Why Non-engineers Think Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups

We're in Los Angeles and we're hiring. http://tbe.taleo.net/NA3/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=YELLO...

I should clarify "low stress" and "fun". It's a big company so I have to do a lot of silly things. Quarterly reviews which no one reads, yearly training courses that are a waste of time, the usual big company politics, etc. These are not fun, but I spend most of my day hacking on challenging problems and learning from people that are smarter than me which is my idea of fun. Yes product people unrealistically want everything to have been done yesterday, but I have no problem letting that go in one ear and out the other except when they are right ;)

By low stress I mean that I don't have to work much overtime and no one calls me in the middle of the night or on the weekends to fix something. When I go home I can leave work at work unless I want to keep thinking about it. I enlisted in the army when I was 17 and spent a year deployed so my idea of low stress might be different than others.

I agree that our system is broken, and I don't do the patents myself. I was just pointing out that at some big companies you get paid real money for patents.

There's a problem with that though. I think one could write a ton about choosing a startup that will be successful from a strictly economic standpoint. But I can't write anything to tell you what kind of startup you want to work for. That's something you're pretty much on your own with. As Carl Jung once said:

"The secret to your vision lies in your own heart. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakens."

There's just so much culture to unpack in this statement.

Any company -- startup or otherwise -- which treated its employees' personal lives as something other than an expendable resources would treat "a drop-everything-it-needs-fixing-now bug got into production" as an anomalous emergency. There would be investigations after the fact and steps taken to prevent it from ever happening again.

The thing about anomalous emergencies? They don't happen every single freaking day if you are competent.

A company I previously worked for, which was by no means a paragon of work-life balance, had a fairly simple guideline with regards to bugs that were that severe: if there is an engineer four levels down the org chart in the office at 2 AM because of a bug, there had better be three levels of org chart also in the office at 2 AM preparing for an investigation into how they screwed up to let that bug get into a customer's system.

Eh, I'm a SysAdmin, so generally speaking, my "bugs" are quite a bit more urgent. Yeah, sometimes you need to drop everything and then go deal with it.

The difference between a reasonable company that can keep good people and an unreasonable company that cycles through burnt-out husks is seen the day after you had to pull an all nighter. At the company you want to work for, you get a day of flex time, and even if you don't take it, you get thanked (and not berated) when you stumble in around 3pm.

My general rule is "If you can't get it done before you sleep, you might as well go to sleep on whatever schedule gives you the most total productivity" This means no sleep deprivation during crunch time, unless you can reasonably stay up long enough to finish. Sleep-deprivation for projects that last more than a day is completely stupid because you trade away all your good hours tomorrow for a few more tired hours tonight.

It's harder than that, too, because sleep isn't the only need. Sure you can go longer without seeing your friends/family or doing whatever it is you do to relax, probably, than you can go without sleep, but most people's performance starts to degrade sharply after a week or so of not having personal time, even if they do get enough sleep. So again, if the crunch time is going to last more than a week, having people do overtime is probably going to net you less total productivity than just having them work optimal hours.

The thing is, humans have limits. there's only so many hours in a row someone can usefully work. There is no point in paying someone to sit in the seat if they are burnt out. You might as well pay them to be home doing something else, becoming not-burnt-out so they can then get something done for you the next day.

He doesn't say its impossible, so one example doesn't refute, or even respond to his statement. Not only is the plural of anecdote not data, neither is the singular.

Eric Schmidt joined Google, early, and as the CEO.

So in one sense he did join a startup. In another, a career like his is as rare as a startup founder turning into Bill Gates. Perhaps rarer.

And Steve Balmer is #33, also neither a founder nor a relative of one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer

I would sell the equity and invest it in a six pack of socks. Honestly, I think anyone working for a startup should continually re-evaluate their commitment to the vision every 3-4 months. If it pains you to see where things are going you're better off cutting lose. I've seen people waste 4 years at a startup only to leave empty handed.

It can be very much like a gambler's dilemma. The more time/money you invest the harder it becomes to walk away. Eventually they realize they've stayed not because they agree with the vision, but because they don't want to cut their losses.

One such startup I know of is going 10 years strong. I think the VCs are in the same situation as the former coworker I mentioned; throwing good money after bad.

Is this such a bad thing? Engineers often have a tendency to to focus too much on writing 'good code', and forget the bigger picture of what they're working on. Technical debt is a real issue, but it's something to manage, not eliminate. I'd much rather be in a place where most engineers have at least half a pragmatic eye on products, features, and ux rather than only caring about code quality and the elegance of their algorithms. Yeah, it can also be good to have a few of those code quality sticklers around to keep everyone honest, but they shouldn't be running things or setting the tone.

I think a big part of the reason a management tier is needed at all in a lot of smaller companies is the general unwillingness of engineers to sacrifice code purity for expediency.

When I went from a big company to a startup, I saw a significant increase in engineering talent. There were some good people at the big company, but there was also a lot of dead weight. It was easy to just coast through a project there. At the startup, you had to be sharp, or you were out.

I won't say the code was always pretty at the startup, but due to the higher level of skill among the developers, I think the code there was superior to what was produced at the big company.

Although the startup went under after I was there 2 years, I learned 10 times the stuff in 2 years of the startup than I did the previous 5 years at the big company. The skills I learned at the startup allowed me to get into a much better job at another big company that I stayed at for 11 years.

At a startup the code will still be bad but there won't be anyone to blame.

The point is to illustrate that even in big companies, stability is an illusion.

It was fine, actually, since my manager knew the score. The HR software we are forced to use only lets you set a person's goals once a year, and then you (the manager) confirm if they reached them or not, then it calculates their bonus. So that's fucking stupid, but he just ticked them anyway, who's to know?

The argument was that you would probably work on something "long enough to accomplish something", and that's true. I mean, the Google Wave team did accomplish something. That isn't always true at a startup. Many times, you get hired to work on something that you never complete because you're constantly diverted to go put out fires elsewhere.

Sounds like NASA, constantly in limbo because of political disagreement. What's the public line though on wanting to cut money from renewable energy, one of the targeted for being "more efficient" in funding?

I agree not all engineers have long-term contracts, but the water is not that deep at software corporations.

Chances are better that the large company is making a healthy profit though. To be sure, this is not true all the time (look at yahoo). However, I think it's fair to say that in general, your job is more secure at a big company than it will be at a small company.

For a completely technical-minded person who is responsible only for algorithms, and not keen on customer support and such, might not burn out due to a movement among departments.