

How to get hired at a startup - lrm242
http://workawesome.com/your-job/how-to-get-hired-at-a-startup/

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roqetman
Why does it always have to be low-paying? I was hired at a start-up and was
paid about 15% higher than any other job I'd seen with my experience and
skill-set. The increases were good and the stress wasn't unreasonable. We went
from a 5-man team to a 80-person team until the company was sold to one of the
biggest companies in the world (after about 5 years). My boss (who'd started
the start-up retired a multi-millionaire an 45). I never got rich on it, but
none of us employed there were ever paid badly, and he even made sure that we
got very good retention bonuses during the buy-out. Perhaps my experience was
unusual, but I wonder if more start-ups respected their workers enough to put
a higher value on them if their companies wouldn't do better. There were none
of us in that company that wouldn't have done anything (legal that is) that
our boss asked of us, because he treated us with respect.

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blhack
Cool article about establishing relationships, but I have a question...

I'm 22 right now and have no family; the idea of having a project that I can
completely immerse myself in (the type of things I see being linked on this
website almost constantly) is more than enticing. (edit: to clarify, there are
projects of my own that I've immersed myself in. The enticing part is being
around other people that feel the same way about it. Writing my little news
aggregator website on the weekends, or making arduino projects in my kitchen
is fun, but it would be great to be doing this [working on projects] full
time.)

To those who have had the privilege (and believe me, to the people on the
outside looking in, it is a _privilege_ ) of working in these types of
environments, what is a realistic set of required skills and how did you gain
them?

I've been coding in perl and python since I was in about 14 or so and feel
like I can accomplish pretty much any task I want in it, but I know that I'm
nowhere _near_ good enough to start applying for jobs as a programmer.

To those working in this environment: how did you finally _know_ you were good
enough, and how did you get there?

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mattm
What? You've been programming for 8 years and you think you're not good enough
to work as a programmer?

I used to think this way as well. You know what changed? I started doing
freelance work and a lot of the first jobs I did was taking over from a crappy
programmer. I fixed bugs in their code and had to work with horrible designs.

It's a great confidence boost once you start seeing real code being used and
think "I can do this much better."

~~~
blhack
Wow, thanks for the confidence boost, Matt. :).

I guess I'll have to start poking around for some freelance work, then.

~~~
mahmud
Freelancing is the bootcamp of software engineering; you will see stuff that
will shock you. I have seen everything, from a medical billing package done in
Excel, to a DSL in Ocaml for generating apache configuration files for a
hosting company.

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sachinag
tl;dr: Blog. Have a GitHub repository.

Longer: We just had a good conversation about this at work in anticipation of
new hires next year. Here's the thing: we know nothing about your day job
aside from what you tell us. But your ability to communicate in code and
English is plain to see for your public side projects. And you don't even need
to blog about code; you just need to be interesting about whatever it is
you're passionate about outside of work.

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bjelkeman-again
I am no expert in hiring folks for a startup, I find it hard. But I have
personally hired a couple of dozen people in my startup companies (there are
some overlaps between them).

The advice given is good, but if you work with software or design, make sure
your work is visible. If you only work on stuff that you can't point to which
is obviously yours, work one some open source projects. Build some cool
Android/iPhone app in your spare time. Do something that makes it obvious that
you have passion, that you like working in a small team, that you can be
flexible on work on a number of different things, as these things are often
key in a startup.

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alain94040
And of course attend a Co-Founders Wanted Meetup (<http://www.meetup.com/Co-
Founders-Wanted-Meetup/>)

I know it's self-promotion, but it's also a service for everyone who wants to
join a startup at the earliest stage possible. An experience that I highly
recommend (it will change your life).

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thinkcomp
As someone reading resumes a lot these days, I'd say there isn't a magic
formula. If you're local, you've made something cool in the past and know how
to write well (in English, not just code), you'll have a much better chance
than most of the people who apply.

~~~
mikeytown2
This is exactly the reasons why I was offered a job at a local startup. I did
a presentation at a local open source mini conference on some software I've
been working on. Since then they have been tracking my commits, comments & how
I interacted with others online. One month later I'm working for them. It's
not just code, but how well you communicate with others that matters to
startups.

