Reasons to Turn Down That Startup Job | Hacker News Reader

Reasons to Turn Down That Startup Job

deardesignstudent.com

102 pointstlo46 comments

I don't know, because I'm an engineer, but what I learned from Apple, was not the work I was doing, but it was from being surrounded by such brilliance. I would go to lunch (or dinner) with the guy who wrote the javascript engine. Or pop into the office, during a beer bash, of the engineer who wrote the original UIScrollView and pick his brain about why they did things a certain way.

The actual day to day work though, was pretty routine. I was mostly fixing bugs and rebuilding parts of features that had to ship in yearly timelines. Every project I worked on that wasn't canceled was spent in refactor mode for a good portion of the year. Let's rewrite this for 64-bit for example, or let's rework this for this new framework. The actual customer should never notice a change in the product, and usually the visual changes are subtle if any. Lucky few got to work on the shiny demo-able new features and even fewer lucky folks got to lead teams from their new products.

Lastly, most of the tooling that I got really good at and used to great advantage was proprietary except for Xcode and Instruments. :(

So leaving to go to a startup I literally had to learn a whole new set of tools and APIs. Then again, I learned so much more about how to build a product from the ground up at a small 11 person startup than I ever did at Apple.

At a company like Apple, I gained skills adding a feature to an existing product. At a startup, I gained skills building a product from nothing but an idea.

At a company like Apple, I gained skills adding a feature to an existing product. At a startup, I gained skills building a product from nothing but an idea.

Being able to take an idea and turn it in to a product is a brilliant skill that startups absolutely need, but equally, once the product is out there being used, you need the other skill set to maintain the product and add new things without annoying the users. Having people around who can do both is exceptionally useful because it means the team continues to do productive work for much longer without having to bring new people in.

To that end, I always recommend people get at least a few years experience at an established company before joining a startup.

> Being able to take an idea and turn it in to a product is a brilliant skill that startups absolutely need, but equally, once the product is out there being used, you need the other skill set to maintain the product and add new things without annoying the users.

But guess who gets the glory? :(

Not you, but it's not you regardless of where you work if you're an employee. Glory comes from public recognition of your work. If that's what you're looking for, start something yourself. Or contribute to an open source project. Or write a book. Do something that will have your name put on it.

If you're working for someone else, and it's their name on the product, ignore glory and insist on money.

> ... start something yourself. Or contribute to an open source project. Or write a book. Do something that will have your name put on it.

You say this like I've not thought about it or tried it myself. :)

It's difficult since I don't know what I don't know. I stumble around trying to figure out what I need to figure out and come to realize that I don't know what goes where.

It's also difficult because of sheer time. I spend 13-14 hours going to work, being at work, or coming home from work. Whatever suggestion you have I've probably thought about or tried, so do be considerate if you decide to reply. ;)

If you want the glory, you're either in the wrong position or the wrong industry.

"Fixing bugs and keeping the thing running" never sounds as impressive on a CV as "created this product from scratch using ....".

That's how I interpreted what was being said rather than expecting fame in the hacker community.

Frankly that's a potentially dangerous state of mind. Impulse you rather accomplish something little and get the glory or be on the team that got man on the moon?

In my opinion, it's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit. You're stronger with others than on your own.

> Impulse you rather

Not sure I understand.

Anyways, I've been around engineering teams for a while now and here's what I mean: there's always some principal engineer or fellow (in the terms of a title) that is greatly esteemed and admired because of decades of progressively larger and larger feature creation and system architecture/leadership.

If all I ever do is fix bugs -- forever in my career -- it means I'm not going to build anything and I don't get to be on the team that gets the people to the stars because that team is reserved for aforementioned team of people who have built a lot.

I probably shouldn't be a programmer anymore since all I'm good for is fixing bugs.

I started my career in a startup, then did a two year stint in an established company and I'm now back in another startup. I got significantly better at reading code and debugging at the bigger company, but I didn't enjoy being a small cog in a big machine as much. I think it's good for people to get some experience with both - but I don't see why the order is important. I would argue that a startup, if it's successful, will soon enough grow big, so you can get to try both that way, and if it crashes and burns, an established company is a great place to land when things get chaotic (and in my case, to cool my feet and get my bearings before jumping into the next startup adventure).

This is the best comment that I've seen in a long time. Thank you. Kudos. I hope that you're successful and happy.

