Red Alert to Red Tape

From small company chaos to corporate compliance. When firefighting servers and building Rust monsters turns into committee meetings and 8-point deployment workflows.

💀 The Glory Days

Ah, small company tech. Where everything’s a P1, nothing is documented, and you’re either a God or the guy who broke it. You write code, you fix networks, you install Netflix on the CEO’s phone. You work on what you want, and if it breaks, you fix it. The code is yours. The chaos? Also yours.

Your mornings start with PRTG status checks (please be yellow, please be yellow...) and sometimes get interrupted by someone letting a builder into the server room who "tidied up" some cables. But then, there are the days you secretly love:

A single slice of PRTG turns red. Then another. You hold your breath.

People pile into your cave-like office in a panic.

"The entire system is down!" "It's the mainframe", "Ransomware!!!".

You respond with a smile, "Funny, you never find this office when there's cake." but nobody laughs. Time to get to work.

Red Bull opens. Spotify changes from Lo-Fi to Speed EDM. The code flies, logs scroll, and the sweat is real. You yell something about 403s, hit deploy, and casually drop "All good, fixed" as you exit like a damn legend.

📆 Welcome to Corporate – [Laughs Menacingly]

A recruiter slides into your DMs with the promise of money for less chaos. You LeetCode yourself into a comfy job and land in a new world.

First surprise: you don't touch code for three weeks. Instead, you learn not to launder money, touch coworkers, or engage in modern slavery. Corporate 101.

Eventually, you set up your machine, battle the VPN, and clone your first repo. You take a task: "Support JSON in message processor." Great! Quick tweak, test, done.

PR: Rejected.

Try again with a business object. Rejected. Template pattern. REJECTED. You get emails: "This is a simple task, why is it taking so long?" Yeah, I’d love to know too.

Turns out, the solution is to convert JSON... to XML.

When a production bug finally surfaces, you’re hyped. But it’s already been triaged, documented, reviewed, and handed to you like IKEA instructions. You make the fix, but it still takes 12 weeks to go live.

Corporate isn’t slow. It’s glacial.

🤔 Identity Crisis – Am I Just a Fancy Code Janitor?

You nailed your interviews. You know algorithms, data structures, SQL. So why does every PR feel like a minefield?

"Use the Memento pattern."

"Don’t use ternary."

"Actually, use ternary."

You begin to doubt yourself. Maybe you’re not good. Maybe you’re just MacGyver with StackOverflow tabs.

Your peers seem like wizards. You're still working tickets. They've moved to specialist teams. You start antidepressants. But hey, that vesting schedule? Still lookin' good.

🕵️ Finding Your Niche – Be the SQL You Want to See in the World

Then, a message. Mike – a dev who once approved your PR without a single comment (psychopath) – asks about your LEFT JOIN.

"Why not use a subquery?"

Wait. You know this. SQL is your thing. You just never realised it.

Mike starts sending you more queries. Then others follow. You’re The SQL Guy now. Time to make use of that corporate Pluralsight access! You brush up, dive into indexing, optimization, filling in the gaps in your knowledge. You’re not a DBA, but you're close.

People start asking for your opinion. Not because you demand it, but because you're helpful. You give guidance. You link resources. You start to feel... good. Like you matter.

🚪 Opportunity Knocks – The Accidental Architect

One day, you're in a meeting you probably shouldn’t be in. A high-level architecture chat. Someone asks for your opinion on the DB plans.

You suggest caching shared datasets, pointing out the benefits grow with scale. The tech lead nods. Another dev says it could fix a bottleneck. Suddenly, your off-the-cuff idea becomes the new standard.

Now you're in meetings. Your name gets dropped. You advise on architecture. You know your limits, you redirect when needed. You're not leading, you're not managing, but you're valuable.

"Where’s Ciarán?"

"In an architecture meeting with the EMEA heads."

Nice optics.

🚀 Level Up – Die Hard with Documentation

You remember the old days. Only hours between an idea and a deployment. Fighting fires. Watching Die Hard. And now? You’re back in the game, but cleaner. Sharper.

Now when you explore new tech, there’s purpose. Rust? Not because it’s trendy, but because you want to understand memory safety. NoSQL? Let’s go. Certification in Azure or AWS? Why not both!

You join side-projects. Get involved in internal tools. You’re not stuck anymore. You’re thriving.

🌟 Conclusion – Escape the Beige, Not the Benefits

Corporate can feel bland. But the secret? It’s all there for the taking. Find your niche. Become the go-to person. Keep learning.

Don’t scream your worth. Just be quietly excellent. Eventually, they’ll come to you.

And when you finally sit in the same room as the influencers—the ones who decide direction, budget, and tech stack—you’ll realise: the real power in corporate isn’t in tickets or frameworks.

It’s in showing up with insight, humility, and usefulness. And now, you’re one of them.

Ciarán's Corporate Survival Tips

🔹 Be helpful, not loud.

🔹 Find the boring stuff you love, and master it.

🔹 Respect the process, but game it when needed.

And never, ever forget to disable the VPN before launching that Docker container. Ask me how I know.