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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

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Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#271

Post by flukus »

owens99 wrote: post #66
Waterluvian wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Isn't over-engineering a type of technical debt? At the very least both can exist simultaneously.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#272

Post by gibybo »

bradlys wrote: post #246
adambyrtek wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this works elsewhere, but in the UK you can find public documents submitted by companies (including private ones) on the Companies House website and find out how many shares are outstanding (as well as some basic information about current shareholders).

Not a thing in the US for private companies.

In the US, corporations are filed with one of the 50 states. The information that becomes public record varies by state, but you can always get the registered agent and some basic information about it (date it was created, name, etc). Sometimes that includes share counts, sometimes it doesn't. You can also generally pay a nominal fee (tens of dollars) to get an official copy of filing documents.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#273

Post by e3b0c »

Waterluvian wrote: post #13
latch wrote: post #4

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…

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…

> 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.

In my opinion, that depends on the experience/background of your staff. I have even seen open source projects (not backed by companies) get all the boxes checked in a very short period of time. For a project maintainer who has prior experience, it just takes several hours at most to set up a git hosting server and the CI/CD infrastructure. The time saved for fixing a single regressing can easily pay off the investment.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#274

Post by jiveturkey »

xivzgrev wrote: post #260

Have you actually had a startup tell you how many options are out there? I've joined a few different startups all series B or later, and have asked at least 2 of them how many total shares there were. Neither would tell me.

In 2018+, it doesn't make sense to accept an offer that includes options without knowing how many are outstanding.

one late round "startup" i worked for, 300-ish employees and series F (just before I started), but still very much a startup, actually gave very, very detailed info in the option/RSU packet as part of my offer, without me having to ask for it. It included per-round valuation and dilution info, shares outstanding, other good stuff. Not liquidation prefs though. I've never seen an offer packet like that before or since.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#275

Post by jiveturkey »

billconan wrote: post #265
sarthakjain wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.25-0.5

how do you know the number? is there a table somewhere?

yes, it's at lmgtfy.com.

snark aside, yes this is common info.

Even as #8, for a fresh grad, 0.25 is probably quite high. Without looking at the standard breakout and also not knowing how strong a candidate the GP is, I'd guess more like 0.1.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#276

Post by lilbobbytables »

reaperducer wrote: post #162
latch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect most to be disappointing too, and it's a good idea to avoid those. Proper logging doesn't take more time, it just takes more discipline / giving a damn. People and companies that say: we don't have time to do it right Almost always mean: we don't know how to do it right Talent, not time, is the enemy of quality. (at some point that stops being true, but most companies (startups or not) are soooo far fr…

Proper logging doesn't take more time, it just takes more discipline / giving a damn. People and companies that say: we don't have time to do it right Almost always mean: we don't know how to do it right You're not wrong. But we're talking startups here, not established companies. It's publish or perish time. When the company has enough breathing room, circle back around and do it the way the big boys do.

Disagree here. You can go without lots of tooling and aim for simple and effective. You can even let in code that won't be perfect in the future (probably you'd be prematurely optimizing for the unknown future). But defensive programming will save you time.

Non shitty logging takes minimal time, like, so minimal. It will make many bugs and customer issues trivial to fix. In the least, use something like Sentry. Makes up a lot for not logging because it adds the context with your uncaught exceptions.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#277

Post by nine_k »

nostrademons wrote: post #160
latch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect most to be disappointing too, and it's a good idea to avoid those. Proper logging doesn't take more time, it just takes more discipline / giving a damn. People and companies that say: we don't have time to do it right Almost always mean: we don't know how to do it right Talent, not time, is the enemy of quality. (at some point that stops being true, but most companies (startups or not) are soooo far fr…

I think the point Waterluvian is making is that if a startup has all its development practices buttoned down right, it's either not a startup or it's going to go out of business soon. Most people (who are even thinking of working at a startup, at least) would rather have a job that's organized chaos than not have a job at all. The ideal order of tasks for a startup usually looks something like this (and I say "ideal"…

This is very true.

But setting up CI is a day's worth of work, and pays off almost immediately.

Having reasonable logging in an app of any serious size is a cultural thing; it takes exactly as much time to write as bad logging, and saves oodles of time every day when you have to discover and fix issues.

Compare it to building a motorbike. Yes, you want a prototype fast. But if you have all your tools stored as one big pile, or have oil and fuel spilled next to your welding machine, it does not speed you up; it sets you for an accident after accident.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#278

Post by wholien »

as300 wrote: post #196
ab992_throwaway wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I guess I'm an object lesson in the value of a college degree! As well as the really innefective way we judge talent in the US

pretty sure college degrees are beneficial to getting a visa/work permit in other countries, like Canada or China.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#279

Post by tzhenghao »

latch wrote: post #4

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'd like to say this is true, but I think in practice, you want early engineers to have the right technical + mental frameworks around good software development practices, and the current implementation may not reflect this (false negative). It's a good to have, but not a top concern imo.

One of the startups I worked with didn't have "good" practices just like what is listed above, and it took a while to get there. The thing is, we're still pulling quite healthy numbers, and we have paying customers. What made it bearable was our engineers knew what needed to be done, and had the technical chops to get there. You'll probably want to avoid very elitist engineering cultures that aren't open to what's considered good practices.

Many successful startups run on the shadiest software architecture in the early days, but market pulled product out of the startup. Today, they have the engineering resources to make it a lot better.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#280

Post by gammateam »

adambyrtek wrote: post #236
jartelt wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some startups are reluctant to tell you how many shares are outstanding in the company (happened to my wife). They say you get 100,000 options, but will not tell you the info needed to properly estimate the potential value of those options. In my wife's case, they just said to trust them that it was a valuable offer.

Not sure how this works elsewhere, but in the UK you can find public documents submitted by companies (including private ones) on the Companies House website and find out how many shares are outstanding (as well as some basic information about current shareholders).

Delaware - where most of these startups are incorporated - does have a way for employee-investors to get this information

Except you have to be an employee share or options holder already

And you have to sue for it (or launch an administrative proceeding)

/facepalm

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