Button colors and Black Friday
When I worked in-house next to an agency, the projects went to the agency and the questions came to me.
A former coworker messaged me last week to ask whether they should take an in-house job. I told them it depends on where the interesting work goes. That’s true and not much use to anybody, so this is the longer answer.
I’d been at the same agency for almost five years when I gave notice, partly because I was curious what in-house work was like. That was June 2021. I spent seven months finding out and went back to agency work at the start of last year. I said at the time that I’d write about it again in a year or so (it’s taken closer to two).
The agency next door
The company I went to still used an agency for a lot of its development, with me as the in-house developer working alongside it. The new features and anything involving an integration went to the agency. I got button colors, a banner for the weekend sale, a typo in the footer, etc.
To be fair, that’s a reasonable way to split the work. The agency had a team and years in the codebase, while I was new. I’d probably have split it the same way.
But the job I’d gone in-house to try, knowing one site inside and out, belonged to the agency. I knew where the button colors were, at least.
Now I’d probably ask about that split before anything about the stack. Is there an agency? If so, what does it do? And what would I do?
Will it happen again on Monday?
Then Black Friday came around and the site went down for about half a day.
The cause was in the server infrastructure, which I didn’t run and couldn’t see into. That mattered less to the people asking than I’d have guessed. Then again, I’m not sure it should have mattered more. From inside the company there was one website and I was the person whose whole job was that website.
So the questions came to me. When will it be back? What happened? Could we have seen it coming? Will it happen again on Monday?
The honest answer was usually some version of “I don’t know yet.” I said that a lot, as carefully as I could, to people who needed a better answer and weren’t wrong to want one.
At the agency I’d never had to answer those myself. When a client’s site goes down, the account manager takes the call and the developers get a ticket. In-house there’s no account manager, so the questions go to whoever’s closest to the website (me).
I still think about the marketing team more than any of it. They’d spent weeks on the emails and banners and sale prices for the biggest day of their year. Most of that work came to nothing through no fault of their own.
That’s the half of in-house work I hadn’t pictured. I’d been curious about knowing one site inside and out. I hadn’t thought about being the face of it for everybody in the company, including for the parts I’d never touched.
Who you know
I didn’t find the next job on a job board. The senior front end developer I’d learned the most from had left the old agency to run the development team at another one and was hiring. They asked if I’d interview. I’ve been there since the start of last year.
In 2021 I wrote that your capacity to refuse comes from savings, a second option and people who know your work well enough to hire you. I listed that one last. I think I’d put it first now because (1) it’s how I got my current job and (2) it’s far easier to keep up when you don’t need it than to build when you do.
Ask who gets the projects
If I were you, I’d find out where the interesting work goes before taking the job. If there’s an agency, I’d ask what it does and what you’d do. A setup where the agency builds and you maintain can be a perfectly good job, just a different one from the one in the listing.
And if you do go, know going in that you’ll be the person everybody asks about the website (all of it, including the parts that belong to somebody else). I don’t think that’s a reason not to go. I’d just have liked to know it beforehand.
They’re taking it, by the way. The agency they’ll be working next to builds the checkout and they’ll have everything else. That sounds like a better split than mine was, and I hope it is.