Propeople experience

Around 2 weeks ago I left Propeople and, of course, I want to share bits of experience I got from the company, community, projects we've worked on, and so on.

When I got employed at Propeople here in Moldova, it was a smallish department made-up from 10 people or so. I've worked at the company for around 2 years (almost) and I must say, we progressed a lot. Now-days we're around 40 employees here and still hiring. 

I learned Drupal as a freelancer and Drupal community helped me a lot in my studies (especially IRC channel). But I had no projects where I would need to do Migration or even use Panels (for instance). So as a freelancer you have the freedom to do anything, but the projects will stay pretty much "simple". The other disadvantage of freelancing is that you don't have anyone around you to share your experience with, and you can't instantly get some help as well.

So I've decided to try something different and that was the point when I joined Propeople around 2 years ago. All-in-all it was a very useful and nice experience. Workmates are fantastic - basically the employees of the company are its core. I loved my colleagues and the atmosphere we had in our office. Of course I loved big and challenging projects as well, as they were the reason I had to learn something new and get better at things that I already knew.

In a couple of months, I went to work on-site in USA, California, Stanford GSB - which resulted in a new awesome life-experience. Thanks to our company I had a chance to visit BADCamp that year and see lots of Drupal Rockstars. In a couple of months later, I went again to the US to work on-site at the same project. Drupal meet-ups, Stanford Drupalcamp, and Meetup.com meetups were just some interesting events that I've visited.

Not sure if you know, but Propeople has offices in 7 countries and around 180 employees. So I've met my colleagues from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Austria & Denmark (and US of course), different cultures, different mindsets and yet all of them are awesome people, part of the same company, some of us share some projects between us - it's just like a big, geeky family.

If you're a freelancer, or a student, or maybe you're working at some corporate company with a strict waterfall structure, or you're not really a geek but you like the concept of open-source and the Drupal project - I would strongly recommend you to try-out Propeople. You will get lots of help there, you will learn a lot, work on difficult and important projects and you will always have someone to back you up (some Senior Developer or experienced Project Manager).

Propeople is growing big and probably it's the perfect timing for you to get there.

More than that, here in Moldova if you're a student, Propeople is having internship programs where you can learn Drupal from scratch.

I left Propeople simply because I want to do something different (and no conspiracy theories, please).