Ask YC: Where do you work?
For those of you that aren't working on your own startups yet, where do you work right now?
The company is actually a lot of fun to work at. The product is useful to a lot of people (Advertisement supported 411 Directory Assistance), and it's a great place to work, learn, and play.
What I like best about the company is that it has a very high engineer to manager ratio ;) That's always one of my metrics when looking at new companies.
Before that, I worked at Irrational Games (now 2k Games), as the IT manager of the US and AUS offices, working on Bioshock and other games.
When Goog-411 first came out, I was impressed: They do Call-Completion (auto-dialing the number you called), which we don't, and I'll admit it's a nice feature.. It's just expensive to do. (They eat those minutes)
On the other hand, we have live operators, and were Google prefers automation, so there are always tradeoffs. .Our Automation is pretty great, but we know that some people won't get recognized, so we give a Liveop backup, and Google doesn't.
I'm afraid I can't really go into details more than that without breaking agreements.
In march we are relocating to form a new studio with the Bioshoch team... so I guess we would have worked together.
Small world...
I love working from home. My stress level has dropped immeasurably since I left the office buildings of AT&T. No commute, no politics, no spending 5 hours/day trapped in a small conference room. My happiness, health, and waistline have all benefited from the change. Granted some folks can't work effectively from home, but I've found that since I generally really love what I do, it's easy for me to be productive without oversight.
(Hopefully this isn't a faux pas =)
Home office, Innsbruck, Austria. My company is DedaSys LLC (always looking for partners), and I do a mix of consulting and working on my own stuff.
Didn't want to do research so sought a mathsy job and joined an actuarial consultancy, advising pension schemes through calculations and mathematical models. Found out that it was less technical than I'd expected and consulting was quite repetitive. Unofficially carved out an hour or so each day to get better at broader finance theory (derivative pricing, corporate finance etc) and programming, and re-discovered why I liked computers so much as a youngster. Not a well-defined career path, but more a case of doing things I found interesting, earning trust, and pushing myself and the firm in different directions.
Then quit and did an MSc in artificial life for a year - unrelated but challenging and great fun.
Then back to the same company, doing similar things. I'm reminded of an article posted here a few months back saying that it's tough to be the best in a narrow field, but being in the top decile in lots of areas is easier and makes you valuable. I'm not the world's best programmer, mathematician, finance theorist, researcher or communicator; but I'm not too shabby at any of them and the combination seems to work well, particularly when coupled with a good knowledge of a particular domain (pensions in my case).
Some parallels to the startup world, even though I work for a big firm. In particular pg's The Power of the Marginal (http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html) resonates and translates to my own experience.
(BTW, we're always looking to hire good hackers -- send me mail if interested.)
Previous jobs: research physicist, biophysics postdoc, semiconductor product engineer, and... web developer.
(I'll admit, i only do it for the rails experience)
Hoping to become a startup :]