Work Hard and Don't Burn Bridges • Vance Lucas : Vance Lucas
On a cold December day in 2014 I got a random call from a contact that had lay dormant in my phone for 12 years. It was Ryan, the owner of Element Fusion – a company that I had worked for in the summers of 2004 and 2005 while I was in college. NetSuite had recently acquired Element Fusion (EF) and they were looking to hire JavaScript developers to help build a custom Content Management System into NetSuite’s Ecommerce platform. It was good timing for me. It was big and ambitious – full of challenges and unknowns. We talked for a bit on the phone about the opportunity and what was needed. I went in for an interview, and took the job. Things went well – really well. After about a year of hard work leading and implementing the new CMS architecture, I was promoted to Principal Software Engineer and JavaScript Team Lead. I stayed there almost 4 more years before moving on – completing all the code changes I wanted to make, coordinating with the Uruguay office (and their half of our product), building the product and leading the team.
The somewhat insignificant 6 months of work over 2 summers during an internship lead to an opportunity that transformed my career. I had always written a lot of JavaScript, but never full-time before NetSuite, and never exclusively on the front-end – I had always been a full-stack developer in every previous job, and even in the freelance consulting I did as well. My time at NetSuite enabled me to re-shape my career into an expert front-end/React developer and a effective team leader that was able to get some pretty hard things done and change the trajectory of the product we were building to a much better one than the course it was on before I got there.
