Leaving Inspectorio

A reflection on my journey with Inspectorio

It’s been over two years since I joined Inspectorio. I started as an individual contributor, but I was thrust into a leadership role right after my first month. It has been an interesting journey, and, much like my time with XSplit, I would attribute a great deal of my professional growth to this experience.

Over a month ago, I handed in my resignation letter, and I’m rendering my last seven days. I’ll soon be joining a local bank, so this is the perfect time to reflect on my journey with Inspectorio. My time here has been marked by unique challenges brought on by the macroeconomic situation that changed drastically on the course of a few months, which greatly shaped my perspective on various issues. I held a leadership position during a period when companies were hiring engineers aggressively and experienced the fallout that followed.

Growth

At my previous employer, Dealtale, I built some of the most valuable networks I ever had, establishing a reliable reputation with senior leadership who have close ties with well-funded VCs. In contrast, at Inspectorio, the most remarkable value I gained was from managing a team and greatly improving my soft skills. This experience made me yearn for a position where I could have a broader impact, beyond what I could achieve as an individual contributor.

I blogged one of such “learnings” a while back, an experience I gained after numerous presentations with top leadership (our CEO and co-founder in this case). I hope to gather my thoughts and document more of them here soon.

On the technical side though, I definitely learned less than what I gained at my short stint at Dealtale, as I joined a product development team working on a five year old project at the time I joined the company, in contrast to Dealtale where I was one of the few pioneer engineers. This fact, however, did give me the opportunities to apply some ideas in practice. One such example would be our push to migrate our codebase from JavaScript to Typescript, which put the ideas that I formed after reading A Philosophy of Software Design into test.

Our shift-left endeavor in Inspectorio was an interesting initiative as I also experienced such initiatives in Dealtale, which ended badly as the quality of our product suffered. One key difference in Inspectorio, which made it interesting, is that we did not remove the QA out of the equation. We just moved them “before” the development starts, working in tandem with our product owners in crafting the Acceptance Test cases as a supplement to our Acceptance Criteria. I think this is another topic worth expounding in a separate post, but all-in-all, the idea was to get the QA’s perspective on how they would test the feature even before the development starts.

Why am I leaving

There were some events that wasn’t unique to Inspectorio (The end of the ZIRP era) which impacted my confidence on the outlook of the organization as a whole. This might be a short-sighted one though, as towards the end of 2024, I see that the organization was able to steer itself to calmer waters, where the future looks very promising, with Kamal joining as a CTPO alongside with his more pragmatic approach. However, I cannot deny the fact that my anxiety level was high during the whole downturn last year and it peaked at the start of this year. As a father of two small girls, I suddenly realized that my priorities shifted as I yearned for stability, at least until my kids graduate.

So, I entertained the head hunters that made their way to my LinkedIn inbox during the first half of 2024, with one that eventually offered me an opportunity that I felt I would regret if I did not grab it. I would soon join Security Bank Corporation as a Senior Assistant Vice President and Principal Engineer, where I would depart from direct people management, and focus more on the technical side of the organization.