
How leaving a corporate job to join a startup fucked me up and sorted my life - rahulchowdhury
https://byrslf.co/how-leaving-a-corporate-job-to-join-a-startup-f-ked-me-up-and-sorted-my-life-out-97f68ea14c28#.h85311vfe
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SmkyMt
The story might be more interesting to me than to more experienced hackers
here, so YMMV. For me, however, what was intriguing was how he first of all
had to learn what he _didn 't_ know - and then learn it. Looks to me as if one
of those learnings was essentially about life/work as a roller coaster - in
the sense that even though it sometimes _appears_ you're headed for a
crash/death, sometimes it's just a whiplash in one's professional "learning
curve." Rahul's sharing this on HN may be one of those whiplashes - on the
blogging slopes - where it's more important than one might guess to attend to
writing(and formatting) _style_. Until that slope is mastered, the poster
discovers that most comments about his post concern his quirks of using _bold_
ing in overabundance.

Anyway, congratulations on surviving the transition, Rahul. And here's wishing
you move through _surviving_ to _thriving_!

~~~
rahulchowdhury
Thanks for the appreciation and lesson learned, I will carefully format my
future articles. :-)

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jondubois
I sometimes try to imagine how differently things would have played out if
this whole startup culture and the massive media buzz around it had not
existed.

The oligopoly that big companies have on tech media has really only helped big
companies ultimately. In spite of what the media says, I think that the past
10 years were the worst time in history to be an indie software developer.

Indie developers got absolutely trashed by VC-funded developers.

Passion has lost, money has won.

Pretty much everyone who started a passion-project over the past 10 years and
who didn't manage to raise VC funding for it have probably been forced to give
it up and are now working for some evil mega-corporation instead.

~~~
closeparen
Or, as every millennial with a liberal arts education learned the hard way,
it's _really fucking hard_ to contribute enough value to some organization for
it to pay you a living these days, and passion rarely if ever comes within a
hundred thousand miles of cutting it.

~~~
GuiA
I don't know, I keep hearing that electricians and plumbers and similar jobs
aren't running out of work anytime soon, and that you can make a very very
good living out of these kinds of technical occupations, especially in a small
community. Maybe it's not that hard to contribute value to an organization;
just that the organizations we've built for ourselves are flawed to start
with.

Perhaps the lesson here is that a lot of what we're doing is just wankery.
Honestly, 90% of the startups you hear about don't meaningfully improve
anyone's life in a way they couldn't do without. Monthly boxes full of crap?
The new social network du jour? I've been in the tech industry for about a
decade, I'm starting to have enough money that I could live a very comfortable
life with a medium salary job, and I'm starting to think more and more about
whether it's really worth it.

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arvidkahl
It is one of the most eye-opening experiences in the career of software
development to be thrown into your first non-trivial codebase. Helpful
colleagues provided, this will get you further than any course-based training,
and much quicker. The condensed mixture of best-practice and this-had-to-work-
quickly is very instructive.

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quest88
I tried to read it but the random bolding of words was too distracting to me.

~~~
jmiserez
It's not just the formatting, the content is also rather unimpressive. How can
you not be able to find your way through a startup codebase if you came from a
corporate job, where presumably you worked on much bigger projects?

My takeaway: Not every startup founder needs to write blog articles and post
them to HN.

~~~
WhitneyLand
With that lack of respect, I doubt you've ever started a company, but if you
have, you know it's one long string of running into things you've never done
before.

Even strictly on the technical side that's usually true because there are so
many unique aspects to every code base.

I choose to disagree, and thank Rahul for sharing real life experience, and
hope that he and others continue to do so.

Anyone who has the balls to quit and start from nothing I assume has at least
one interesting thing I can learn from their journey (not to exclude women
with the colloquialism).

~~~
jmiserez
I'm sorry if my comment came across as lacking respect, I meant no disrespect
towards the author as a person. I would like to apologize if I insulted the
author in any way.

It's just that given the title (i.e. corp->startup) I expected something
different from all the other, similar articles.

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inestyne
It's a great story because it's honest. Nothing in life is free and growth is
messy and painful. You could have spent a lifetime at any steady gig and never
seen anywhere near what you have seen in the past year. The good stuff is out
here on the dangerous part of the limb. :)

~~~
rahulchowdhury
"good stuff is out here on the dangerous part" \- true words, and I believe if
you keep on learning new stuff and making yourself better its not that
dangerous anymore :-)

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sean_patel
> You see in India, a general rule of the thumb defined by the society is that
> you complete your college, get a job in some “renowned” company, and get
> your life set. Though this mentality is changing in the current generation,
> it is still prevalent in the older ones.

That's not necessarily a bad thing IMO. My father grew up in Bombay and he too
resisted this 'mentality' and pursued his arts passion - documentary
photography. Despite winning awards for his war photography (Indo-Pak War and
the Indo-China War) he was struggling to make ends meet.

Eventually he put himself through engineering college studying nights and
weekends and made it to US into a Masters Program and that's when he had me.
He used to tell me this story in my 'coming of age' years, but he never forced
me to take up Engineering or Medicine. Eventually, I ended up becoming a
Computer Science major rather than pursue my Sports career ambition (more on
that some other day). I am still thankful to my dad for instilling that thing
you call 'Indian Mentality'. I know my father would've supported me if I had
gone the Arts or Sports route, but I am so glad he showed me how the real
world is. :)

~~~
gvd
I'm glad OP took the road less traveled. I'm getting pretty tired of people
living up to their stereotypes.

~~~
sean_patel
Not disputing that. Very brave. But you never hear of the 95% + stories that
end in tragedy / poverty. You only see the Glory Stories.

~~~
inestyne
The ones that end in complete failure are the most valuable.

~~~
sean_patel
How so? Please explain.

~~~
user837387
From Wikipedia:

>>Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating
on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently
overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can
lead to false conclusions in several different ways.

