My Neighbor Bigfoot

Chapter 9: Aquentia

"Welcome to Aquentia. Where we work tirelessly to give the world better access to water. Please present your keycard to get inside."

I'm standing in the lobby of my office. It's 2 blocks away from my apartment, about a 10 minute walk or so. I was so focused on trying to get to work on time that I was pretty much in the zone from the moment I left my apartment.

Digging through my pockets, I pull out my office ID keycard and scan it on the digital lock. The lock makes a high pitched beep noise, allowing me entry into the building.

I'm relatively new at Aquentia. They posted a job listing looking for a full stack web developer to maintain their website and create various applications for them that can help their clients log and communicate with smaller businesses to make sure that water levels, chemicals, and transport are up to par.

The job isn't anything too groundbreaking or high tech, but our clients have deep pockets and I still get paid. My team has three other developers on it. Victor and Jose have been with the company since it opened back in 2000, and Sasha, who got hired with me last winter. The team I'm on is pretty chill. Sasha and I report directly to Victor. If he's not available, then we report to Jose. Victor and Jose treat us like equals, which always feels nice. Leadership at Aquentia mostly just consists of Justin, our owner, Daniel, our finance guy, and Mike, our lead business analyst. And that's pretty much it. We are a very small team.

Prior to working at Aquentia, I worked at a much larger corporation of over thousands of employees. They had me focused primarily on front end web development, which involved making web pages look pretty and functional. If I wanted to do anything else, it was looked down upon because it meant I was usurping the flow of the team. While I did enjoy that job, they didn't give me much opportunity in growth. While here at Aquentia, I get to wear many hats...figuratively.

There's up's and down's to being a smaller company. On the upside, everyone knows each other well. We have each other's backs. Competition is nonexistent. On the downside, sometimes we each juggle lots of programming languages in our heads every day. Try designing a website, making it look pretty and functional, programming the back end to make sure that everything is wired up, designing all the database integrations so that our company data is saved properly, writing manuals to make sure that clients can understand what we did, checking in all our code into a git source control system so that we have backups, and to top it off, participating in code reviews as both the presenter and the audience. It's a long day and sometimes it flies by, other times it doesn't.

Ever since the pandemic, Aquentia changed their work from home policy. We are allowed to be in the office at least 3 days a week. We can decide those three days but must update our calendars well in advance. For example, I work in the office Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. I work from home on Thursdays and Fridays. This schedule was helpful for me when I commuted to the city. Having four days in a row of not having to deal with Chicago traffic was nice. Now that I'm living here at Mind Heights, who knows? Maybe my schedule will change. But for now I'm happy with my schedule.

Once inside the heavily air conditioned lobby, I climb the main staircase and make my way into the second floor main office area. Our office has an open floor plan. Everyone can see everyone. No cubicles. No dividers. Just open tables. We all have laptops too so we could work anywhere in the office. Justin, our company owner, had the office set up in a way that any piece of furniture, be it a couch, hammock, desk, table, or chair is equipped with an outlet for charging our devices. It's super convenient for us, especially when we just feel like laying down while coding with headphones on. Justin even has a dedicated blackout area where programmers can work in the dark and not be bothered.

"Good morning Ben! Congratulations on your new place! How does it feel being here early?" I hear Jose in my company's kitchen. He's holding a coffee mug with an angry taco on it.