The actual day to day work though, was pretty routine. I was mostly fixing bugs and rebuilding parts of features that had to ship in yearly timelines. Every project I worked on that wasn't canceled was spent in refactor mode for a good portion of the year. Let's rewrite this for 64-bit for example, or let's rework this for this new framework. The actual customer should never notice a change in the product, and usually the visual changes are subtle if any. Lucky few got to work on the shiny demo-able new features and even fewer lucky folks got to lead teams from their new products.
Lastly, most of the tooling that I got really good at and used to great advantage was proprietary except for Xcode and Instruments. :(
So leaving to go to a startup I literally had to learn a whole new set of tools and APIs. Then again, I learned so much more about how to build a product from the ground up at a small 11 person startup than I ever did at Apple.
At a company like Apple, I gained skills adding a feature to an existing product. At a startup, I gained skills building a product from nothing but an idea.
Being able to take an idea and turn it in to a product is a brilliant skill that startups absolutely need, but equally, once the product is out there being used, you need the other skill set to maintain the product and add new things without annoying the users. Having people around who can do both is exceptionally useful because it means the team continues to do productive work for much longer without having to bring new people in.
To that end, I always recommend people get at least a few years experience at an established company before joining a startup.
But guess who gets the glory? :(
That being said the #7 point of "The world needs fixing, not disrupting" seems to lose sight of what disruption really is and conflates it with simply taking advantage of people.
Disruption fixes things. In fact I think one could easily argue that disruption fixes things far more effectively than anything else. Telling someone to go find "real problems to solve" is simply useless. I don't understand the point of trying to make the "service economy" a place "Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life".
Sure there are issues in this area with SOME start-ups but going right into calling it a race issue without providing anything useful just screams useless rant.
Just drop #7, rename to 7 reasons and update the HN title to make it more obvious of the target demographic. Just my thoughts.
Disruption in the US health care system would be great; until that happens, my excitement over having cat litter delivered to my door in an hour or less will, sadly, be dampened by the fact that some Americans are literally doing their own minor surgeries over a bathroom sink right now. Wart removal is a really common one, presumably because it routinely bills out $250-$350 per visit in larger practices, and the typical visit count is high.
The real problem are laws that try to offload welfare to employers when it should be paid through a govt. tax system.
You have to take whatever IC income you get and divide it by 1.4 to get the equivalent pay as an employee after benefits.
How is it like for people with no savings on medicaid or mediCAL?
I would guess immigration isn't that hard for a highly skilled computer scientist.
My meds cost 100€ per day (MS) and I have to worry about my disease but not about paying for treatment.
I'm confused. Is this a hypothetical where the employee doesn't have short- and long-term disability insurance?
The practical answer is to have insurance to cover risks.
I liked his other reasons, though.
Have to give credit, though; he saved it for the end. If that's #1, I don't bother reading the rest and I would guess many others wouldn't either. So that's clever at least.
>4. You need to be going wider than deep right now.
The author's argument is roughly that working a at a startup is limiting because you will work only a single problem because a startup is focused on solving only a single problem.
I disagree.
1. A company that seeks to solve a single problem is a company that has focus; I would argue that many startups lack focus. Many startups do not know the specific problem that they are solving nor for whom. Much time is spent on product/market fit. So, I disagree with the premise that startups are solving for a single problem. Successful ones do, yes, and that brings me to (2).
2. The idea that you will work more broadly at a successful, time-tested company than you would at a startup does not seem accurate. Startups are known for allowing people to wear many hats for a reason (because they often require people to wear many hats). For individual contributors, roles at a Fortune 50 company will be far more specialized – and opportunities to join projects even slightly outside your domain of expertise will be far less prevalent.
This is why I think the argument is really about in-house vs. agency work. Agency work will teach you their methods and provide you with exposure to a range of clients and industries, sure.
3. The premise that because your startup is focused on solving a single problem, you will not get to work on a variety of problems or get to 'try different things' makes me scratch my head... If only solving a problem were that simple, that efficient!
Programing and design are both hard in their own way, but fundamentally they are a skill you can hone. Once you have mastered those skills the rest of it becomes understanding your companies domain.
As an example from a programers perspective it is fair to say that every system that deals with money interfaces with accounting. I have been in enough places and exposed to enough systems, that I understand that these things will need to happen, and how they need to happen. I also understand how to speak with the accountants to make sure the data they are getting is what they wanted or expected. It was only by seeing this repeatedly that the patterns and language became clear to me.
I think it takes time to become a proficient coder in a professional setting, as well as understanding the language and needs that are common to almost every business. If your busy learning how to do your job, and how to deal with the person in accounting, and trying to focus on your startups domain it might get a bit overwhelming.
That's true. However, you lose the 'have you thought about doing it in X way?' 'would have never thought of that' thing. There are advantages in wearing more hats but you absolutely must make sure that you constantly get some ideas from outside (blogs, friends, books, etc).
>>> if you have some talent because then he'll be afraid of you
If one engineer is afraid of other, that's an indicator of a toxic workplace. If it's the senior who's afraid because of someone much less experienced... He's probably not that senior anyway and definitely not a good mentor.
