Starting at Metaweb
Today was my first day at my new job, and it was good. Very strange, somehow unreal. That has nothing to do with Metaweb per se, and everything to do with my long tenure at Nimblefish. Almost five years there made it seem like the canonical work environment, so that a different environment seems to lack solidity.
It’s good to be there. It’s good to change it up, but more than that, I think that Metaweb is a really good environment for me.
Apart from the simple strangeness of being somewhere different, it’s amazing how much disparity there is between the atmospheres at the two companies. Metaweb feels much quieter, much more like a research institute. Nimblefish felt much more like an agency (meaning advertising/marketing/whatever client service). This was less true but still true on the engineering side at Nimblefish.
I’m surprised by such a difference, because after all they’re both software development startups. In fact, they’re both software development startups that have been around for quite some time (Metaweb went through some other forms before becoming Metaweb). It’s not the size, either. I started at Nimblefish when it was smaller than Metaweb is now.
Both offices have an intensity to them, Nimblefish frenetic and Metaweb quiet.
Whether this is cause or symptom I don’t know, but: Metaweb appears to think in the long term to a greater degree than Nimblefish.
I look at this as a significant step, having started at the production end and moved steadily towards higher-level/longer-term projects. On the other hand, it’s not completely new, because the M.Sc. was clearly a move in that direction, years ago, and with the amount of university time I’ve put in, a more academic environment is hardly daunting. I think I could do really well with it. Just a day in, many of my good feelings about Metaweb seem well-founded.