I’m not one to get attached, but because of slowing sales I had to watch my mentor take his leave from the company the other day…I’m also not much for calling anyone my mentor, but this is one of those times that a person brought so much to the table and was so willing to help me grow as a leader that I proudly refer to him as such.

Sorry for the generic, not enough details post but I believe I’d get in a little trouble here at work for naming the person.

I’m the Lead PHP Developer with an e-commerce company, more-or-less a retail business. We handle everything from designing and marketing your site to writing all the software that runs it and the warehouse and call center tools to support it. A pretty impressive setup I think; you sometimes lose sight of the fragile economy when producing such a product. You’re so busy watching what you have worked on - or fixed from previous dev groups - succeed that your vision becomes blurred and shortsighted.

I’m confident I could always land a job else where, and would even gladly take the backseat to be a member of the dev staff rather than one of its leaders (I miss just being able to code for hours uninterrupted). So no worries there I suppose. I don’t see this company falling, and I certainly don’t want to sound like I want to leave; all I really want is to be able to bring in new dev staff so my core team can get back to coding more cool shit.

Being a programmer is great. I have friends who are in great positions, with good companies making good dough. My only advice to those developers looking, avoid e-commerce for now.