> and that blanket prohibition made me miss out on being employee #2 at DropBox (along with 10 or so other startups that went nowhere).
That seems to have worked out ok, though, if you only had a 1/11ish chance of jumping on a startup being the right decision at that time, anyway. It doesn't dissuade me from the "options are most likely worthless, and akin to a lottery" viewpoint.
However...
> I think that your goal, when you're a 20-something with few connections and little savings, should be to gain experience as quickly as possible.
This is good advice, and I'm no longer in the 20-something bucket myself, but the trap I see friends among that group falling into these days is jumping from the "akin to a lottery" thing into a "I'm going to gather as many tickets as possible" job-hop-every-year strategy.
The downside is they aren't gaining much useful experience, and their "connections" are mainly just to an insular group of VC-funded founders and other inexperienced engineers. Being the most experienced engineer (with 2 years of experience before joining) at a company of 20 people with all the other engineers being straight out of school isn't particularly useful experience. You can make it work, but it's much harder - nobody to learn from, no mentor, etc. And if the projects you're working on are just basic social or game apps over and over, your experience isn't very deep.
So if that tight-knit pool dries up... what are you bringing to the table when you're looking for a job at somewhere a bit larger and more stable?
That seems to have worked out ok, though, if you only had a 1/11ish chance of jumping on a startup being the right decision at that time, anyway. It doesn't dissuade me from the "options are most likely worthless, and akin to a lottery" viewpoint.
However...
> I think that your goal, when you're a 20-something with few connections and little savings, should be to gain experience as quickly as possible.
This is good advice, and I'm no longer in the 20-something bucket myself, but the trap I see friends among that group falling into these days is jumping from the "akin to a lottery" thing into a "I'm going to gather as many tickets as possible" job-hop-every-year strategy.
The downside is they aren't gaining much useful experience, and their "connections" are mainly just to an insular group of VC-funded founders and other inexperienced engineers. Being the most experienced engineer (with 2 years of experience before joining) at a company of 20 people with all the other engineers being straight out of school isn't particularly useful experience. You can make it work, but it's much harder - nobody to learn from, no mentor, etc. And if the projects you're working on are just basic social or game apps over and over, your experience isn't very deep.
So if that tight-knit pool dries up... what are you bringing to the table when you're looking for a job at somewhere a bit larger and more stable?