3 Years At MongoDB

In the years since leaving college I’ve jumped through a number of jobs, sometimes at my own motivation, sometimes not. For example, who could possibly have known that LimeWire would get sued into oblivion? (Everyone, that’s who. Everyone.)

That means, having recently crossed my 3-year anniversary at MongoDB, my current position is now the longest I’ve stayed in one place. So as a trip down memory lane I trawled through some old photos and was lucky enough to find this:

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With a date stamp of November 10th, 2011, this photo of our weekly engineering meeting from almost exactly three years shows just how far we’ve come. In this old office, it wasn’t uncommon to run out of space for phone calls and to end up with three people on the fire escape at any given time: someone making a sales call next to someone doing an interview next to someone taking a smoke break.

And if you can forgive the terrible panorama, one thing shown by this photo that I’m most proud of is how well we’ve done in retaining employees. Out of sixteen people in the photo, we’ve still got ten working here three years later. Compared to the average tenure I’ve seen in other companies, I think that means we’re doing something very right around here.