Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience, working in startups is anything but boring. You have to wear all hats and solve all problems. You have to be ready to think on your feet. You've gotta be able to think fast and act and be able to deal with the consequences of your actions on the fly. This is start up life. It's exciting, but it's stressful. Some might call it a baptism of fire.

Working in startups - especially if they have funding, is definitely not what I'd call boring.

If you're thinking about a startup, you need to be comfortable doing full stack dev, testing, infrastructure, operations, debugging in production, debugging on your local dev, databases both querying and architecture, unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, scalability and being able to be ripped out of whatever it is you're doing that needed to be finished yesterday to debug the server that just went down taking out your primary income stream; and then when it's done and you've high fived a couple of people, you need to be able to sit right back down and get the shit out of the door you got ripped away from to do that.

This is startup life. If you don't like the heat, you'd definitely better stay out of the kitchen.

If you're working in a startup and you're finding it boring, then chances are this startup isn't going anywhere. Time to get your CV out.

> If you're thinking about a startup, you need to be comfortable doing ...

This list is good advice for anyone, not just startup employees. It's also really optimistic as pertains to startups, and comes off as some myth-making stuff. (Startups don't deserve myth-making and they definitely aren't glamorous. If it isn't your baby, then it's a job. Woe betide you if you don't keep that in mind.)

I agree that anybody should be capable of those things--though to be honest I say that about wherever you're working, "specialization is for insects" is one of the only Heinlein quotes teenage-me liked that I think still fits--but the reality is that the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of developers at startups don't have most of those skillsets when they walk in the door.

I consulted for quite a while and most of my clients were startups. In my experience, most startups before or at the "elbow curve" of growth have zero to "a few" senior engineers (the group of whom may include the technical co-founder/co-founders) with a broad skillset, a lot of juniors (the group of whom may include the technical co-founder/co-founders, they just don't know it yet) who have fallen for an okeydoke of an under-market salary and toilet-paper options, and zero to one principal engineer (the group of whom may include one of the technical co-founders) who is paid something within smoke-signal distance of market rate and is expected to perform miracles on a daily basis.

You will, to be clear, learn a lot of the stuff in that list if you're at a small, growing startup; you'll have to. Whether you do it right, or whether you do it right enough to do it at your next job...good question. I really wouldn't expect most developers to party on in with even a majority of those things already nailed down, though.

If they did, most startups couldn't afford them.

Yep, eventually you become sufficiently skilled at enough of those disciplines as to be able to call yourself a specialist in many/most of them. At which point, you're either in high enough demand that only those that are desperate for you are willing to pay, or you're priced out of the market... or you still just do it for fun.

And yes, in a startup you will learn these things, whether you want to or not... and that growth curve will be painful. And you'll either thrive, or you'll die.

Doing it for the love of the game is certainly an option, I don't mean to exclude that. I'm going to my next gig for something a little under-market because I think they're good people and I like the vibe there. (It helps that there's a big video component to what they do, and I do a lot of video stuff for fun already and want to learn and contribute there in addition to my usual infra/mobile/frontend/backend nonsense.)

Just saying that most people coming in the door, the sorts of folks who are going to be asking this sort of question, are just not in the same position as you or I are. ;)

I went from corporate to startup... and now I just don't seem to be able to go back to corporate. Once you've had that baptism, if it didn't kill you, it's part of you. There's no going back to sitting in a cubicle after that kind of excitement.

The heroification and myth-making is, again, I think a little much. It's a job, it's working to make somebody else wealthy. It's not "a part of you" any more than any other job; it just becomes what you're used to.

Frankly I think most people who have taken a few turns in startup-land should try freelance consulting on for size. I'm explicitly not doing it right now for other, personal reasons, but I'll go back to it eventually; it's the arena in which your skills are really as-fairly-as-possible valued and where you can realize some really outlandishly-sized gains for a lot of organizations if you hustle.

And, having spent time in startups, you've already internalized that your job might disappear tomorrow. ;) Consulting at least lets you spread out that risk both in terms of clients and in terms of billing.

It's not about heroification and myth-making or what you're used to. It's entirely about the excitement found in the chaos, and either you thrive on that, or you hate it... or you get Stockholm Syndrome and learn to love it because of the psychological trauma of running that gauntlet.

It's stressful for sure, in a manner not dissimilar to jumping out of a plane for the first time. The rollercoaster of emotions. The dread and worry about how the fuck you're going to pull off the impossible. The heartbreak you feel as you think you're just not going to be good enough to pull it off this time. The relief when you manage it again. The exhilaration of having come through it, perhaps with some bumps and bruises, but you made it and it didn't kill you.

Work in this kind of environment long enough and it will either break you or make you feel like there's nothing you can't do. One thing's for certain though, it does change you, in a way that those who haven't worked in startups will never quite understand.

Consulting is certainly a different mindset. You can either become attached to the project and make it as much your baby as the rest of the team, or you can function as mentor and help them to grow to the point they can handle it themselves. There's a lot of satisfaction in this. I find that the more emotionally involved I am in a project, the more fulfilling it is. The more detached I remain, the less so. I get a lot of enjoyment about being part of a team coming together for the achievement of a goal - even if that goal is to make someone else rich. When a project is personal, and by personal, I mean I'm emotionally attached to the outcome and I am vested in seeing it succeed, the emotional highs and lows are where the magic is found... that's what makes me feel alive and that is what I live for.

I went from startup to corporate and back to startup. You can't resist the desire for instant gratification and feeling of accomplishments that you get at a startup. You become this "T-shaped person", and your knowledge bar on the _T_ keeps expanding because you get the chance to wear many hats, while still being able to expand the vertical bar of your expertise/develop new specialties.

Right on! This freedom to wear many hats is what makes working at startups such a lively place. Startup is chaos and finding ways to contribute to the overall business eliminating the chaos is what makes your worth.

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