ITIDO

Are you into investments?

Strange way to start describing my journey as a software engineer at ITIDO, right? After all, ITIDO is a software development company and we do not talk about investments all the time but rather programming languages, good practices, and recent technological challenges. How investments fit in all that? Well, you are about to find out!

Picking the right opportunity

I joined the company almost 6 years ago. Believe it or not, I was the second employee back then. To come work for ITIDO was a life changing event for me. I wasn’t into software development at that time. Not fully at least. I had been learning and practicing, I had had a couple of years of experience already but as a freelancer in small projects as a part time job.
My main occupation was a business development expert at a major bank in Sofia, Bulgaria. I started working for ITIDO as a freelance frontend developer. After almost a year of good collaboration with Christo and Christian, the founders, and Ivan who is the first employee, I realized that I actually enjoy working with those guys and things were going well.
It was exactly at that time when they proposed that I go work with them full time and quit my current job. Although everything seemed great, I had to think about it. I had to weigh the pros and cons. Yeah, I enjoyed programming but at that time I was enjoying my other work, too. I also got a master’s degree in Bank Management so I thought that my career path was already decided.
However, as a person working at a bank with education in business and finance, I was well aware that in life we got just a handful of really good opportunities. Opportunities to buy the right stocks, to exit the market at the right time or to get an amazing job and to work with amazing people. I think it is quite clear what my decision was after all, right?

A mindset of continuous learning

After joining ITIDO, everything became far easier for me. I got the support of the people who I was working with. There were plenty of opportunities that I could explore and work on. The possibilities were endless and the great team that we were, we wanted to take them all. Those are very important factors which provide for relatively new software engineers to gather the experience and skills they need to evolve and to climb the seniority ladder.

The key for me to evolve was not only in the work opportunities but also in the mindset of the founders. They were willing to invest in me as much as I required to learn new skills and technologies. You might say that most companies do that. Not so many companies do it with such trust and confidence in their employees. Christo and Christian trusted me and they invested in me to embark on a number of different learning initiatives. Most of them were not cheap at all. And I don’t think that all of them were right for me, the project I was working on or in line with the company’s main tech stack. I had interests in some distant fields for which I wanted to learn about just out of curiosity. Actually, I believe reaching out to distant subjects is a professionally enriching experience. Even for that I got financial and mental support.

Growing with the company itself

In the couple of years since I joined, the team became even more amazing. People with various experiences joined us in our journey. It was at that point when the founders decided that we have to write down our internal policies and define our strategies as a company. I had the opportunity to be part of this process. We agreed on how we wanted to continue going forward. Christo and Christian’s goal was to keep the employees united and to make sure everybody feels at home like they are working with family, even when the number of employees grew over the years.

At that time, I realized that the company had already become a family. My colleagues and I were very close, we were working in an environment where everyone shares, helps, and supports each other. That was amazing! So, we sat together and wrote down the foundations of our internal policy as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston, Roger Sherman did with the “United States Declaration of Independence” back on July 4 1776. The company is still following these basic principles. ITIDO continues to provide a nice, friendly environment full of opportunities and people that support each other.

A keeper of ITIDO’s values

Then you can imagine that things just worked out very well for me in all aspects. I had the chance to work on amazing projects, I got a lot of experience in different areas and gathered plenty of skills. I climbed the ladder and became not only a software engineer but a people manager, too. People managers are the keepers of ITIDO’s core principles and values. And it didn’t feel difficult. It has been a pleasant journey. And I am sure it will continue like this in the future.

So, to go back to my question from the beginning “Are you into investments?”, aren’t we all into investments? Aren’t we investing every day in our lives? Everybody does it. We invest our time, emotions, feelings, knowledge, efforts, and everything you can think of. We just have to be careful where we invest all of that! Our job takes a great portion of it. We have to choose wisely the company, the people and the work we are doing in order to get a return on that investment and not lose it! “What about you, Lyubo?” you might ask. Well, joining ITIDO was the best investment I have made so far!