I agree, though you do need to make sure you choose a good startup. There are still startups out there that view developers as interchangeable cogs, where you can end up with the worst of all worlds (no stable paycheck, no real autonomy, uninteresting work).
One thing I did notice - it can be a little risky to spend a long time at a single startup that fails. I worked for a startup that did fail (and was a little crappy) for two years, and some people had been there for 8 or more years. When it tanked, the people who had spent their entire career since college at the startup didn't have extensive networks to tap into for the next gig.
The ideal resume probably includes a stint at a large but respected company (such as google amazon), as well as some innovative work at smaller companies and/or startups and maybe some consulting and open source work.
Of course, the "resume" is starting to get a little outdated, and a lot of people would say the best thing to do is just start your own company when you're young and can afford the risk, rather than wasting those consequence-free first 10 years on resume building.
Now that I'm the primary wage earner for a family with two kids, trust me, I know the restrictions. Interestingly, startups aren't really off limits to people like me in places like the Bay Area, because they keep your skills sharp and there is just so much hiring going on (the ol "career security" vs "job security" thing).
But what is off limits (or at least very difficult) is the ramen-level poverty you can afford when you're in your 20s and have nobody depending on you. For the first 5 years after college, my rent was $350/month near the beach in San Diego, and that was the only real expense. If I'd needed to, I could have driven that even lower. That's a serious opportunity that goes away later in life.
It does go away later in life, but I personally think 2 years at a job is not a bad idea (of course I am biased because that's what I'm doing).
You certainly want to take advantage of the low cost of 20's living. That is definitely a big asset. But if you can save up some money working first, that really extends your runway. I can have that cheap cost of living for 2 years while making a real salary, and save the difference. Now my runway is quite long.
I would love to move to Mission Beach, San Diego! Best surfing place I've ever been to [1]. However, I assume, that there is more interesting stuff going on in Silicon Valley.
Right now, my plan for the summer is to couch surf around a bit in Palo Alto first. Then, if I find nice people I will offer them a small but fair monthly payment so I can use there kitchen and bathroom and hang up my hammok in the garden.
Has anyone tried this before? Any tips? Looking for a couch surfer?
I'd like to bring down my expense to the minimum of what is sustainable, healthy and productive.
Can you use the Stanford library and Wi-Fi for free? You can at MIT but here in Munich the Wi-Fi is locked for non-students/alumni. Also, according to Phd-comics, there is a much free food there as at MIT, right?
[1] I learned to surf whites with a long board there within a few hours. The best thing is, that you can walk instead of paddle because the water is so shallow. This way, you can surf all day long, even as a rookie. Also, board + wetsuit are $10 whereas in San Francisco I couldn't find anything cheaper than $25. In San Diego they even let you bring back the stuff any time you want, with free pick up later the day.
Yeah, Mission Beach is an excellent surfing beach, good for beginners but also attracts some good surfers because it's a wide open beach break in the usually crowded SoCal surf scene. I was about a 5 minute bike ride away. The downside is that this is pretty much what I spent my time doing. Keep that in mind any time you consider taking any advice from me ;)
Unfortunately, PB and MB are no longer anywhere near as inexpensive as they were when I was living there, so it's not quite the slacker paradise it used to be.
The biggest reason I joined a startup after graduating: I got to do things.
Positions that I would be steered towards applying for in big companies would be things like "sales engineer", "support engineer", testing, verification, documentation, government policy... lots of grinding-work type of jobs. Put in your 5-8 years and/or get a Master's degree, and then we can talk about interesting work (I'm in hardware, fwiw).
At the startup, I do a bit of all that, but I also get to make things. A few months in, and I was designing boards, all the way from initial design, through schematic, layout, prototyping and testing. I write code we need when we need it. I get to help figure out what kind of specs we need to look for, and how to do it. I get to work at macro- (architecture) and micro- (components and signal levels) levels in near-parallel, on my design in progress.
I have the impression that I would be lucky to have found a job with a large company that let me run as far as I have in any one of those directions.
Human beings are naturally divided into three different groups with different likelihood of risk-taking after graduating:
1. I can risk everything to be an entrepreneur.
2. I want to be an entrepreneur, but I'm not ready or I'm unsure to take the risk.
3. I just want a stable career and work as hard as I can.
The first group will start their companies; the second group will join start-ups to learn what it takes; and the third group will ultimately join big companies and earn a stable income.
Ironically, start-ups usually want loyal people to stay (especially when their businesses are uncertain), so they aim for the third group when choosing people. Big companies want to look for extra investment opportunities, especially from their employees (because they know them more and trust them more), so they may want to hire the second group instead.
It's always hard to match the mutual interest in hiring. I don't think there're any reasons to choose what to do either. It all depends on what the other companies want and which group you fall in.