This should really be "8 reasons to turn down that startup job as your first job" as most of the bullet points are really only geared towards someone in or leaving college. This should be obvious from the website's name but without context it took me a minute before I realized.

That being said the #7 point of "The world needs fixing, not disrupting" seems to lose sight of what disruption really is and conflates it with simply taking advantage of people.

Disruption fixes things. In fact I think one could easily argue that disruption fixes things far more effectively than anything else. Telling someone to go find "real problems to solve" is simply useless. I don't understand the point of trying to make the "service economy" a place "Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life".

Sure there are issues in this area with SOME start-ups but going right into calling it a race issue without providing anything useful just screams useless rant.

Just drop #7, rename to 7 reasons and update the HN title to make it more obvious of the target demographic. Just my thoughts.

I agree with you 100%. You're going along reading a bunch of very reasonable and helpful advice, then BAM, politics, stereotyping, and class warfare! One can observe that most of the "problems" that today's startups are solving are not very interesting or inspiring without resorting to politically charged language and personal attacks (and for the record, I agree that the ideas he lists are silly at best).

Have to give credit, though; he saved it for the end. If that's #1, I don't bother reading the rest and I would guess many others wouldn't either. So that's clever at least.

Thing is, #7 doesn't apply because he's referring to Amazon, and they are far, far away from startup territory. Sure, there are actual startups that have work/life balance issues that are as toxic (or more) as Amazon's, so I suppose it applies to them.

I liked his other reasons, though.

Honest question: have you ever worked a job in that service economy and fallen seriously ill? Things turn in to a shitshow really quickly when six-figure bills start raining in from oncology, your for-profit insurer starts denying claims after you've cleared the massive $5,000 deductible and $6,250 out-of-pocket maximum, you're technically "self-employed" and have no access to employee protections like paid sick time or FMLA, every bad health day you have is another couple hundred dollars foregone that could have gone to medical bills, and then the IRS piles on with self-employment tax to add insult to (literal) injury.

Disruption in the US health care system would be great; until that happens, my excitement over having cat litter delivered to my door in an hour or less will, sadly, be dampened by the fact that some Americans are literally doing their own minor surgeries over a bathroom sink right now. Wart removal is a really common one, presumably because it routinely bills out $250-$350 per visit in larger practices, and the typical visit count is high.

Your an employee with cancer, and your for profit insurance still deny's your insurance, you quickly run out of paid and unpaid leave through the FMLA and your still up shit creek with cancer. The employee designation doesn't seem much better as far as I know.

The real problem are laws that try to offload welfare to employers when it should be paid through a govt. tax system.

You have to take whatever IC income you get and divide it by 1.4 to get the equivalent pay as an employee after benefits.

How is it like for people with no savings on medicaid or mediCAL?

Being an employee in the US can, in some cases, help preserve both your job and your employer-facilitated health insurance while you're sick. The company needs to have 50 or more employees for it to apply, IIRC, and you need to have worked there for at least a year. There are slightly more generous laws in some states. It's quite close to nothing, but still slightly better than nothing.

I definitely agree that employment (or lack thereof) should have nothing to do with health care.

Or you know, you could come to Europe, found your startup here and get free healthcare.

I would guess immigration isn't that hard for a highly skilled computer scientist.

My meds cost 100€ per day (MS) and I have to worry about my disease but not about paying for treatment.

Not sure which part of Europe you are speaking of, but I have to pay around 15% of my income for the (mandatory) insurance, which then provides me with (almost) unlimited health care. If you are unemployed it is a lot harder to get health benefits, especially if you are a foreigner and haven't worked (==payed for the insurance) before. Just saying, that it's not like "come here, we have free health care and everything".

Anecdotally I can tell you that I also need regular medication (not in the same range as you, but still), and I was unemployed after college for some time. I got the meds, but only because my parents paid the minimum "social tariff" for health insurance, which is around 150€/month.

One of our (US) employers pays about 10% - 15% of our combined total compensation (read: salary plus "other personnel expenses") for a $250 deductible health insurance plan. And that's just the insurance premium. Dental is extra. 20% co-pay. Bills are always a surprise and full of errors. Sometimes the same service is coded in radically different ways, leading to claim denials and hundreds of dollars of variation in what's billed. It can take six months for a provider to get paid. People here routinely finance life-preserving medical treatment using credit cards. The per-practice administrative overhead for dealing with private insurance claims is estimated by quite a few (peer-reviewed) papers at between 15% and 30%.