>>> If you have the energy and the talent you can run circles around the big guys.
It's not all black and white. Both have their pros and cons, as simple as that.
And I'm gonna be honest: the assumption that a mentor has fear-based motives for ensuring that your work has greater benefits than the risk it poses is so utterly unrelated to reality in the general case, so monstrously projective and in itself pathologically fear-based, that I have trouble believing somebody would state it in good faith as such a universality. (To the newbie: your highly-self-regarded work is risky. Unknown commodities are always risky. If you are not analyzing your actions as a leader through the lens of risk, you are a bad leader. Many startups don't do this. They have bad leaders, too. But the understanding of and formalization of this is not something taught to entry-level employees at that move-fast-die-fast startup, because all too often, nobody else knows about it either.)
This is not to say that there are not startups where one can learn and thrive, because obviously they exist in some proportion. I would say, and the failure rates of startups and the it-was-my-first-job candidates I've seen ejected from the crashing wrecks strongly push me in this direction, that it certainly seems significantly harder to learn how to be directed and effective (as opposed to thrashy and high-effort) in such an environment. But it's certainly possible. Nor would I say that there isn't a very good time to leave a big company--I bailed two years to the day and probably stayed six months longer than I needed to in order to be a good engineer rather than a good coder.
But there is no generalization that holds, in either direction, as universally as your post asserts, and the assumption of such is foolish.
LOL. Seriously LOL. Literally laughing out loud and people are staring at me.
We've worked for some VERY different startups. At the last startup I worked for, I couldn't even choose whether my monitor was rotated to portrait or landscape mode. The co-founder changed it to the "better" mode for me.
YCombinator company list: http://yclist.com/
How many of those fit the above criteria?
Surely, not everyone is mature enough to learn by trials and _erorrs_. But by listening to superiors one may never mature.
Maybe for a designer this is different. Probably the title should point this out?
There's a point about going "wide" instead of "deep" in the article, and I can surely say that working at that startup gave more "wide" than anything else.
And by the way, at the job where I am at the moment, I had to use a severely limited skillset and had to use a couple of same technologies all over the place.
I definitely learned a lot working as a freelancer and in a agency solving different kinds of problems. The startup problem set is usually narrow with variety of random things. Many startups are also not that willing to actually invest in design (time or money wise), and it might not even make sense since they are just trying not to die.
Many startups are not also not founded by designers, and won't really understand design which also makes it harder to learn or practice good design. (As devs, think about a startup founded by sales MBAs and try to teach them good dev practices and make them understand what it is the value in it.)
I've also never worked at a startup where I could see someone as my design mentor. Most of the time, you will just have to figure things out by yourself.
I'd still say that you learn a lot at a startup, and it can be a good place for junior or more senior designers. It's about creating and nurturing one overall experience and product and learning as you go. To do and learn good design, as a junior design, the team you're joining matters a lot, as a senior designer, the management matters a lot.
You're probably going to see more senior Agency people grumbling about startups for two reasons:
1) Agencies are getting priced-out of the market for talented designers. Go on glassdoor and compare how much mid-level designers at agencies make compared to tech companies. It's close to double. As an aside, #7 is really rich. There are tons of design firms out there who utilize of 1099 designers (some with masters degrees!) who gross less than 38K a year for full-time work. Mike's Mule isn't one of those companies, but the design industry isn't without it's own 1099 abuses.
2) The startup world requires "product designers" who have a specific set of design skills that agencies aren't well equipped to provide. Namely- ongoing data-driven product development (as opposed to "Just enough research"), systemized/componentized view of design (as opposed to "The customer is always right/Take what I have created for you or I'll walk like Saul Bass"), and a more collaborative "agile" workflow (As opposed to waterfall). Based on my experience as an engineer working with agencies, they are reluctant to allow their designers to directly interact with engineering teams -- we always had a PM or an senior designer (who wasn't on our project) act as this mediator, putting us in a time-boxed meeting when in reality we just needed to sit down with 1 designer and just work through a few issues over <1 hour.
Because of this, agencies aren't just losing talent: They're also losing potential clients. Startups tend to prefer tight-knit product teams, where the designer is (or at the very least SHOULD BE!) a major component.
Replace the word startup with "that one inspired guy trying really really hard to accomplish something awesome who's personally asking you for help" and I think the post reads a bit differently. Like, do you buy their vision and feel the awesome vibes there? This rules out #5 and #6 and #8 as motivation. With what's on the line at startups, I doubt you'd even get an offer if they didn't think you were ready. This rules out #1 through #4.
Reason #7 seems more to me as reason for than against working for a startup. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... aren't places to go either to "solve real problems" as a designer.
Or am I missing something?
"Q: I graduated from school this year and I’ve been looking for my first job. After interviewing around, I finally got a job offer at a small startup. How do I decide if it’s the right offer to take?"
But for developers beginning their careers at a startup, most of these points just don't apply. I cut my teeth at an early startup, and just for example: people taught me how to be a better developer (#2), I went wider rather than deeper (#3), and I had a great mentor (#4).
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so. fucking. real.