I think you are definitely onto something, although it's a temporary mindset.
I've worked at a startup for exactly the reason you describe as type #2. Consider it practice for my eventual startup (when I will join #1).
But after graduation I declined going back to the startup world and choose path #3. I did this for a very specific reason: stability while I save up some money to let me do #1.
But I disagree with your use of the phrase 'risk everything'. There is almost no way to 'risk everything' at graduation because you have nothing. I thought about going straight to #1, but it would have required living at home with my parents. Instead I moved out and got a job. If you are living at home and being supported, you are almost risking nothing. If your startup fails while your living expenses are $0, you haven't fallen at all.
The risk for someone to jump later in life is far greater. You have savings people can come after if you go bankrupt. You have bills and responsibilities. You truly are risking something. Living with someone else's support right after graduation really isn't risking anything.
1) Leverage (lack thereof): When you work for a larger player, you have established yourself as a person that the firm found acceptable. Having a big name company on your resume means that you were accepted (and lets be honest, for however bad people describe working at a large company, there are enough people who want to work there that it lends credibility). I've had countless offers just handed to me (ie joke interview, sometimes even just offers on the spot) based on pedigree.
Addressing his argument about "cashing in chips", it comes when you decide to start on your own. Just mentioning names of my former employers or work therein automatically confers a sense of legitimacy, and I've noticed that my phone calls are actually returned (try A/B testing this)
2) Cash upfront: The ideal ideal solution is to bootstrap your own startup. Unfortunately that means you need to have enough cash to bootstrap.
To defray the obvious argument, I will break down the chance as follows:
- If you are going into a startup, you are taking the chance that the startup will do sufficiently well that your equity actually has enough value to compensate for the lack of salary (and that's not necessarily within your control)
- If you are going into a company, you are taking the chance that your lifestyle won't scale to meet your income. If it does, you won't have as much flexibility when you do want to do a startup.
The salient point here is that, with a company, the result of the gamble is completely within your powers
3) Relationships: You build relationships with hundreds or thousands of coworkers, on top of the umpteen companies you interact with on a daily basis, who have other skills that may be of help later on. I still call on some former coworkers and others for help with certain things they were strong in, and vice versa. It's hard to build that rolodex at a startup.
I probably could write a point-by-point rebuttal to the original post
I still hold the best place for a person after graduation is a large but not monolith company. Avoid Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the giant companies where you're just a cog in a giant machine. Go to a company like LinkedIn/Dropbox/Square. They are growing and are hiring, they aren't startup level anymore but most likely you will many benefits of startup life (freedom to move around, less clearly defined roles) without the long hours and risk. You also have the advice and mentorship of people who have already built a successful company.
Medium sized companies of all stripes seem to be the best for someone early in their career. Small enough to notice you, but big enough to have somewhere to move you once you are noticed.
One of the biggest problems with a startup - if there are 10 engineers, where can you get promoted to?
The converse problem at a large company, there are plenty of places to get promoted to but getting recognized is often hard. I've been at my job 9 months at a big company and have had 2 different bosses already. My boss's boss oversees 100 people and barely knows me. How do you built continuity and a reputation?
Medium sized (50-250 people?) seems the best, but are sometimes hardest to find. They aren't on the S&P500, but they also aren't young enough to get press in Techcrunch.
It's growth rate that matters, not size. I interned at a medium-sized (~150 employees) consulting firm in college. It was a pretty relaxed and functional atmosphere work-wise, but it would've been a career dead-end. It was far too easy to get pigeonholed into a single contract for a couple years and not learn anything.
As Marc Andreesen wrote, you want a fast grower. If the company is growing, there will be plenty of opportunities for you to grow with it. If it isn't, you're fighting over a fixed-size pie with every other employer.
LinkedIn/Dropbox/Square are great choices today. But so are Google, FaceBook, or (if you get into one of their growth products like AWS) Amazon. I've been with Google a bit over two years and am already more senior than 60% of employees. And my job description is anything but set in stone; it seems to have changed roughly every month for the past year, and I have a lot of latitude to set it myself.
The biggest problem I see with joining a startup after graduation is more often then not, Startups don't use any kind of best practices, as they just want to Get Things Done(tm).
It's not uncommon to run into a startup that doesn't use source control, code comments, have failover servers, or even have a dev/staging environment. There are some things that are best to get a good foundation for your career, and large companies provide these in droves.
That said, there are Startups that have their act together, and after college is probably the best time to take that risk.
For what it's worth, we're helping dozens of startups hire, and I think every single one uses source control, some have failover servers, and I'd the majority have dev/staging environments (I haven't looked at their code bases, so I don't know how well documented the code is).
