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What Are Those Environments?

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And what are those environments?

Well, I’ve sort of developed a pattern of bouncing back-and-forth between large teams and smaller teams. Working at Apple so early in my career was good and bad — I think it gave me a realistic picture of what it was like to work in an environment that I might otherwise have held out as a perfect ideal. I would have kept thinking “Oh, if I could just work at a place like Apple, everything would be so easy — everybody would care about the things I care about, and I wouldn’t have to deal with all the nonsense I have to deal with here.” But the truth is that, although a lot of the things you imagine about a place like Apple are true, it’s still a job. It’s still a company. It’s still real people running that company. And there are all the frustrations that go along with doing a job anywhere.

Being so young and idealistic, I think that gave me a exaggerated sense that big companies weren’t for me. I ran into a lot of frustrations there, and I think I overcorrected a little bit, and figured I just couldn’t make it at a big company — I thought I needed to be working more independently, in a smaller team.

Going to work at Facebook was me sort of testing that hypothesis. And in some ways, it was borne out, but it also proved me wrong in other ways. I found it incredibly valuable to work in an environment with a lot of other designers and being able to collaborate — I think I grew a lot as a designer from that experience. But it’s just not

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