Editor's Note: This piece was written by Kyle Kaczynski. Kyle has been on Orum's Engineering team for five years, going from Software Engineer to Manager to Principal Engineer. In this blog, Kyle shares why he joined Orum, what keeps him here, and the unique challenges working at Orum provides.

Background

I have always been motivated by curiosity and wanting to learn. I really wanted to work on a team where I could learn from others, as there were some things I’d never be able to learn alone. But I wanted it to be a small team so that I could wear different hats. I didn’t want to get stuck on an app development team and never learn any infrastructure, for example.

So naturally, I looked for jobs at small early-stage startups. Of all the companies I interviewed with, Orum stood out for a few reasons. The product felt very concrete. It solved a problem that I could viscerally understand, even though I’ve never been a sales rep.

Another thing, which seems small but I think is actually a great sniff test for a company’s culture, is that they were intent on selling me in the company from the first call. From the get-go, I felt like the relationship was a two-way street. For example, one call in the interview cycle was just me asking the CEO questions for an hour. So I just had a good vibe from the company, and I actually turned down other opportunities that paid more.

What I’ve Enjoyed as an Orum Software Engineer

Solving problems is fun, and that’s what motivates me as an engineer. I’ve gotten the opportunity to work on so many interesting challenges in my time here, so I’ll highlight just a few: a virtual Salesfloor that integrates tightly with our dialer to allow sales reps to make calls together, using packet captures to analyze and fix problems with our telephony service, using Linux perf module to create flamegraphs and analyze CPU issues for our node services, building a service to allow our users to receive callbacks from their prospects, deep dives into Postgres statistics and transaction performance.

Another highlight has been our hackathons. Anyone who has worked remotely for any length of time realizes that it has its upsides and downsides. Some in-person hacking is one of the best ways to learn and have fun together. All of our hackathons have also generated features we end up polishing and shipping to production, and some of these have been among our most impactful.

There are many companies where engineers never get a chance to implement their own ideas, but many of these hackathon features have been conceived by engineers, which I think is really cool.

Why I’m still here

The biggest thing is the people I work with. The people are what make it a great place to learn, make mistakes, and have fun. I’ve never worked on a team as friendly and capable as this one. As an engineering culture, we emphasize first principles thinking, simplicity, ownership, and judgment, all of which I really vibe with.

Our product is really fun to work on. It’s a daily-use app for most of our users, and they often spend hours in it. The small design and product details matter a lot, which makes it feel almost more like a B2C app.

As much as I love working on deeply technical problems, I also love the psychological and artistic sides of building software, and Orum gives me many opportunities to flex those. As our CEO likes to emphasize, many apps let you “see” the work being done, but ours helps you “do” the work.

That said, there are many technical challenges to master in our system/domain. Small changes in latency matter a lot. Performance matters. The usage in our system has scaled almost 100X in the years I’ve been here, and is growing larger all the time.

A small company doesn’t have scale; ergo, it doesn’t have scaling challenges. A really large company has scale, but it’s already figured out the hairy challenges. You need to experience going from small to large to tackle those challenges.