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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

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Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#311

Post by [deleted] »

gnahckire wrote: post #268
reaperducer wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. Publish or perish includes time to triage issues, bugfixes, and new developer onboarding. If logging is fubar'd then all 3 of those are impacted. If you're pushing a PoC out the door. Sure, go on ahead and forgo proper logging. But if you're secured some form of series funding and need to scale. Fix your boat before you launch.

[deleted]

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#312

Post by sweezyjeezy »

seibelj wrote: post #42

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…

> Learning - they will not have any formal training nor time to train you, so be prepared to self-learn.

Disagree with this one - yes you will need to self-learn, but learning to self-learn is an invaluable tool in itself. You will learn to be extremely non-reliant on other people, and you will probably need to learn about parts of the stack you did not know about before, and fast. You might learn about project management or giving sales pitches. If you are thinking about starting your own company, you will learn a huge amount about how this happens, and what that means (I learned that I didn't want to do it for example!)

I have learned a huge deal from my startup experience, probably double the rate I was learning at the bigger company I was working at before.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#313

Post by adamlett »

nradov wrote: post #300
nikanj wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first year or so, the only way to get builds of our software was for me to click "build" in Visual Studio, on my laptop. I definitely knew how to set up a build server, CI pipeline, etc. It just would have meant that every time I (not we!) changed the build, I would have to fix my own machine and the pipeline. I'd much rather spend that time fixing one more issue, or adding one more feature. There are numerou…

That doesn't make any sense. Setting up the CI pipeline should be the first step, before writing any product code. It doesn't cost you any time, it saves time and allows for building more features faster.

That sounds completely unrealistic and utopian to me. Before I even consider how to deploy a product, I want to experiment locally to find out if I even have a potential product. Most of my experiments never amount to being anything more than an experiment. If I had to set up a CI pipeline before writing any code, most of them wouldn’t even amount to that!

Maybe, if I were executing on someone else’s vision, I could justify taking time up front to set up CI. But I still think it’s a little dogmatic to state that this has to be the first order of business, always.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#314

Post by raghava »

nikanj wrote: post #247
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…

For the first year or so, the only way to get builds of our software was for me to click "build" in Visual Studio, on my laptop. I definitely knew how to set up a build server, CI pipeline, etc. It just would have meant that every time I (not we!) changed the build, I would have to fix my own machine and the pipeline. I'd much rather spend that time fixing one more issue, or adding one more feature. There are numerou…

Pardon me, but this reminds me of https://www.monkeyuser.com/2018/workaround/

>> numerous things that increase velocity for a large team, but decrease it when the product is just getting started.

Irrespective of the team size, if the speed of delivery has to grow, a decent CI/CD helps make it faster, IMO.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#315

Post by xz0r »

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…

Would you always avoid an open office ?

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#316

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

> 2 - To see a sample of their production systems stdout & stderr

That's a good one, definitely gonna ask this at the final interview stage of my next job. It very much indicates how people work, whether they spend a lot of time fitting in features into a difficult code base or if things are just working a features a developed at a predictable pace. (On prod won't stop working on weekends)

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#317

Post by nnain »

The power dynamic: You're seeking a job and mostly at a younger/lower power position and might not be able to question the founder too much. It's the kind of soft power that the #metoo movement has talked about. Unfortunately, there are people who are ready to misuse that.

It's worse than when negotiating with a bigger company actually, cause there you're just negotiating with HR department employees who would follow the law more closely. At a large corp, you largely get what you expect.

Be very wary of what you're promised and told. I, unfortunately, was burnt by this. I largely trusted everything that I was promised/told about the company performance. But it was all hoax.

So an additional tip: Cross-check with your friends how they feel about the company. Make this effort even if you are a bit introverted and don't like discussing job offers etc with other people. Match what your research about the startup tells you with what the founders told you about the company performance. Look out for red flags.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#318

Post by alliecat »

nnain wrote: post #317

The power dynamic: You're seeking a job and mostly at a younger/lower power position and might not be able to question the founder too much. It's the kind of soft power that the #metoo movement has talked about. Unfortunately, there are people who are ready to misuse that. It's worse than when negotiating with a bigger company actually, cause there you're just negotiating with HR department employees who would follow…

> Cross-check with your friends how they feel about the company.

This is very important. I have a friend who took a job at a Mysterious Fintech Startup - he told our social circle in the pub and the entire table collectively groaned and encouraged him to find something more stable (red flags involved being paid pre-tax, etc).

They went bust a month later, a day after he decided jumped ship.

Re: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup

#320

Post by nikanj »

solomatov wrote: post #292
Aeolun wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your CI breaks every time you change the build you are doing something wrong.

It usually happens when tests are not fixed.

It usually happens when changing the build means something like "Let's package the installers with WiX instead of NSIS, so we can provide MSIs for enterprise clients".

Not everyone's app is a web page.

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