How leaving a corporate job to join a startup fucked me up and sorted my life | Hacker News Reader

How leaving a corporate job to join a startup fucked me up and sorted my life

byrslf.co

The story might be more interesting to me than to more experienced hackers here, so YMMV. For me, however, what was intriguing was how he first of all had to learn what he didn't know - and then learn it. Looks to me as if one of those learnings was essentially about life/work as a roller coaster - in the sense that even though it sometimes appears you're headed for a crash/death, sometimes it's just a whiplash in one's professional "learning curve." Rahul's sharing this on HN may be one of those whiplashes - on the blogging slopes - where it's more important than one might guess to attend to writing(and formatting) style. Until that slope is mastered, the poster discovers that most comments about his post concern his quirks of using bolding in overabundance.

Anyway, congratulations on surviving the transition, Rahul. And here's wishing you move through surviving to thriving!

Thanks for the appreciation and lesson learned, I will carefully format my future articles. :-)

I sometimes try to imagine how differently things would have played out if this whole startup culture and the massive media buzz around it had not existed.

The oligopoly that big companies have on tech media has really only helped big companies ultimately. In spite of what the media says, I think that the past 10 years were the worst time in history to be an indie software developer.

Indie developers got absolutely trashed by VC-funded developers.

Passion has lost, money has won.

Pretty much everyone who started a passion-project over the past 10 years and who didn't manage to raise VC funding for it have probably been forced to give it up and are now working for some evil mega-corporation instead.

Or, as every millennial with a liberal arts education learned the hard way, it's really fucking hard to contribute enough value to some organization for it to pay you a living these days, and passion rarely if ever comes within a hundred thousand miles of cutting it.

I don't know, I keep hearing that electricians and plumbers and similar jobs aren't running out of work anytime soon, and that you can make a very very good living out of these kinds of technical occupations, especially in a small community. Maybe it's not that hard to contribute value to an organization; just that the organizations we've built for ourselves are flawed to start with.

Perhaps the lesson here is that a lot of what we're doing is just wankery. Honestly, 90% of the startups you hear about don't meaningfully improve anyone's life in a way they couldn't do without. Monthly boxes full of crap? The new social network du jour? I've been in the tech industry for about a decade, I'm starting to have enough money that I could live a very comfortable life with a medium salary job, and I'm starting to think more and more about whether it's really worth it.

It is one of the most eye-opening experiences in the career of software development to be thrown into your first non-trivial codebase. Helpful colleagues provided, this will get you further than any course-based training, and much quicker. The condensed mixture of best-practice and this-had-to-work-quickly is very instructive.

I tried to read it but the random bolding of words was too distracting to me.

What, you don't think "rule of the thumb" deserves to be in bold?

just read the takeaways...

Came here to say exactly this. Why make them bold? I don’t get it.

> Why make them bold?

It's an Indian thing. And I can say it cos I am also Indian (American), so don't cry "racist".

I worked with quite a few off-shore devs during my internship at Goldman and I noticed this in a lot of blogs and GH Project README.md / Landing pages of my off-shore Indian peers. I even asked a couple of them and they said "SEO!". But I've read on mattcutts.com and other SEO blogs that bold-ing / making keywords strong is no longer a factor in determining SEO Rank, atleast with google.

Well I just thought that bolding certain sentences in the story which are important in the story would be helpful in keeping people engaged in a long story like this. But guess I was wrong, and I reverted back to normal formatting. :-)

paste to console

    var e = document.getElementsByClassName('markup--strong');for (var i = 0; i < e.length; i++) {e[i].style.fontWeight = 'normal'}

Thanks for the command, but I have already done it myself :-D :-P

I do a lot of fiddling around in the console for things like these, and the advent of ES2016 for..of loops makes this quite a lot simpler nowadays:

  for (let a of document.querySelectorAll('a')) { a.style.fontWeight = 'normal' }

Alternatively, you can use the more functional:

  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('a')).map(a => a.style.fontWeight = 'bold')

If your browser supports the spread operator you could equivalently do:

  [...document.querySelectorAll('a')].map(a => a.style.fontWeight = 'bold')

It's not just the formatting, the content is also rather unimpressive. How can you not be able to find your way through a startup codebase if you came from a corporate job, where presumably you worked on much bigger projects?

My takeaway: Not every startup founder needs to write blog articles and post them to HN.

>Not every startup founder needs to write blog articles and post them to HN.

What's the point of joining a startup then?

I was on my initial training there, I quit halfway during my training, so I didn't get a chance to work on a real big project in that company.

