11–20 of 43 posts
Do you believe strongly and are you passionate about what we are doing?
I'm like no dude I can code and want to get paid for it, do you ask if your plumber is very excited about fixing your toilet?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As harsh as that reality is, in all seriousness, if that scares you why on Earth would you work for a start up?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Are you implying that there are no other reasons to work for a startup, other than exposing yourself to risk? Might I suggest rock climbing or skydiving instead of startups?
So sick of this too, particularly the notion that you should be thankful and happy to work for a startup. Do you believe strongly and are you passionate about what we are doing? I'm like no dude I can code and want to get paid for it, do you ask if your plumber is very excited about fixing your toilet?
Hiring is just like any other kind of marketing: an employer is going to paint a rosy picture to get you to join, and you are going to paint a rosy picture to get hired. At the end of the day ignore the rosy picture and look at the fundamentals - whether it's a big organization or a tiny startup. Will this job be good for my career? What's the feedback from ex-employees or customers? (Glassdoor etc). What's the salar…
In other news: water is wet. Company isn’t a family, HR isn’t your friend, CEOs care about shareholder value. But no point being upset about it, you can learn to filter the copro speak out.
There are definitely some good startups. Glassdoor has some good reflections. The good startups are rated higher than FAANG. They often have high CEO approval, and talk about how high the pay is and how hard the work is, but they'd never want it any other way. I'd say those have a legitimate shot at becoming a unicorn. They take hiring risks that large, established companies often don't.
Like all companies, you need to make sure, and having in writing, the bits of your job you worry about. For example when I joined a startup, I got in writing that my hours would not exceed 40 a week. If a company doesn't want to do that, then I don't join. Now we are lucky that presently a sysamdmin/SRE/devop can be picky. There are so many startups out there, some are run by people who genuinely care about their sta…
Hiring is just like any other kind of marketing: an employer is going to paint a rosy picture to get you to join, and you are going to paint a rosy picture to get hired. At the end of the day ignore the rosy picture and look at the fundamentals - whether it's a big organization or a tiny startup. Will this job be good for my career? What's the feedback from ex-employees or customers? (Glassdoor etc). What's the salar…
“Continuous integration and testing practices? We think those things are great, but we’ve been too busy to get to that, because we’re a startup ...”
I mean it takes maybe a day or two at most to set up a CI/CD pipeline with Github actions or something similar. It takes maybe a day to set up test runners, and you can just sprinkle in small tests as you go. There are plenty of templates you can find depending on your language/platform that do most of this out of the box.
You don't need a perfect pipeline or test coverage, just something you can improve on incrementally. It's much, much harder to do all this on top of a bloated legacy codebase and infrastructure and that's when "adding CI/CD" becomes a Big Project that we'll get to real soon now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure I understand the question. Are you implying that there are no other reasons to work for a startup, other than exposing yourself to risk? Might I suggest rock climbing or skydiving instead of startups?
The economic case for working at a startup is the risk. High risk of failure but a chance at a big payoff. He's probably saying that it's already accepted that that risk is there if you work for a startup.
In theory I own 1% of a startup worth $10m, but that will likely get diluted further and come to nothing. Even if it doesn't, I could have easily made an extra $100,000 over 3 or 4 years by just getting higher paying jobs at a regular company. And 1% is very high for employees, most of whom have a lot less equity.
The point is unless the startup becomes bigger than Google, most employees will lose out financially vs. working for a BigCorp.
I try to find a recently departed employee and ask them what it's really like. Not every founder is trying to pull one over on you, but some are...overly optimistic.