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Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

mattswanson.org

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Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#21

Post by ig1 »

I was at DDD9 on Saturday (Community MS conference) and there were a lot of startup folks there. I think it's too easy to get caught up with a subset of the community (say the mobile startup community or the rails community) and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Certainly among b2b startups BizSpark has encouraged a lot of startups to go with the MS stack where they previously would have gone with Rails, etc. While consumer startups seem in general to be more often based on non-MS stack there's plenty of MS stack consumer startups (PlentyOfFish, Just-Eat, StackOverflow) which have become the dominant players in their field.

When it comes down to it, for most startups it doesn't really matter what your stack is, just pick the stack that you're most productive with.

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#22

Post by VladRussian »

pgroves wrote: post #7

Full text from google cache: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career Note: This post is intended for engineers who are looking to start their own company or join an early stage startup. Many of the critiques I suggest do not apply to engineers who enjoy the comfort of a larger company. As the CTO of a growing early stage startup, I have had the experience of interviewing a number of ve…

In Shawshank it was said much more succinctly - "institutionalized"

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#23

Post by MediaSquirrel »

sriramk wrote: post #20

This is pretty interesting since I know of a Microsoft person who was talking to some startups in the Bay Area to find a potential role (this person is one of the most talented engineer/product manager I've met, has run some very critical initiatives for MSFT and extremely well-versed in both the Microsoft and the non-Microsoft landscape and is looking to move to the Bay Area from Seattle for personal reasons). There…

And yet...stereotypes often come from somewhere, no? Would you say that these stereotypes are inaccurate in terms of the general picture they paint?

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#24

Post by kaelswanson »

kkshin wrote: post #17

I try really hard to not get pigeon-holed into using my company's (one of the mentioned ones) stack but its really hard. Why? Cause when you have a full-time job then you're working 8-9 hours a day and there's really not that much time left over. I do a lot of side projects that usually revolve around non-proprietary technology but really there are only so many hours a day. I think it comes down to a decision of whet…

Agreed, and I think this decision is what defines an entrepreneur

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#25

Post by larsberg »

There's another thing you should take away from this article: if all you want to do is work on really hard technical problems, be well compensated, and never have to worry about managing people and career-limited for it, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google are all great places to do that. Having sat on the other side of the hiring wall from the author -- as a manager doing hiring of developers at Microsoft -- I found that college students who had gone off to a startup for several years often had gained some breadth (product knowledge, used/configured more types of systems, etc.) but had failed to gain much real technical depth.

I take a little bit of issue with his characterization of risk at these big companies. I don't know anyone working at any of those companies who hasn't experienced feature or product cancellation at some point in their career. Well, except for a couple of guys who've worked on debuggers and text editors for their entire 15+-year careers, but those are special cases :-)

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#26

Post by acconrad »

TL;DR: don't be complacent.

Slightly less TLDR: companies which foster working there all the time (Facebook, Google) are the kind of people who need to go out and meet people besides their coworkers. Companies which foster working on their own stack the whole time (Microsoft) are the kind of people who need to go out and use other programming languages.

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#27

Post by enjo »

MediaSquirrel wrote: post #23
sriramk wrote: post #20

This is pretty interesting since I know of a Microsoft person who was talking to some startups in the Bay Area to find a potential role (this person is one of the most talented engineer/product manager I've met, has run some very critical initiatives for MSFT and extremely well-versed in both the Microsoft and the non-Microsoft landscape and is looking to move to the Bay Area from Seattle for personal reasons). There…

And yet...stereotypes often come from somewhere, no? Would you say that these stereotypes are inaccurate in terms of the general picture they paint?

I would most definitely say that. I've hired from corporate cultures far more rigorous than Microsofts (Samsung springs to mind) with great results. A smart engineer who can get things done is a strong engineer regardless of where they've cut their teeth.

One only needs to look at all of the startups that IBM, famous for their bureaucratic structure, too see what rubbish this is.

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#28

Post by kaelswanson »

rbanffy wrote: post #12
MediaSquirrel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The server is under DDOS attack.

Only this site or the whole slicehost block? http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=mattswanson.org

no attack, just a giant wordpress fail earlier

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#29

Post by tomorrow_today »

A stable system must have high diversity and high connectivity. If you do not have a network with strong connections to many people of many backgrounds, you will have trouble surviving/understanding changes in the world around you and you will eventually become irrelevant. The startup environment is incredibly taxing on a person and the group. If the people in a startup are not well connected and diverse in knowledge, they will not be resilient enough to survive internal or external conflict. In small groups, it only takes one person with a small network or a limited scope to make it all crumble when the pressure is on.

Re: Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

#30

Post by tomorrow_today »

enjo wrote: post #27
MediaSquirrel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet...stereotypes often come from somewhere, no? Would you say that these stereotypes are inaccurate in terms of the general picture they paint?

I would most definitely say that. I've hired from corporate cultures far more rigorous than Microsofts (Samsung springs to mind) with great results. A smart engineer who can get things done is a strong engineer regardless of where they've cut their teeth. One only needs to look at all of the startups that IBM, famous for their bureaucratic structure, too see what rubbish this is.

Divisions and collaborative ventures that start in a large companies' research lab and eventually split off or are sold to another party are not startups.
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