With that lack of respect, I doubt you've ever started a company, but if you have, you know it's one long string of running into things you've never done before.

Even strictly on the technical side that's usually true because there are so many unique aspects to every code base.

I choose to disagree, and thank Rahul for sharing real life experience, and hope that he and others continue to do so.

Anyone who has the balls to quit and start from nothing I assume has at least one interesting thing I can learn from their journey (not to exclude women with the colloquialism).

I'm sorry if my comment came across as lacking respect, I meant no disrespect towards the author as a person. I would like to apologize if I insulted the author in any way.

It's just that given the title (i.e. corp->startup) I expected something different from all the other, similar articles.

>How can you not be able to find your way through a startup codebase if you came from a corporate job, where presumably you worked on much bigger projects?

You'd be surprised. Enterprise might mean tons of legacy visual basic apps, or crappy add-ons to some proprierary platform, not "much bigger projects". Just because you e.g. work for a branch of Unilever somewhere, it doesn't mean you work on their payroll system or anything close to it.

Weird, I was thinking the same

I am very sorry for my incorrect formatting, I have rectified the mistake, thanks for pointing this out to me :-)

It's a great story because it's honest. Nothing in life is free and growth is messy and painful. You could have spent a lifetime at any steady gig and never seen anywhere near what you have seen in the past year. The good stuff is out here on the dangerous part of the limb. :)

"good stuff is out here on the dangerous part" - true words, and I believe if you keep on learning new stuff and making yourself better its not that dangerous anymore :-)

> You see in India, a general rule of the thumb defined by the society is that you complete your college, get a job in some “renowned” company, and get your life set. Though this mentality is changing in the current generation, it is still prevalent in the older ones.

That's not necessarily a bad thing IMO. My father grew up in Bombay and he too resisted this 'mentality' and pursued his arts passion - documentary photography. Despite winning awards for his war photography (Indo-Pak War and the Indo-China War) he was struggling to make ends meet.

Eventually he put himself through engineering college studying nights and weekends and made it to US into a Masters Program and that's when he had me. He used to tell me this story in my 'coming of age' years, but he never forced me to take up Engineering or Medicine. Eventually, I ended up becoming a Computer Science major rather than pursue my Sports career ambition (more on that some other day). I am still thankful to my dad for instilling that thing you call 'Indian Mentality'. I know my father would've supported me if I had gone the Arts or Sports route, but I am so glad he showed me how the real world is. :)

I'm glad OP took the road less traveled. I'm getting pretty tired of people living up to their stereotypes.

Not disputing that. Very brave. But you never hear of the 95% + stories that end in tragedy / poverty. You only see the Glory Stories.

The ones that end in complete failure are the most valuable.

How so? Please explain.

From Wikipedia:

>>Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways.

> 95% + stories that end in tragedy / poverty

Do they?

I agree, it's almost certainly riskier than the survivorship bias suggests. But by how much?

Depends on how you answer that question: Do we have so many people working in corporations (often in Dilbert jobs) as a result of people being smart or people being stupid?

Note that this is not about the actual intelligence of people, but about the intelligence of the entire process that is much larger than individuals, into which the IQ of individuals goes as just one variable. The larger process has its own logic, just like the constructions of insects are system outcomes. The situation we have is the result of such a process.

Personally, I think the process has spoken - the outcome is what it is for a reason. Assuming "individual human incompetence" when looking at large-scale and long-term outcomes IMHO would be wrong. So I think we have people seeking safety in large established organisations for very good reasons - whatever they may be when you ask them.

Note that answers from people may not be useful: What would a bee or an ant be able to even see about the organization they are in, the grander outcomes? Asking individuals leaves out the big picture that they inevitably are to small to even notice. So just like in marketing talking to people only takes you so far I'd say it is the same here: Looking at individual experiences, no matter how many, IMHO is too limited. There is a larger (to us mostly invisible) system at work here.

I am very sorry if those words disrespected anyone out here, I meant no offence.

Its just that I have been dealing with this stuff for so long and also seeing my friends dealing with the same, so I decided to mention it in the post.

Sorry again, if I have hurt your feelings.

No need to apologize. That's another Indian trait I've observed. My cousins in India are always apologetic. Perhaps it has something to do with a Servitude culture (serving the white man for 240 years during the British Tyranny). You didn't hurt my feelings. I just felt the need to share my experience as the son of an Indian Immigrant, who also went through something similar to what you went through, took the road less traveled, and got burned.

I commend you for being brave and doing what felt right in your heart. I wish I was as brave as you, my life might have turned out different.

That said, I regret nothing :)

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