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Earlier quoted context omitted.
ah okay, I always sort of imagined it would be like that in SF. I live in a metro area that is not as tech-oriented. when I tell people I'm a software engineer at parties, the only thing they find impressive is that I actually have a full-time job.
I get a lot of "oh yep, you look the type". Ouch.
I guess it's a compliment, but it feels a little backhanded.
I get that this is a just a PR piece to attract new talent but I think you're selling a startup short still. Learning is hardly a thing at startups. So many people are incredibly junior and know nothing about the industry or tech to begin with. (I mean, who else would take such low pay?) Yes, you can get to get pushed into unqualified roles and learn from it - depending on who you are. But that's really only at the c…
Good point. I guess I've always taken choosing who you work with for granted. That being said if you join a startup you don't exactly get to choose who you work with any more than if you join a team at a big company.
At a big company, I am saying yes to a company - not the people. Team selection is later (if at all) and you can be a victim of circumstance. You don't usually meet the people you'll be working with before you take up an offer at Big N or what not.
It's funny how my experience is exactly reverse. Since I joined startup I learn much less, since we can't afford experimentation and there are no other front end devs here, so I don't get a chance to learn backend stuff, since someone has to do front end part. I also hoped to learn some business stuff, but most of it happens behind closed doors between founders and investors while you code boring crud application.
I've been back and forth between startups and corporations. I think I know what you mean in technical terms; that corporations use more advanced (rigorous) processes and tools and so it feels like you're learning more (it feels more precise/correct) - That said, I think that a lot of the stuff that you learn in big companies are anti-patterns when you consider the big picture; a lot of the time, you learn technical s…
I'm in a similar situation as yours and have switched between big corporations and startups and now at a big co again. I used to have the opinion that unit tests are a time sink, but what changed my mind was the iteration speed unit tests gave me. Without them, to test that my code actually worked, I would either deploy to a test environment (or prod in the worst case) and if it didn't work, then that just meant a longer feedback loop. What I realized after starting to have solid unit tests was that I catch issues much earlier in the pipeline and when I finally release code to test, it works 99% of the time. The only time I've had bugs in test env was because of some implicit assumptions in my mocks in the unit test. If you think about it, that lets me iterate faster by pooling in lots of changes and releasing with confidence.
I think its natural to be biased towards testing in a real environment as opposed to unit tests, as it is more rewarding to see your code work and do what its supposed to do versus seeing it work in a stubbed out environment.
Unit tests to me are more about iteration speed and release confidence, than about corporations not trusting engineers (which is also true).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I used to socialize a bit more around SF, there definitely was social cache to being part of a unicorn. Declare that you worked at [Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, Square] and you'd have people wow or talk about how smart you were. There is a huge social capital element here.
ah okay, I always sort of imagined it would be like that in SF. I live in a metro area that is not as tech-oriented. when I tell people I'm a software engineer at parties, the only thing they find impressive is that I actually have a full-time job.
Also, this article is spot on. This is a back pocket article because this question comes up a lot.
> If you’re seriously considering both options — a traditional company and a startup — here are some points to consider. There are so many definitions of "startup", but given the common one of "VC funded trying to get big", I'd say there's a third company type between these two I dub a "starting-up". It's an early traditional company that's in the black but is not poised to go through the roof or become bloated with…
It's funny how my experience is exactly reverse. Since I joined startup I learn much less, since we can't afford experimentation and there are no other front end devs here, so I don't get a chance to learn backend stuff, since someone has to do front end part. I also hoped to learn some business stuff, but most of it happens behind closed doors between founders and investors while you code boring crud application.
I would never have had the experience I have from front end, back end, databases, cloud architecture (I’m one of the AWS admins) from netops, devops, to development and to work directly with C-level people.
Had a good laugh at this, because it's completely true in my case. 7 years ago became the "data scientist" at a 4-person startup before I even knew what a data scientist actually does. Parlayed that into further data science jobs at somewhat bigger startups. Now I'm Head of Data Science at a stable traditional tech company making good money and this likely wouldn't have been possible without that first startup job.
I hope I won't bore people if I repeat a point that I've made before: far more startups die of suicide than homicide. The tendency to self-sabotage, among entrepreneurs, is surprisingly strong. And I’m hardly the only one who has noticed this odd fact. The great business guru Peter Drucker made the point repeatedly. In his 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker includes a long chapter on the tendency of e…
Perhaps there is the problem!