Not a Hacker or a Hipster – How I Got My First Startup Job

And yet two guys were able to ask everyone in an entire coffee shop what they were working on with a 95% "super friendly" rate. Perhaps some problems are perceived rather than real.

https://medium.com/life-learning/what-are-people-working-on-...

Doesn't seem to matter whether the author already knew that she had a knack for talking to strangers without appearing crazy, or held with the "general assumption" and was genuinely surprised when the experiment turned out well. The important thing is that it worked!

Now, perhaps it will not work so well for every person. Perhaps in the general case people will instead recoil in horror at being approached nicely for small interesting favours. Perhaps a more universal lesson to take away from this is that success is more likely if you play to your strengths, and push every advantage at your disposal. The author is a Cambridge Law graduate, so one might safely presume reasonably skilled at speaking - I'm not exactly sure how surprised she was that she could engage strangers in professional conversation at a coffee shop - but the experiment is available for others to replicate! I'm not sure what parameters would have to be changed for the interaction to take on a "dramatically different character" though, maybe don't get drunk beforehand.

> Reverse the genders and watch the interaction take on a dramatically different character.

I dunno, give it a shot. I generally don't have much interest in just randomly starting up conversation, but when I talk to a stranger about something it rarely goes poorly.

Perhaps some, but in my experience not as much as you're suggesting.

I think it's a fair characterization of some sort of minimum commitment as an employee. Especially if you're new to the industry sticking around for 5+ years is going to be a waste of time, rarely will the company match your market value.

I wrote the post, as some people have picked up in the comments, the one year is a reference to the minimum time I wanted to spend working for someone at a start-up. I used the word build as when you're an early employee that's the dynamic.

My plan wasn't to leave after the year, just to re-evaluate if I was learning what I wanted to be in the role. As it turned out, I did leave as I wanted to develop my technical skills instead of carrying along the VC/Biz-dev career path.

I agree that if you're starting your own thing then 7-10 years is a good minimum time frame.

I think the author wanted to work out if startups were a thing they wanted to do.

Yeah exactly, hiring managers have this list in their head, and what they're basically doing is crossing off items that dont apply for each candidate. essentially the ones with the least things crossed out will likely be top of the pile...

As a currently unemployed developer I take this advice everyday but it really hasn't generated any results (and it really shouldn't be at my current experience level).

I've heard countless times from other developers that they would be happy to hire a competent programmer with no familiarity with their stack because it's better than waiting 6 months to find a dev with the preferred experience. I've never seen or heard about this in practice.

No. In major market cities (SF, Boston, NYC), chances are they're already moving forward with a candidate who does fit the qualifications. Tjey're not hard to fund in those markets.

I need to work on my chutzpah. I overspecialized in moxie and spunk (the personality trait, that is).

Chutzpah's critical though- you're usually not going to get what you want if you never ask for it. You can wait a really long time for people to just give you what you want, especially if you never express an interest by asking for it.

It sounds like common sense, but it feels like it took about 20 years too long for that to really sink in with me. I always assumed people understood me a lot more than they actually did.

Chutzpah must be followed up with hustle or people will quickly figure out you're just full of hot air.

200 hours self-taught followed by 3 months at, say, 80 hours a week is 1160 hours in total. I imagine there are people who spend less time learning to code during a 3 year university course. Plus her learning would be very specifically focused on startup-oriented JavaScript instead of trying to cover everything. I see no reason why the statement "So I can code." should be wrong.

It would be okay if prototypes would be prototypes, but in the software field prototypes are too often taken into production. It's like a designer giving you a small model how they envision it. You don't expect to shrink yourself and live in the model house out of paper. It should be the same with software. Just recall the struggle with Twitter's MVP that failed to be available. Maybe we should differentiate between builders, designers and visionaries in the software field.

few things grind my gears like hipsters telling me how much THEY care about products being usable LIKE IT'S SOME SORT OF NEW IDEA, like they are the ONLY ONES WHO CARE.

beards and winter hats in summer seem, counter intuitively, to incubate a lot of unique little snowflakes.

This seems like your baggage not the author's; I'm not sure that she ever said what she meant by hipster. I read it differently.

Where are you looking? OP's idea of talking to people in coffee shops obviously only works in certain cities. If you're not in such a location, you need to look online.

> Meanwhile, I am being humiliated by stupid whiteboard interviews .

I just went through my most humiliating whiteboard interview last week. Never knew how bad it could get until that...