A couple of congratulations on linkedin made me notice that I now have been working for Liip since 8 years.
This is a very long time indeed. But I am not tired of working at Liip at all.
Of course, i occasionally thought whether I should move on and see other companies. But there was always some cool project to do or some interesting new challenge to tackle. When looking back at what I did in those past 8 years, it actually feels like I got a new job every couple of years.
I started during my final year at university and had to do a one-man-show to maintain and improve a small website done with an unusual RDF approach. Next up was a large custom CMS to maintain and extend. This was a joint project with another agency and for quite a while, I saw more people from that other company than from Liip. With the growth of Liip, we started to need more project managers and methodology. We turned to the still very young Scrum methodology and I went to a scrum master training. Back from the training, I started being the scrum master for a team at Liip. But I realized that what I really enjoy is actually implementing things, not just plan them. Luckily by then we had enough scrum masters that I was allowed to rejoin the development side. I worked on one of the very first Symfony 2 projects and even though 2.0 was not even alpha yet, I became really interested in this framework.
Supported by the Liip innovation budget, I also started working on Jackalope, the implementation of PHPCR, a port of the java content repository. On top of this, we started to build the Symfony Content Management Framework. These projects got me involved in active open source development. I started attending and talking at conferences. I got to know various people, both highly skilled and rather inexperienced. In all of that, I learned a tremendous amount of things that I then brought back to my regular work.
The last big change so far was switching from the Fribourg office to the Zurich office to join a different project with different people.
This flexibility is one of the things I really appreciate at Liip: It is possible to try out things but its not a one-way path. I recently read a quite polemic blog post entitled How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management. While I think that post misses the fact that some people coming from development do enjoy this change in role, it is close to my personal feelings. I love the engineering side of software development, not the project management or people management side of it.
PS: Those who follow Liip closely might notice that Liip was only founded 7 years ago. I actually started at Mediagonal, the Fribourg precursor company, before it merged with Bitflux to become Liip.