Where My Developer Career Started: Almost Six Years at Concentrix

This month I’m leaving Concentrix. I joined in December 2015, so it’s been five years and nine months, and it’s where my career as a developer really started. It was the first time other people depended on code I wrote to get through their workday. Before I go, I want to write down what those years looked like, while I still remember how they felt.

My first team worked on SugarCRM for IMVU’s support. IMVU is a social game where people hang out as 3D avatars, and a community that big sends in a lot of support cases. The agents handled those cases inside SugarCRM, and our job was to keep it running and keep shaping it around how they actually worked: new fields, new views, new rules, and fixing whatever broke after an upgrade.

Most of what I learned that first year came from reading code I didn’t write. SugarCRM has its own way of doing almost everything, and you don’t get to argue with it. You learn its rules, you work inside them, and you find out quickly what happens when you don’t. I also learned that support agents notice everything. When you’re working through a queue of tickets all day, one extra click on every case adds up, and they will tell you about it.

Then I moved to the employee management and payroll team, and the stakes went up. I was part of the team that built the system handling records and pay for around 90,000 employees. A bug in a CRM annoys people. A bug in payroll means someone gets paid wrong. And Philippine payroll has a lot going on: night differential, overtime, holiday pay, leaves, and all the rules that look simple until you have to write them in code.

That team taught me to slow down. You check your numbers, then you check them again with someone who knows payroll better than you. You write things down. You learn to respect boring code, the kind that quietly computes the right amount every cutoff. Nobody thanks you when payroll goes out on time and correct, and honestly, that’s how you know you did your job.

My last move was to the team that builds and maintains the applications our client accounts use on the call center floor. They’re the tools agents and team leads have open during their shifts, each one built around a client’s process. I ended up owning eight of them, from keeping them alive to building whatever they needed next. Eight projects means eight sets of quirks to keep in your head.

Across those years I worked in more of the stack than I ever planned to. PHP with Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter. The MEAN stack: MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node. Front ends in Ext JS and Backbone.js. SugarCRM and SuiteCRM on the CRM side. MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MSSQL, depending on who built an app first. None of it was glamorous, but real people used all of it every single day.

Owning something is different from working on it. When one of my apps acted up in the middle of a shift, I was the one who got the message, and there was a floor full of people waiting on the fix. So I kept notes for my future self, because three months later I wouldn’t remember why one report worked the way it did. I also stopped guessing from my desk what slowed people down. I just went and asked them.

In August 2017, while still at Concentrix, I started freelancing on the side. I’d love to say it was only about learning, and that was a big part of it. But I’ll be honest: it was also about money. We were planning a wedding, and we wanted a house of our own. My day job alone would have gotten us there, just slowly.

So my evenings and weekends started belonging to clients. Most of them were in the US, which meant a lot of our conversations happened while one of us was asleep. I got good at writing updates that didn’t need a reply. Weeknights were for small fixes and reviews. Weekends were for the bigger pieces that needed a few hours of quiet.

The first gig was a year with Codal, doing backend work on medical applications. Healthcare was a new world for me. There are strict rules about how patient data is stored and who gets to see it, and you learn to take them seriously from day one. The work also had me updating older React components that called the APIs we built, so I got to work on both ends.

Then came about five months with Real Estate IQ, building custom WordPress themes and plugins. WordPress gets a lot of jokes from developers, but making a site fast, secure, and easy for non-technical people to update is real work. That job taught me more about performance and SEO than I expected.

Simple Salt took most of 2019. I built a referral and viral marketing app where businesses could run campaigns and reward people for sharing, with an admin dashboard behind it for users, campaigns, rewards, analytics, and catching fraud. It was the first side project that felt like a real product.

In 2020 it was CoCreators Group: an online enrollment system built on SuiteCRM, cron jobs that pulled data in from tadpoles.com, and an admin dashboard for student profiles, leads, enrollment, and attendance. Most of it was PHP, CodeIgniter, and PostgreSQL, which by then felt like home.

I won’t pretend the pace was free. Some weeks I was tired in a way coffee didn’t fix, and there were Saturdays when I didn’t want to open the laptop at all. I said no to more hangouts than I’d like to admit. What kept it going was having a reason I could actually see, and a partner who knew exactly why my laptop was open on a weekend. I also learned, slowly, that rest is part of the job. Tired developers write bugs, and I didn’t want to ship those to a client or to a call center floor.

And it paid off. We got married, and we bought our house. I like to think a few of those weekends are built into its walls.

The day job and the side work fed each other the whole time. Concentrix taught me how to own things and how to be careful when real money and real people are involved. Freelancing kept throwing new stacks and new kinds of clients at me, and a lot of what I picked up there came back with me to the office on Monday.

Now I’m going fully remote, and I’m leaving with a lot of gratitude. Concentrix is where I learned to be a developer, from the teams I worked with and from the people on the floor who used what we built. If you’re just starting out, especially somewhere that isn’t a tech company, don’t look down on the unglamorous work. Support tools, payroll, internal apps. Nobody writes blog posts about them, which is exactly why I wanted to write this one.