The Story

Welcome on my Blog.

As a kid I got an Atari 800 and it changed my life. You probably read those lines before and I am aware that I am just one of many, it just seems like a good start to my story though.

I wasn't that prodigy kid you may know from these stories. I barely programmed anything, and the best motivation I ever had was to charm a girl from the neighborhood. I was lazy. But I figured out that I get the complex concepts faster than most of my peers and this information somehow persisted through my punk music driven teenage years. 

I envy all of my colleagues who can say "I always knew it would be computers". I didn't. I actually wasn't interested in anything. But being lazy and forced to have a job, I decided to join PVT, which was a huge, state owned software shop. I was supposed to fill in data from paper forms, lovely job if you are a brain defective monkey. My first achievement was overriding security on my computer, so I was able to run games. As you can see already, games are practically the reason I am in the industry today. Later I found that most of the forms I am typing in the system have the same data. Like "City" was almost always "Praha". I tried to change the code (in Foxpro) to fill those automatically and partly succeeded. Partly means that some sysadmins detected a change in the code and I was fired.

We had compulsory military service in Czechia, so my next step was sort of given. I was lucky that someone from the General staff found that I can work with the computers, so I spent one more year filling forms. It sounds like another opportunity to a little hacker in me, but I actually appreciated what the unit did. We were trying to save the communist regime's records of political persecutions, so the newly born democracy can handle the compensations. 

After returning to the civil life my career took a more regular path, I was selling software, creating Flash websites, working as a sysadmin. It was a lot of fun, nothing worth your time though. Most important transition I made was taking responsibility for projects, which slowly turned the core of my job towards the project management stuff. I was really successful and I clearly understood how unfit the waterfall process made for creating railways is for creating and implementing software. I was looking for a different way to do things and found the Agile Manifesto. It was enlightening. I read all the related things and tried to change the ways we managed the projects in the company. I partly succeeded, this time it didn’t result in my sudden departure from the company and my team loved it. But changing big companies and changing the team are very different things and I decided to leave my fight with windmills.

I started my own company, completely unprepared, expecting the world to be ready to throw money in my direction, in exchange for my knowledge. Burned the savings completely in a half year. But the lessons I’ve gained from this experience changed my life. I learned to be humble, to focus on value and most importantly - to listen. I found a peaceful warrior inside. I still miss the understanding of how real life works, outside of corporate walls, in some of our candidates for managerial roles. And I always recommend what I did: start a company. 

My next was a digital agency and that was a bad idea from the beginning. I met a lot of interesting and very capable people, mostly limited by their ego. The culture was horrible and the only lesson learned from this tenure was that I don’t fit in every company. I am not saying that every agency is like this, but I heard a lot of similar stories.

So I decided to find a company that will have a good culture and make something interesting and honestly, it was really hard. In Prague now, it is relatively easy to find a great company - I can name a few from top of my head, but at the time I was looking for my next, it was horrible. Basically living on my wife's payroll I found a Socialbakers and it was a love at first sight. I hope. It was from me. I finally found a company where I felt like I am really helping people, a company that is capable of evolving. And here I am, working with great people at Socialbakers. My Socialbakers story (tease: with leaving and rejoining) is a matter for another article. It will be shorter, I promise. 

Thanks for reading.