Why to Join a Startup After Graduating

One thing I did notice - it can be a little risky to spend a long time at a single startup that fails. I worked for a startup that did fail (and was a little crappy) for two years, and some people had been there for 8 or more years. When it tanked, the people who had spent their entire career since college at the startup didn't have extensive networks to tap into for the next gig.

The ideal resume probably includes a stint at a large but respected company (such as google amazon), as well as some innovative work at smaller companies and/or startups and maybe some consulting and open source work.

Of course, the "resume" is starting to get a little outdated, and a lot of people would say the best thing to do is just start your own company when you're young and can afford the risk, rather than wasting those consequence-free first 10 years on resume building.

Now that I'm the primary wage earner for a family with two kids, trust me, I know the restrictions. Interestingly, startups aren't really off limits to people like me in places like the Bay Area, because they keep your skills sharp and there is just so much hiring going on (the ol "career security" vs "job security" thing).

But what is off limits (or at least very difficult) is the ramen-level poverty you can afford when you're in your 20s and have nobody depending on you. For the first 5 years after college, my rent was $350/month near the beach in San Diego, and that was the only real expense. If I'd needed to, I could have driven that even lower. That's a serious opportunity that goes away later in life.

Positions that I would be steered towards applying for in big companies would be things like "sales engineer", "support engineer", testing, verification, documentation, government policy... lots of grinding-work type of jobs. Put in your 5-8 years and/or get a Master's degree, and then we can talk about interesting work (I'm in hardware, fwiw).

At the startup, I do a bit of all that, but I also get to make things. A few months in, and I was designing boards, all the way from initial design, through schematic, layout, prototyping and testing. I write code we need when we need it. I get to help figure out what kind of specs we need to look for, and how to do it. I get to work at macro- (architecture) and micro- (components and signal levels) levels in near-parallel, on my design in progress.

I have the impression that I would be lucky to have found a job with a large company that let me run as far as I have in any one of those directions.

1. I can risk everything to be an entrepreneur.

2. I want to be an entrepreneur, but I'm not ready or I'm unsure to take the risk.

3. I just want a stable career and work as hard as I can.

The first group will start their companies; the second group will join start-ups to learn what it takes; and the third group will ultimately join big companies and earn a stable income.

Ironically, start-ups usually want loyal people to stay (especially when their businesses are uncertain), so they aim for the third group when choosing people. Big companies want to look for extra investment opportunities, especially from their employees (because they know them more and trust them more), so they may want to hire the second group instead.

It's always hard to match the mutual interest in hiring. I don't think there're any reasons to choose what to do either. It all depends on what the other companies want and which group you fall in.

1) Leverage (lack thereof): When you work for a larger player, you have established yourself as a person that the firm found acceptable. Having a big name company on your resume means that you were accepted (and lets be honest, for however bad people describe working at a large company, there are enough people who want to work there that it lends credibility). I've had countless offers just handed to me (ie joke interview, sometimes even just offers on the spot) based on pedigree.

Addressing his argument about "cashing in chips", it comes when you decide to start on your own. Just mentioning names of my former employers or work therein automatically confers a sense of legitimacy, and I've noticed that my phone calls are actually returned (try A/B testing this)

2) Cash upfront: The ideal ideal solution is to bootstrap your own startup. Unfortunately that means you need to have enough cash to bootstrap.

To defray the obvious argument, I will break down the chance as follows:

- If you are going into a startup, you are taking the chance that the startup will do sufficiently well that your equity actually has enough value to compensate for the lack of salary (and that's not necessarily within your control)

- If you are going into a company, you are taking the chance that your lifestyle won't scale to meet your income. If it does, you won't have as much flexibility when you do want to do a startup.

The salient point here is that, with a company, the result of the gamble is completely within your powers

3) Relationships: You build relationships with hundreds or thousands of coworkers, on top of the umpteen companies you interact with on a daily basis, who have other skills that may be of help later on. I still call on some former coworkers and others for help with certain things they were strong in, and vice versa. It's hard to build that rolodex at a startup.

I probably could write a point-by-point rebuttal to the original post

It's not uncommon to run into a startup that doesn't use source control, code comments, have failover servers, or even have a dev/staging environment. There are some things that are best to get a good foundation for your career, and large companies provide these in droves.

That said, there are Startups that have their act together, and after college is probably the best time to take that risk.

It takes a tremendous amount of drive and passion to deal with the negatives of working at a startup. Low pay, odd/long hours, uncertain future, non-existant code base...

For many people, taking that junior programmer job at the big corporation is much closer to their pace and risk level.

And let's not forget that if you have that much drive and passion, you might be better off being a partner at a startup, instead of being a hired hand.

At a large software/Internet company, you can learn best practices, how organizations work, politics, real team work and real challenges in large scale. And can make more connections that will help you for future opportunities and company name might be a great reference.

But 1-2 years later, you have to move on. Because clearly, you'll see that you've started almost nothing, never practiced some fundamental architecture patterns (since your large scale cant scale with them), shipped less code. You are living in a comfort zone that you obviously cant even take a tiny risk.

The whole article is good but this one is the one that rings loudest to me.