191–200 of 348 posts
The only valid reasons for working at a seed-stage / series A startup: You are a founder. They are working with a technology or in an industry that you specifically want to work with and it is very hard to work on it professionally, and doing side projects are infeasible. You need experience and you have no other option to get experience. You are getting a significant title bump that moves your career forwards. Inval…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 hour weeks? Don't most people work 40 hour weeks? My first job I worked 60 hour weeks for basically 2 years straight (average, we'd work a ton of hours for a month, then work normal for a week or two, then back up to a ton of hours) and I should have started looking sooner. Instead I waited until I was burnt out and got fired. Only took me two weeks to find a newer, better job where I didn't work more than 40 per…
Everyone should look for a new job sooner (don’t wait for burnout, don’t wait if you’re not being promoted or seeing comp increases, don’t wait for the promise of reasonable hours). Congrats on the soft landing, sorry to hear you burned out first.
the answer to every question on this list: "We are a private company and don't share this information." Outside of the room, the Engineering team laughs at your questions, Operations and the CEO give each other quizzical looks before laughing too, and they go on to the next candidate. You get smug satisfaction for not going with "THAT Company who cant answer simple questions", until a reminder about the rent payment…
With regard to equity, I wouldn’t join a startup unless it’s cheap for me to buy the options. If you get your cliff, and it costs 50k to buy your options, you are sol. You options are to throw away your equity, or be stuck at a shitty job. Whether it’s worth it “to get rich”, is kind of a bs argument. If the opportunity exists to be a founder go for it, if not take the next best possible option.
Your decision point around the cost of those options seems poorly thought out, besides being a victim of a false dichotomy.
I've been thinking about low-friction options for getting a sense of the engineering quality. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that technical debt and bad software development practices are a top concern. Being quite senior now, I'd feel comfortable asking: 1 - To see their CI dashboard 2 - To see a sample of their production systems stdout & stderr 3 - Asking to review a recent non-trivial commit (with the person…
I've found the 12-item Joel Test to be great. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... PS: Yes! Shockingly not all startups use source control.
The only valid reasons for working at a seed-stage / series A startup: You are a founder. They are working with a technology or in an industry that you specifically want to work with and it is very hard to work on it professionally, and doing side projects are infeasible. You need experience and you have no other option to get experience. You are getting a significant title bump that moves your career forwards. Inval…
I guess this might fall under "You need experience and you have no other option to get experience.", but I ended up on the path of working for startups because 1. I never graduated from university (life came up, and I couldn't afford to keep going); but, also, 2. I don't live in the US (I'm Canadian.) Any of the US bigcorps that want to hire programmers, expect them to get a visa and move to the US. You know what you…
As well as the really innefective way we judge talent in the US
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In the context of a startup, I would expect almost all of those to be disappointing. But maybe that's what you're hoping to see. In my opinion, if you're a start-up and you've got all those boxes checked, you're possibly doing the right things in the wrong order, and that's a red flag for me. What I hope to hear are responses like, "so this is how we're doing CI. It's awful, almost non-existent. But that's because at…
This. As I always say, "If you are building a startup, over-engineering is a far bigger sin than creating technical debt."
the answer to every question on this list: "We are a private company and don't share this information." Outside of the room, the Engineering team laughs at your questions, Operations and the CEO give each other quizzical looks before laughing too, and they go on to the next candidate. You get smug satisfaction for not going with "THAT Company who cant answer simple questions", until a reminder about the rent payment…
The company doesn't have to answer every question but it would be a huge red flag if the company could not answer any of them.
the answer to every question on this list: "We are a private company and don't share this information." Outside of the room, the Engineering team laughs at your questions, Operations and the CEO give each other quizzical looks before laughing too, and they go on to the next candidate. You get smug satisfaction for not going with "THAT Company who cant answer simple questions", until a reminder about the rent payment…
So true! I've interviewed with several startups (about 50-60) in the past, over the course of 5 years. I had offers from most of them, while some of them rejected me after the interviews (for whatever reasons they had). Your comment is so close to reality (based on my interactions). Some laugh, some genuinely have no clue, some act arrogant (you can either join based on whatever limited information is provided, or le…
the answer to every question on this list: "We are a private company and don't share this information." Outside of the room, the Engineering team laughs at your questions, Operations and the CEO give each other quizzical looks before laughing too, and they go on to the next candidate. You get smug satisfaction for not going with "THAT Company who cant answer simple questions", until a reminder about the rent payment…