Why I left a great job to build a crappy task list
“I find it hard to believe you are leaving just to build a crappy task list” I spent nearly all of the previous decade taming the chaos of a successful online dating system, namely PlentyofFish. I joined a very small tech team in 2011 and together we learned the hard way how to turn a startup into a mature software development shop. In those early days we all wore multiple hats and spent much of our time putting out fires and averting disaster. In the years to follow we expanded (and incessantly reorganised) the team and introduced (and frequently circumvented) new process. Scaling the software was trivial, scaling the operation, not so easy. In the latter half of the decade, PlentyofFish was acquired by the Match Group and I accepted two new challenges. The first was to join the executive team with a grand new Chief Architect title, and the second was to begin work on tearing apart the monolithic system we wrestled with each day, and attempting to rebuild it as a set of event-driv