That said, you're right: Startups do focus more on getting things done and making sure people actually want what they're building, sometimes to the detriment of best practices.
On the other hand, startups tend to use use better (and certainly newer) tools. For instance, git vs. svn or cvs.
I think there's a lot to be said for learning best practices the hard way. In my experience at a large company, these things can become a cargo cult, especially for less experienced people.
As much as I enjoyed working at a startup and watching it go from debt to massive profit, I definitely don't think it's for everyone. Or even most people.
It takes a tremendous amount of drive and passion to deal with the negatives of working at a startup. Low pay, odd/long hours, uncertain future, non-existant code base...
For many people, taking that junior programmer job at the big corporation is much closer to their pace and risk level.
And let's not forget that if you have that much drive and passion, you might be better off being a partner at a startup, instead of being a hired hand.
I think spending some time in a big company after graduation is very worth while. Preferably not a software company. At least you'll learn the culture, the way they work, their problems. With this knowledge under your belt you will be in a better position to sell into these companies in the future.
It's more valuable to start with a huge corporation and then move to a start-up according to my personal experience.
At a large software/Internet company, you can learn best practices, how organizations work, politics, real team work and real challenges in large scale. And can make more connections that will help you for future opportunities and company name might be a great reference.
But 1-2 years later, you have to move on. Because clearly, you'll see that you've started almost nothing, never practiced some fundamental architecture patterns (since your large scale cant scale with them), shipped less code. You are living in a comfort zone that you obviously cant even take a tiny risk.
In the bay area this seems an increasingly irrelevant question (join a startup vs. big company), compared to grads deciding between joining and startup and starting a startup. I'd be curious to see more discussion on that pros/cons surrounding that decision for new grads.
Totally. This is definitely something I'm seeing on the East Coast as well (Although at a lower rate than those deciding between startup and big co.) The advice I've generally been given is to start a company as soon as possible, because nothing can prepare you for the world of being a founder. In reality, my experience working for a startup has been incredibly useful in shaping how I think about starting my own company. Looking back I feel I was relatively clueless right out of college, and working for a startup first has been an awesome choice for me. But again, I am just one data point.
Looking back from my first job after college, I feel I was relatively clueless right out of college.
But looking back from my startup after my first job, I was relatively clueless in my first job.
And looking back from my big-company job after my startup, I was relatively clueless in my startup.
I don't think this ever ends. Rather, you just become relatively less clueless compared to all the other nincompoops founding startups. Repeat often enough and maybe you can convince someone to give you lots of money.
A great point he makes is about friends and family (especially those not in silicon valley)--it's hard for them to understand why you would give up a stable job for uncertainty.
"what I’ve found in talking with older friends in other career paths is that the further you go down one path, the harder it will be to make the switch to another. The weight of momentum can be overbearing, especially when the skills accumulated in most industries outside of tech are little transferable to tech startups. "
The whole article is good but this one is the one that rings loudest to me.
The best of both worlds for me is to work for a new division or product inside a large company. This way you get some of the start up type leverage and exposure, but have some decent processes and people in place to learn from. Also you have the stability of the constant income to pay off student loan debts.
I think he misses the biggest advantage - after college most people don't have a family and kids and mortgage to worry about so they can devote a huge number of hours to their work, and the risks are much more manageable. Why waste that at a large company where the effort cannot be rewarded?
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it! There are 5-10x as many jobs in design/eng compared to biz dev/product mgmt/mktg.
In business, if you don't have tech/startup experience I would argue it's harder to make the jump to it. You limit your options pretty quick if that's what you ultimately want to do.
One thing I did notice - it can be a little risky to spend a long time at a single startup that fails. I worked for a startup that did fail (and was a little crappy) for two years, and some people had been there for 8 or more years. When it tanked, the people who had spent their entire career since college at the startup didn't have extensive networks to tap into for the next gig.
The ideal resume probably includes a stint at a large but respected company (such as google amazon), as well as some innovative work at smaller companies and/or startups and maybe some consulting and open source work.
Of course, the "resume" is starting to get a little outdated, and a lot of people would say the best thing to do is just start your own company when you're young and can afford the risk, rather than wasting those consequence-free first 10 years on resume building.
Now that I'm the primary wage earner for a family with two kids, trust me, I know the restrictions. Interestingly, startups aren't really off limits to people like me in places like the Bay Area, because they keep your skills sharp and there is just so much hiring going on (the ol "career security" vs "job security" thing).
But what is off limits (or at least very difficult) is the ramen-level poverty you can afford when you're in your 20s and have nobody depending on you. For the first 5 years after college, my rent was $350/month near the beach in San Diego, and that was the only real expense. If I'd needed to, I could have driven that even lower. That's a serious opportunity that goes away later in life.