If the wrong one of us changes jobs, all of this comes crashing down and I'm back to reading 200-page policies, figuring out what network I'm now in, and trying to determine if I can still see my normal doctor.

15% of after-tax income for no-questions-asked health care, sans any form of billing, sounds like a utopia to me.

> have you ever worked a job in that service economy and fallen seriously ill?

I'm confused. Is this a hypothetical where the employee doesn't have short- and long-term disability insurance?

The practical answer is to have insurance to cover risks.

This is the realistic scenario, where non-W2 service industry jobs provide few if any benefits, and individual policies are expensive, complicate and often require individual underwriting. Individual underwriting can require proof of a stable income (they pay a percentage of this in benefits if you get sick), and many have exclusions that can be difficult for people to fully understand, let alone compare against their own risk factors (if they're even understood). Other factors: affordability, exclusion due to medical history.

Take a look at the "service" lines in this 2014 BLS report: http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-4/pdf/disability-insuranc.... 76 percent of the service industry jobs they surveyed provided no access to short-term or long-term disability benefits whatsoever. And this is probably optimistic, it includes lots of non-contract W-2 employees. Where employer-facilitated plans are available, most employers provide them at zero or near-zero net cost to the employee (take a look at access vs. participation).

SSDI exists, but has a five-month waiting period and (IIRC) pretty substantial past-income restrictions.

I'd love to see employers get out of the health care arena altogether, but I'm also not convinced private and/or for-profit insurance plans can completely solve the problem.

" Wart removal is a really common one" Have you tried duct tape? It's offers higher chances of success.

I've heard that. I haven't ever had them and can't speak personal from experience, but I've heard from a couple docs that cantharidin works really well, and cryotherapy ranges from might-work to total-garbage. Only downside is the whole "high potential for toxicity and misuse" thing; apparently people have taken cantharidin internally as a supposed aphrodisiac, which is clearly a terrible thing to do with a blistering agent.

While I agree with some of the author's points, such as considering your tolerance/appetite for working within a chaotic environment before joining a startup, the article seems less about deciding whether to take a startup job and more about why one should choose to work at an agency instead of in-house for their first role.

>4. You need to be going wider than deep right now.

The author's argument is roughly that working a at a startup is limiting because you will work only a single problem because a startup is focused on solving only a single problem.

I disagree.

1. A company that seeks to solve a single problem is a company that has focus; I would argue that many startups lack focus. Many startups do not know the specific problem that they are solving nor for whom. Much time is spent on product/market fit. So, I disagree with the premise that startups are solving for a single problem. Successful ones do, yes, and that brings me to (2).

2. The idea that you will work more broadly at a successful, time-tested company than you would at a startup does not seem accurate. Startups are known for allowing people to wear many hats for a reason (because they often require people to wear many hats). For individual contributors, roles at a Fortune 50 company will be far more specialized – and opportunities to join projects even slightly outside your domain of expertise will be far less prevalent.

This is why I think the argument is really about in-house vs. agency work. Agency work will teach you their methods and provide you with exposure to a range of clients and industries, sure.

3. The premise that because your startup is focused on solving a single problem, you will not get to work on a variety of problems or get to 'try different things' makes me scratch my head... If only solving a problem were that simple, that efficient!

I think your criticisms of the explanation given are valid, but there is something to be said for breath vs depth.

Programing and design are both hard in their own way, but fundamentally they are a skill you can hone. Once you have mastered those skills the rest of it becomes understanding your companies domain.

As an example from a programers perspective it is fair to say that every system that deals with money interfaces with accounting. I have been in enough places and exposed to enough systems, that I understand that these things will need to happen, and how they need to happen. I also understand how to speak with the accountants to make sure the data they are getting is what they wanted or expected. It was only by seeing this repeatedly that the patterns and language became clear to me.

I think it takes time to become a proficient coder in a professional setting, as well as understanding the language and needs that are common to almost every business. If your busy learning how to do your job, and how to deal with the person in accounting, and trying to focus on your startups domain it might get a bit overwhelming.

