The shift
There is a version of job hunting that most people know well. You update your CV, you apply everywhere that looks remotely relevant, and you spend most of your energy trying to convince companies to pick you. Your focus is entirely outward. You are selling.
After a decade in design and development, something shifted for me. I still care about the work itself, and I still want to land in the right role. But the way I approach the search has changed in a way I did not fully expect. I am no longer just asking whether a company will hire me. I am asking whether I actually want to work there.
That question sounds simple. It is not.
How I view companies now
I have been in this industry long enough to know that a job title tells you almost nothing about what a role will actually feel like. The company you join shapes your thinking, your pace, the problems you get handed, and the people you end up spending most of your waking hours with. It shapes the direction of your career in ways that a salary figure never will. So when I look at a company now, I am not just scanning the job description. I am reading the company itself.
A lot of that reading starts with how they present themselves publicly. Not from a technical lens but from a human one. What kind of client are they speaking to? What does the energy of the brand feel like? Is there warmth in it, or is everything deliberately clinical? Those signals add up quickly and, more often than not, they tell you exactly what kind of room you will be walking into on your first day.
I was looking at two companies recently that sit on completely different ends of this spectrum.
The company that targets founders
The first targets founders. Their whole positioning is built around people who are building something, who are moving fast, who need financial and operational support that keeps pace with their growth. The moment you land on their site, that energy is clear. The colours are bold and deliberate, warm without being casual, confident without being cold. The copy talks to you like a peer. There is a sense that the people behind the brand actually enjoy what they do and enjoy the clients they serve. When I think about the type of person who works there, I imagine someone who is curious, collaborative, and comfortable with a bit of uncertainty because founders bring a lot of it.
What that also means is that the clients themselves become part of your education. Founders are building things that do not exist yet. They are testing ideas, pivoting when something is not working, and looking for the approach that actually moves the needle. Working in that environment means you are constantly adapting alongside them. You are exposed to new industries, new problems, new ways of thinking about what a solution should look like. Every engagement brings a different perspective into the room and some of those perspectives will genuinely change how you see your own work. The direction of a career shaped by that kind of exposure is one that keeps expanding outward, not just deepening in one narrow lane.
The company that plays it safe
The second is a corporate group spanning finance, insurance, and professional services. Their clients are institutions, not individuals with a vision. The site reflects that. Darker, more conservative colours. Precise, structured language. Everything is measured and formal, which makes complete sense for the environment they operate in. The culture that comes through is one of process, compliance, and consistency. That is exactly what their market demands and there is nothing wrong with it. But it is a very different day-to-day from the first company.
The client base is also largely consistent across the board. The problems are familiar, the delivery formats are established, and the expectations are well defined. For someone at a certain stage of their career that kind of stability is genuinely valuable. But for where I am right now, the risk is different. The risk is not instability. The risk is spending years getting very good at a narrow set of things inside a predictable environment, and looking up one day to find that the wider world has moved on without you. When the clients you serve all operate inside the same box, the box becomes the limit of what you learn.
I have been in both rooms
I have lived on both sides of this. Over ten years I have worked in environments where every week brought something genuinely new, where a client would walk in with a problem nobody had a template for and you had to think your way through it. That kind of work is demanding but it does something to you over time. It keeps you sharp. It makes you adaptable. You develop a taste for figuring things out rather than just executing what has already been figured out.
I have also spent time in environments where the opposite was true. Predictable briefs, familiar deliverables, a process that had been refined for efficiency rather than growth. There is nothing dishonest about that kind of work. It gets things done and it gets them done reliably. But after a while you start to feel the ceiling. You stop being challenged by the problems. You get good at something but that something stops growing. And the version of yourself that walks out of that job after three years is not that different from the version that walked in.
That contrast is not just about job satisfaction. It is about who you become in the role. The clients you are exposed to, the conversations you are pulled into, the problems you are trusted to solve, all of it leaves a mark on how you think. Working alongside founders and innovators changes your perspective in ways that working inside a fixed corporate structure simply cannot. Their urgency becomes your urgency. Their willingness to try something new and discard it when it is not working becomes part of how you approach your own craft. You absorb it without realising, and eventually it becomes the standard you hold yourself to.
Where that leaves me
A decade in this field has given me a clear enough picture of what that looks like when it is present and what it costs when it is not. I know which direction I want my career to keep moving in. And for the first time, I am in a position to choose accordingly.