

Ask HN: Graduate startup employability? - reubenyeah

I want to start a startup when I graduate from university, with a computer science degree, but I'm concerned taking a non-traditional path may make me less employable if it all goes wrong and I'm forced to take a traditional job. For example, that I'd find it harder to find a job than a new graduate or that after several years working on a product, I might have to take a graduate level job.<p>Is this the case? What would likely happen to my employability?
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nostrademons
tl;dr: Don't worry about your employability, but your startup has a bigger
chance of success if you do the big company _first_ and then the startup.

As long as you challenge yourself during the startup, it's normally not a
problem. Typically, having "Founder" on your resume attracts a lot of
attention, and then the purpose of the interviews becomes to determine whether
you actually have the skills that a founder should or whether you just sat
back and waited for the phone to ring the whole time.

A word of warning: when I got out of college, I read all the articles that
said "Go blue-chip", figured they didn't apply to me because I only ever
wanted to do startups, and so I worked at a startup for a couple years and
then founded one. And while I don't exactly regret my choice - I needed to do
it, based on my personality and my experiences in life up to that point - I
think it made things harder on me and set me back a couple years.

You get several things "for free" when you take a job at a big, successful
company. You'll pick up development practices like version control, continuous
integration, unit testing, etc. because they're just the way things are done.
You'll probably learn several technologies, though those technologies are
often more proprietary than you'd get if you struck out on your own. You'll
learn how large software systems are put together. You'll learn the sorts of
problems that companies with money face, which is absolutely essential if you
ever want to sell to said companies. And you'll hopefully build up a network
of trusted coworkers that you can tap for cofounders later.

All of that stuff, I had to teach myself when I was working at somebody else's
startup and later founding my own. I remember scouring the web for any public
information I could find about how Google put their infrastructure together,
and then when I actually got to Google, I found that the publicly available
information is only the tip of the iceberg. A/B testing wasn't widely
publicized at the time; nowadays, most people in the startup community know
about it (largely thanks to patio11), but when I was hunting around, the only
indication I had of how this was done was Max Levchin's 2-word aside in a
PayPal presentation: "Measure everything". I remember obsessing about things
like scalability and internationalization that really aren't that important
for a startup, but I vaguely knew that successful companies did them, so I had
to know how.

Most of that becomes a "well, duh" once you've spent a couple weeks working
with it in practice. At good companies, there'll be code review, so you can
just have a senior engineer tell you how it's done. And then once you do
strike out on your own, you can say "Well, I know how to do this, but it's a
gigantic timesink and not really that important to my current situation, so
I'm going to leave it until later," and focus on the parts that actually are
important, like getting product/market fit.

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zixan
You may have good chances of getting a job at a startup that is working on a
similar technology. I think it comes down to how well you are able market your
skills. Experience never dies out, but you need to be careful how you showcase
your abilities.

