Jun 14, 2021 | by Budi Tanrim
How to choose a company?
Q: Budi, how do you know it’s the right place for you? I know you joined the public sector to work on education. Can you share a bit about how you made the decision? Love your blog, as always!
I used to be obsessed with big companies—Google, Facebook, Spotify.
Working in a big company is cool, get excellent compensation and an opportunity to work on the latest technology. It’s an exciting place. In retrospect, that how I made a decision.
One day, I considered Spotify and prepared my portfolio and CV to apply. But then I reflect: what is it that makes me want to work at Spotify?
- I use their product, so it’s cool to work on the product I love.
- Their design team looks pretty good, at least the way they present themselves.
- Their design blog and their design system have a good reputation.
- And so on. I list down a lot of reasons.
Are those important? I decided they are nice to have.
I talked about the 4p framework on how I chose my work before. I want to add two more things: mission and leadership.
The mission is critical. Without a mission, a company will suffer from a lot of dysfunctionality. The team will quickly get demotivated, no clear direction, no clear purpose, and easily distracted. This will make the team hard to prioritize and create a strategic trade-off.
Leadership is also essential. Do the leadership know what to the mission? Do they have humility? Are they critical thinkers? Because without strong leadership, everything can go south easily. A reactive leader, for example, would hire bad people without much thought (worked with one).
These are two big factors why I decided to join my current team. They have strong leadership who care about the users and the mission. It’s a lie to say there no room for improvement. Still, the experience of working with people who care about the mission is refreshing. I feel like we move as a unit.
Every day I wake up with so much energy.
Good luck.
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