At a startup you'll have way more responsibility and be making decisions at a much higher level than at bigcorp. You'll learn way more, move much faster, wear more hats. It's not even close. That mentor will put you on some narrow meaningless tasks, especially if you have some talent because then he'll be afraid of you. I'd advise the opposite, go startup when you're young and have less to risk and more to prove. If you have the energy and the talent you can run circles around the big guys.

I consult for companies from ten-person startups to a few thousand employees, and, from my perspective, it's all the same thing. While everybody pretends their particular organization size and type is supreme, it all comes out in the wash. Sure, startups move marginally faster. The time for reflection and self-analysis is lesser and most people seem to get less out of what they do, learn less from their mistakes, have generally poorer leadership that can't devote the time to helping more inexperienced employees learn the lessons they should learn from those mistakes and help them grow both as practitioners of a craft and as human beings.

And I'm gonna be honest: the assumption that a mentor has fear-based motives for ensuring that your work has greater benefits than the risk it poses is so utterly unrelated to reality in the general case, so monstrously projective and in itself pathologically fear-based, that I have trouble believing somebody would state it in good faith as such a universality. (To the newbie: your highly-self-regarded work is risky. Unknown commodities are always risky. If you are not analyzing your actions as a leader through the lens of risk, you are a bad leader. Many startups don't do this. They have bad leaders, too. But the understanding of and formalization of this is not something taught to entry-level employees at that move-fast-die-fast startup, because all too often, nobody else knows about it either.)

This is not to say that there are not startups where one can learn and thrive, because obviously they exist in some proportion. I would say, and the failure rates of startups and the it-was-my-first-job candidates I've seen ejected from the crashing wrecks strongly push me in this direction, that it certainly seems significantly harder to learn how to be directed and effective (as opposed to thrashy and high-effort) in such an environment. But it's certainly possible. Nor would I say that there isn't a very good time to leave a big company--I bailed two years to the day and probably stayed six months longer than I needed to in order to be a good engineer rather than a good coder.

But there is no generalization that holds, in either direction, as universally as your post asserts, and the assumption of such is foolish.

>>> You'll learn way more, move much faster, wear more hats.

That's true. However, you lose the 'have you thought about doing it in X way?' 'would have never thought of that' thing. There are advantages in wearing more hats but you absolutely must make sure that you constantly get some ideas from outside (blogs, friends, books, etc).

>>> if you have some talent because then he'll be afraid of you

If one engineer is afraid of other, that's an indicator of a toxic workplace. If it's the senior who's afraid because of someone much less experienced... He's probably not that senior anyway and definitely not a good mentor.

>>> If you have the energy and the talent you can run circles around the big guys.

It's not all black and white. Both have their pros and cons, as simple as that.

> At a startup you'll have way more responsibility and be making decisions at a much higher level than at bigcorp.

LOL. Seriously LOL. Literally laughing out loud and people are staring at me.

We've worked for some VERY different startups. At the last startup I worked for, I couldn't even choose whether my monitor was rotated to portrait or landscape mode. The co-founder changed it to the "better" mode for me.

From the article: "I hate to tell you this, but right now the startup world, or at least the ones making the majority of the noise, have their heads up their own ass and don’t realize it stinks. They’re solving problems for the top 5% of the population. How can I get poor people to do my chores? How can I get people to drive me around without having to pay them health insurance? How can a drone deliver my toilet paper within 15 minutes while the person who fulfilled my order sits at her desk crying because she’s working a 15-hour day and can’t take time off to get that lump in her chest looked at. This is known as the service economy. Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life."

YCombinator company list: http://yclist.com/

How many of those fit the above criteria?

he does say "or at least the ones making the most noise".

I find the rant of the article exaggerated and ridiculous. But actually a lot of those companies do fit the criteria.

Waiting for the perfect time and feeling not competent enough without a patronage (i.e. points 1-3) are my biggest educational regrets. Sure, in startups there is a bias for being too independent and confident. But virtually all other places (including academia) are not good for skilled minds and independent spirits - they rather expect you to respect hierarchy and status quo.

Surely, not everyone is mature enough to learn by trials and _erorrs_. But by listening to superiors one may never mature.

As a developer my experience has been the direct opposite. Getting my first job at a startup was a the best decision for me. I think I have more width (rather than depth) of knowledge because of it, (since I worked in wider verity of roles).

Maybe for a designer this is different. Probably the title should point this out?

