

What to look for when joining a start up? - quasimodo

i am young, no wife and kids, and am not in SF, but moving to SF in a couple months to get into the game.  i have a technical degree, have worked for start ups before, but can not program.  i have the start up affliction.<p>what types of jobs are available for a non-coding, technical person in a start up?
what do you look for when joining a start up?
what can i expect as far as avg employee number?
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geebee
One of the best thing about coding positions is that they allow you to enter a
new company and start contributing immediately in a very high value way. If
you're good at this, companies will typically heap as much responsibility on
you as you can take - largely because the only way the developer can be
effective is to gain domain knowledge. I think that one of the best ways to
get to other technical positions is to start as a developer and move into
these other roles once you start to understand the business and product

(note: I definitely don't view moving out of development as necessarily
"moving up", just "moving over" - in fact, I'd avoid companies that view the
software development role as a "bottom rung" position. These companies will
write unbelievably crappy software and almost certainly lose any meaningful
technology race).

Any reason you don't want to start with the dev position? You have a technical
degree - did you do any programming during it?

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brk
My suggestion is that you go out and figure out for yourself what types of
non-coding jobs are available, and then come back and ask for some
tips/pointers about the specific position(s) that interest you.

If you're not even sure what the typical org chart looks like, you're not in a
very strong position to convince many folks that you're a good fit for the
team, and will lend value.

Sorry if my comment seems too harsh, your post just reads to me like you don't
even have some of the basic covered yet.

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prakash
sales engineer, product management, program manager

