Unemployed #8 - An Unexpected Offer

The CTO of my ex company at Malang invited me to discuss about technical issue for their current project. I went to their office by lunch time. Little bit nostalgic since I grew up for more than 5 years with the company. I met and talked with my ex partners who used to be worked together.

Still amazed me how one of them is actually my first hire as web developer back then when we’re still 5 peoples IT agency now becomes a project director. I remember he was a fresh graduate from college and I tested him with some basic CRUD using PHP. Couldn’t solve related with JQuery stuff but I decided to hired him.

It has good feeling knowing our work partner grows to a certain point, remembering who they were at the start. Also remember I was mentioning my high school intern then becoming a solid developer. Time flies.

System Performance Discussion

It was discussion about their web application performance and find what approach to solved it. The web application which supported client’s ERP system is actually working normally but during the peak usage, it started slow. The latency could be 5 minutes long which is unacceptable. The possibility is probably coming from slow queries due growing data in database or infra capacity issue.

Application hosted in a single server along side with the database server so we’re assumed that particular setup contributed to bottleneck during peak. Separate the database or even making it a master-replica is impossible right now because it was client’s IT department authority and the CTO won’t bother to make that requests. Just wasting a time.

We were discuss a lot regarding database issue. I suggested them to use profiling tools to track the bottleneck, otherwise it might ended up solving the wrong problem. They already had slow query and some profiling in Sentry but although it already been improved but slowness still occurred. I suggested to check database usage especially on threads and lock time. At Flip, I experienced many performance issues related with threads and lock time went high although the CPU and the memory was low. Indexing, connection pool, query strategy also been discussed.

Sudden Offer

Conversation led us to I said that I already resigned from Flip and looking for new opportunities. Suddenly he offered me a same position as my last position before I leaved the company, this time with slightly different title and scope of work. They’re facing some managerial issue in engineering department and needs me to help them sorted the problem.

This put a dilemma on me. I need a job but my priority is on IC position because I still wants to going deeper to technical expertise. I wrote some of my reasons on two separate blog posts why I choose IC as my current main goal:

Being managerial position is not my top of priority but it still valid option as career journey.

I answered that I still want to grind on technical position as IC though and I also mentioned that I already committed to a full time project with my ex coworker which could be took 3-4 months long. The other thing is I also still on hiring process on a commerce company based on Singapore which wants to expand their engineering team to Indonesia which still being my interesting choice.

The Choice

Yea, at the end I have to consider this offer so I said that I needs time to think and he was fine with it. But I offered back to him if I am available to part-time development job if needed. It could be the opportunity to “warm up” or observe the company condition before I take final decision whether want to join as managerial position or not.

So ya, I think for couple months forward I will focus on the upcoming project or waiting hiring result from Singapore company or even another interesting opportunity.

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