The Job Thing, Part 2: Troops

[jducoeur]

Okay, so as of last October I'm at Troops -- let's talk about that.

Troops has been very much me going back to my roots: a scrappy little startup. Unlike most such, it's been pretty well-run -- cautious without being timid -- with the result that when I got there the company was six years old and still only 30 employees. That's refreshingly sensible: too many startups fall into the Cult of Blitzscale, believing that the only way to succeed is to GrowGrowGrow as fast as possible, to weave illusions in front of investors, regardless of whether that makes any business sense. Troops thinks a lot more like I do -- you're trying to build a viable company, and that takes a lot of time and experimentation.

There's a lot to like about Troops: they started talking about the company's values from the first interview, and unlike many places, they tend to walk the walk. For example, Transparency is a very big deal, and I've been impressed on that front. Every Monday we have an all-hands that goes into serious detail for every department: not just what Product and Engineering are working on, but line-by-line breakdowns of how things are going in Sales, details about what Marketing is working on, what's going well (or not as well) in Customer Success, and so on. The result is that I've actually gotten to not only know everybody in the company, but also what they are doing, in a way that I don't think has been true of any employer since Buzzpad. (Which was only eight of us, so scarcely counts.)

The product is mundane but terribly useful: we provide analysis and notification services from "systems of record" (eg, Salesforce) to "systems of communication" (eg, Slack), so that you can get notified when something interesting happens, or just get updates on a regular schedule. The company started out just doing Salesforce-to-Slack, back when that was a new and somewhat heretical idea, but pivoted a couple of years ago to be more generalized. It's still pretty focused on customer-relationship applications in practice, but our tech is pretty general-purpose by now.

The stack is very much in my sweet spot: a pure-FP Scala backend, coupled with a TypeScript frontend. Aside from using ZIO instead of my preferred cats-effect, it's largely the same stack that I was pushing at Rally, so the coding is fun.

The company is small enough to not be hidebound -- we have a level of continuous integration and release that we were dreaming of at Rally, not too far from one release per engineer per day on average. We count on the engineers to take strong ownership of the application, working together and with Product to figure out how to make things better.

My timing could scarcely have been better. The company was just hitting market-fit in a serious way when I joined, with sales starting to really take off and the user base growing in serious ways. That's an exciting time to be at a firm, when you can look at it and say with some confidence that things are getting steadily better.

Mind, it can be a somewhat hectic environment: being a tiny group (just ten engineers) supporting a growing customer list and a hugely ambitious technical vision, we've had to work hard and stay focused. But the company has a generally good attitude, and doesn't push burnout-level stress -- folks understand that building a company is a marathon rather than a sprint, and are quite supportive of maintaining a decent work/life balance.

So it's been a good time, these past six months or so. Things got more interesting last week, but that'll be the topic of the last entry in this trilogy...