The struggles of new graduates

These points are exactly the struggles I had at my first major development job. And from talking with others I know that I was not alone in them. My poor communication skills were a huge blind spot for me, but fortunately I had an excellent manager and team who worked with me to turn weaknesses into strengths.

I learned to swallow my pride and ask questions of the people I worked with. I started to recognize when I was getting stuck on a problem and needed a fresh perspective. I learned how to write clearly for an audience which doesn't have all of the domain knowledge I have accumulated. And I learned that sometimes it's much better to say "hey! I found a bug here!" and move on to more pressing concerns than to try to fix every problem you come across.

As I look back I'm glad to be able to say that I've grown significantly as a developer. I won't say that I'm perfect, but I'm definitely accomplishing more now that I've learned how better to interact with my teammates and collaborators in a larger business setting.

I took the observations in this article as arguments in favour of doing a startup straight out of school. Having experienced the problems it mentions first-hand (since I was not so wise as to do a startup straight out of school), my logic is:

1. You will be inefficient at a corporate job due to the overhead of integrating with a team, an organization, and understanding a large codebase.

2. Startups don't have inefficiencies due to large teams, large organizations, or large codebases.

3. You will be more efficient in a startup.

4. Through greater efficiency, you can create more wealth in a startup than in a big company.

As a side-effect, when you spend time in a big company, you become better at dealing with the large organization and the large codebase. Thus, the marginal value of leaving for a startup decreases, which creates one more lock-in.