

Things you need to know before working at a start-up - esharef
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/20/5-things-you-need-to-know-before-working-at-a-startup/

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jasonkester
This is a good example of why you should always send your content over the
wire.

As a dozen people have noticed, this article is unreadable. But it doesn't
have to be. The piece coming from venturebeat.com is transferring fine. But
the CDN hosting their css and jQuery is down, and they've built their site
using that baffling pattern of loading nothing but an empty shell, then
populating it later.

So we get the name of their "chief reliability officer" and a bunch of links
to other articles that we won't be able to read, but no article.

Now suppose they had built their site like we used to build sites, and
actually sent the 760 bytes of content that make up the text of the article as
part of that shell. I know, I know. We'd have to download that _entire_ 3kb
html page every single pageload (before then downloading four megabytes of
sidebar nonesense). And think of the extra engineering time they'd need to
spend so that they could not only send that article at load time, but also use
their (presumably) fancy article-changing mechanism that we were so near to
seeing today.

But at least then people would be able to read things on their website.

We'd have one comment at the bottom asking if anybody else had seen the borked
CSS. But that would have been drowned out by people who were happy enough to
read the text in Times Roman actually discussing its content.

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mappum
I'm working at a startup right now, and I think this is pretty accurate.

The freedom is nice (no hours, nobody telling exactly what to do every day).
However, I will NEVER be able to have the passion for the product as I would
if it was my own startup, this is just work to me.

~~~
textminer
The rewards game for first employees is perplexing. You have an order of
magnitude less incentive than the founders who birthed the thing. Arguably,
that's taken care of: you're on a real salary while they're making peanuts.
You're also capable of moving to a new job tomorrow, while this is the
founders' life.

But when an acquihire with retention bonus is almost equivalent in net payout
to you as a successful acquisition or IPO might be, it is difficult to be
super-invested instead of merely daydreaming and working toward starting your
own company. At best you can hope to be flush from a quick and healthy payout,
which might pay off student loans or capitalize the first steps of your own
risky venture.

Is the game of Silicon Valley just to structurally encourage everyone to
eventually devote their time to fully creating their own pet technologies and
products? Who works for anyone else except for fools and transients?

(I'm currently a fool or transient.)

~~~
optimusclimb
I haven't had a chance to read the article yet, as venturebeat seems to be
down, however to your last point -

I feel like to some extent, yes - and I sort of doubt it's a good thing. One
of the founders where I work actually asked me why I hadn't tried to start my
own company. In truth, there's a myriad of reasons. What stuck in my head
though, is that - if anyone with a modicum of talent is viewed as slacking for
not starting their own thing, then who are we left with to actually work for
and help develop the companies that DO get started?

Given this current culture (at least, how I perceive it) - I feel as if it's
leading to many companies that, though they may end up getting bought and
putting a nice chunk of change in its founders' and investors' pockets,
they're really not making important break throughs, and will eventually be
forgotten. Whereas, if getting a company off the ground were substantially
harder, the ones that did make it off the ground floor would need more people,
be working on bigger problems, and ultimately more progress would be made.

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wiradikusuma
This is weird, I can't see the article, refreshed many times.
<http://imgur.com/n7rlMvc>

Chrome on Windows 7.

~~~
mappum
Same here, I even switched to a Macbook with the same results.

Mobile seems to be fine, though.

~~~
tommaxwell
Couldn't get it to render in any Ubuntu browsers I tried.

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codeonfire
Great article. This explains succinctly why you never should work at a start-
up. Just don't. Let the 'founders' do the work, that's why they're founders.

~~~
mappum
I think they mean startups that are in a later stage than what you are
thinking (funded and growing). It's not like the founders are going to be the
only employees for the life of the company.

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jupake
Cant see anything :-(

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nolite
Can't read on iPad

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ahxn
I can't read this article.