I'm with you here. After working at a startup for 1.5 years I became a solid full stack developer with the ability to very quickly adapt to the current task.

There's a point about going "wide" instead of "deep" in the article, and I can surely say that working at that startup gave more "wide" than anything else.

And by the way, at the job where I am at the moment, I had to use a severely limited skillset and had to use a couple of same technologies all over the place.

Many startups see development as the product, and design as the pretty.

I think this rings somewhat true designers. However like any advice, it's very generalized and won't necessarily apply.

I definitely learned a lot working as a freelancer and in a agency solving different kinds of problems. The startup problem set is usually narrow with variety of random things. Many startups are also not that willing to actually invest in design (time or money wise), and it might not even make sense since they are just trying not to die.

Many startups are not also not founded by designers, and won't really understand design which also makes it harder to learn or practice good design. (As devs, think about a startup founded by sales MBAs and try to teach them good dev practices and make them understand what it is the value in it.)

I've also never worked at a startup where I could see someone as my design mentor. Most of the time, you will just have to figure things out by yourself.

I'd still say that you learn a lot at a startup, and it can be a good place for junior or more senior designers. It's about creating and nurturing one overall experience and product and learning as you go. To do and learn good design, as a junior design, the team you're joining matters a lot, as a senior designer, the management matters a lot.

Boy do I disagree with these.

You're probably going to see more senior Agency people grumbling about startups for two reasons:

1) Agencies are getting priced-out of the market for talented designers. Go on glassdoor and compare how much mid-level designers at agencies make compared to tech companies. It's close to double. As an aside, #7 is really rich. There are tons of design firms out there who utilize of 1099 designers (some with masters degrees!) who gross less than 38K a year for full-time work. Mike's Mule isn't one of those companies, but the design industry isn't without it's own 1099 abuses.

2) The startup world requires "product designers" who have a specific set of design skills that agencies aren't well equipped to provide. Namely- ongoing data-driven product development (as opposed to "Just enough research"), systemized/componentized view of design (as opposed to "The customer is always right/Take what I have created for you or I'll walk like Saul Bass"), and a more collaborative "agile" workflow (As opposed to waterfall). Based on my experience as an engineer working with agencies, they are reluctant to allow their designers to directly interact with engineering teams -- we always had a PM or an senior designer (who wasn't on our project) act as this mediator, putting us in a time-boxed meeting when in reality we just needed to sit down with 1 designer and just work through a few issues over <1 hour.

Because of this, agencies aren't just losing talent: They're also losing potential clients. Startups tend to prefer tight-knit product teams, where the designer is (or at the very least SHOULD BE!) a major component.

Let's not forget for whom we work.

Replace the word startup with "that one inspired guy trying really really hard to accomplish something awesome who's personally asking you for help" and I think the post reads a bit differently. Like, do you buy their vision and feel the awesome vibes there? This rules out #5 and #6 and #8 as motivation. With what's on the line at startups, I doubt you'd even get an offer if they didn't think you were ready. This rules out #1 through #4.

Reason #7 seems more to me as reason for than against working for a startup. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... aren't places to go either to "solve real problems" as a designer.

Or am I missing something?

Please note: This advice is for designers who have just graduated from art school. The answers are for question:

"Q: I graduated from school this year and I’ve been looking for my first job. After interviewing around, I finally got a job offer at a small startup. How do I decide if it’s the right offer to take?"

Also relevant: Fuck You, Pay Me by Mike Monteiro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

Although it's a good advice, I can't really see how is it relevant.

This article is aimed at designers, and maybe it makes good points for them.

But for developers beginning their careers at a startup, most of these points just don't apply. I cut my teeth at an early startup, and just for example: people taught me how to be a better developer (#2), I went wider rather than deeper (#3), and I had a great mentor (#4).

I hate to tell you this, but right now the startup world, or at least the ones making the majority of the noise, have their heads up their own ass and don’t realize it stinks. They’re solving problems for the top 5% of the population. How can I get poor people to do my chores? How can I get people to drive me around without having to pay them health insurance? How can a drone deliver my toilet paper within 15 minutes while the person who fulfilled my order sits at her desk crying because she’s working a 15-hour day and can’t take time off to get that lump in her chest looked at. This is known as the service economy. Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life.

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so. fucking. real.

More like 8 ways to become another drone.

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