

Why you should work for a startup at least once - justinnoel
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/20/5-reasons-you-should-work-for-a-startup-at-least-once

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bmmayer1
One reason this woefully reductive article doesn't mention is the value of
learning about what _not_ to do when the time comes to start your own startup.
Why caring about optics instead of revenue is a bad idea. Why peddling
reputation instead of product can get you in trouble. How dangerous founder-
founder disagreements can be for morale and success. How important it is to
hire good talent.

The fact is, if you choose to start your career working for a startup, you
will likely work for a failing one. That can be a more valuable lesson than
working for a successful one.

Established companies have largely weeded out inefficiencies, problems with
product-market fit, and so on. If you work for a startup, you will learn very
quickly why you don't see the "startup culture" in mature companies--at least
not all the bells and whistles associated with a startup--because it doesn't
work. Letting employees work from anywhere when the company has no sense of
direction doesn't work. Paying for meals 3x a day for the whole staff when
there's no bottom line revenue because the CEO would rather be photographed
with a celebrity than make a sale doesn't work. Giving entry-level employees
right out of college the power and responsibility to distract the company from
its core mission doesn't work.

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ripitrust
I think it is better to work for a established company at least once

I get overwhelmed by people who never really had any respectful work
experiences and started to call themselves Director/CEO/Founder

And surely they failed

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johan_larson
The advice in this article would make a lot more sense if the title were "Why
You Should _Found_ a Startup at Least Once", because working for a startup as
an employee, even a fairly early employee, really isn't all that different
from working for a larger company. There are more changes in direction, that's
all. But you're not the one calling the shots on the changes, so whatever.

(I've worked as a junior employee for two startups, one about a year in with
~10 employees and the other about five years in with ~100 employees.)

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prostoalex
> because working for a startup as an employee, even a fairly early employee,
> really isn't all that different from working for a larger company

How so? Typically with a large company an engineer is exposed to a variety of
stakeholders, such as other engineers, designers, DBAs, product managers,
project managers, program managers, engineering managers with more or less
clearly defined roles.

At a startup a bunch of those roles are usually conflated, and without prior
experience during the growth phase it's pretty hard to make a statement like
"we need to hire a project manager, we're spending too much time on ad hoc
project management" or "it's time to add a product manager into the team,
product is becoming too big to be managed via email/chat".

Without exposure to such clarity of roles, most of the teams just go with the
flow, passively-aggressively protesting the amount of busywork that's suddenly
their responsibility.

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johan_larson
In the smaller startup I worked in, there was already a formal hierarchy. We
had a VP of Engineering, two lead engineers, and what amounted to a QA lead
and a data architect. And all engineers worked mostly in their own areas of
responsibility and expertise.

The difference was that most of these senior people did quite a bit of grunt
work that in a larger organization would have been delegated. The VP did a lot
of program manager work and the leads did a lot of design and development,
since they only had a couple of subordinates each.

But because the roles and hierarchies were established, it was usually clear
whose responsibility it was to make any particular decision. We had on paper a
formal organization suitable for a much larger team. We could have telescoped
out to three times the number of engineers without adding any more senior
people; the leads and VP would just have spent more time on leadership duties
and less on direct implementation. I suspect the presence of the formal
hierarchy was why the organization felt very mature.

Are things different in other companies of the same size?

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Tiksi
I don't agree that all of these are exclusive to startups. In my experience,
smaller, more laid back companies generally hit most if not all of these
points. The company I'm currently with certainly does, except maybe #5, and
it's been around for a couple decades.

To me this reads more along the lines of "5 reasons to work at a small
company", and #5 is the only one that's more startup-specific, though there
are companies out there that provide that too, and are not startups.

~~~
lostcolony
It's not even that. I've worked at a large company, but which ensured that
small -teams- were given responsibilities and empowered to get things done,
and these all applied. In fact, transitioning from that, to a startup, was a
rather depressing experience, all the good in a startup I had seen in an
enterprise environment, but much of the good in an enterprise environment
(such as domain experts, full time IT, HR, etc, to handle issues you don't
want to have to get sidetracked on) was lacking.

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codingdave
Just be wary when learning so much, so quickly - quantity vs. quality is a
very serious concern in this arena.

~~~
tete
I agree, but that's something you really want to learn about anyway. To quote
from a job ad I once came across: You'll "know when to hack and then to
engineer". I guess knowing this is one of the most valuable things as a
programmer, as I constantly see people (including myself) failing on that.

