Hello Fictive Kin

Today I’m happy to announce that I’m leaving the freelancing life for full time work with Fictive Kin. There is a lot that has gone into this decision, but let me say that I have been looking at and thinking about full time work for most of this year. It’s been rocky to keep my pipeline full, I missed being on a team, and there are some personal reasons as well—steadiness became more important to me.

But nothing quite right had presented itself, so I kept sticking with freelancing. Then, a few months ago, Cameron approached me about working with Fictive Kin. To say I was hesitant is a bit of an understatement. I’d been to a Brooklyn Beta, but only knew of 3 of the people on the team. Add to that, it is a group of guys who’d been working together for quite some time, well, I just wasn’t sure. And it’s a group of guys.

Cameron and I made a deal: 3 months and if it went well, I’d go full-time. We are coming up on the end of the second month and it’s going well, so I’m making the transition earlier than planned.

I should also say, another woman was hired on just before I started the contract, so I’m not the only woman on the team, which is nice, but I would probably have stuck with them even if I was the only woman.

As you may be wondering what swayed me, I thought I’d give some examples, because they are what illustrate how cool this team really is.

  • It is a remote team, so all the flexibility and ability to work from my little home office still exists. I’ve grown to love that and, as an introvert, it suits me well.
  • In my first few weeks, when setting up a VM to jump in on a client project, I was asked what my comfort level with the command line was in the perfect way in the chat room. My teammate stated that it wasn’t a judgement, but he needed to know in order to know exactly how to best help me get this thing up and running. These are not dudebros in any way, shape, or form.
  • FK does a mix of product work and client work. I like the variety. I’ve missed being on a product team since Editorially shut down.
  • In my first week, I started coding a new thing, from scratch, and was told, “We want good solid HTML and accessibility.” Yeah, you read that right, the word accessibility was used and it got me excited. Since then, I’ve been given the time to research accessibility even more in relation to the project, “We all would say we care about it, but we don’t know much about it, so take your time and read as much as you need.” That’s a dream come true.
  • They want to invest in me in more than just learning about accessibility. I’m hopefully going to be mentored in other areas, such as JavaScript (my long time nemesis) and maybe even more backend things.
  • I’ve felt extremely comfortable in chat asking questions about process, tools, etc. In addition we just had a rousing discussion on how to name color variables and it was awesome. Ideas and thoughts flowed freely and together we came up with a solution that made sense to everyone. Being able to have good, open back and forth like that is great.
  • They aren’t interested in work being your whole life. They all have varied and interesting outside work interests. Which is exactly the kind of team that I want to be a part of.

Those are just some of the things that have happened over the past two months. And, to be honest, not much in my day-to-day life is changing, except that I’ll be working with the same team for much longer and getting to know them better.

And in June, it’s off to a retreat to meet them in person and, as Cameron would say, “I am excite!”