leading the main Android app at Beeline.kz for several million users.
Actually I've been working in exactly the same position and at the same scale for probably 4 years now, but in each company this position is understood mildly speaking differently, and all my previous experience crashed into some lack of support around. Like they hired you to determine strategic vision, but you're sitting there laying out screens.
So far this is probably the best workplace of those where I've been before. Namely in terms of comfort and how much I can generally give to the project per unit of time. In the previous company in 8-9 months with me they managed to do as much important stuff for me as here in the first three months or so. Here they really listen, some adequate ideas are quite easy to push through, this wins you over.
For me this is also the first experience of working abroad, albeit relatively easy-mode in the form of Kazakhstan. But even this is not very simple, and also the change of language and culture in general my head could have not survived. Now it's good, calm, as far as possible.
If we go through my own impressions, then the project a year ago and now is really night and day, probably I had some influence on this. Before the new year I was warming up, afraid to break everything from an already quite shaky position, and then started making one tectonic shift after another, and seem to be alive. In a year not a single hotfix due to our fault, full stability, you can really brag about this.
The main downside of such work though, is that it's mainly about long-term and about the team. Improvements to end users arrive essentially as a side-effect of the fact that you once long ago launched the right process or pushed through the right idea. The feedback loop to users is much longer than you'd like. So usually you live in the paradigm that your team is your clients, and globally the result of your work is some metrics from prod. Users sorry, we're trying!
So, everything is working out here. I'm doing what I want, and this even matches what the company needs. Somehow they even called me the most senior lead here. Although I see perfectly well that there's room to grow. I'm sagging in some ordinary people management towards technical operations or sometimes excessively trying to control everything, although I could delegate or forget about it. Or constant solving of moral dilemmas like who from the team to give more time to, so that there's more benefit, and there's no feeling that you forgot about someone (doesn't always work out). But this is a typical lead trap, understandable. Here directly the size of my developer team has grown, so I feel a bit more responsibility and challenge than before. And this is a pleasant challenge, unlike attempts to defeat bureaucracy.