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Comment by montecarl | Hacker News Reader

This post made me realize why I am hesitant to leave my role in a struggling start up. I get paid to discover what our problems are and solve them as fast as possible which leads me to constantly learning new skills and fully owning our product and R&D output. I like that more than the lack of job security and must be why I've been so resistant to searching for a new more secure position.

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I was once like you. And I'm here (~50 yrs old) to tell you the experience you are gaining right now is setting you up for great success in the future, should you choose to stay in the field of software. I mostly worked at small companies for the first 80% of my career where I wore many hats. Then I moved to a larger, more corporate employer and was astounded and how little experience my colleagues had with databases / message queues / mail systems / ad servers / analytics / monitoring / alerting / etc.

All that to say it sounds like what you are learning in your current role is extremely valuable; worth so much more than your paycheck[1].

1. offer only applies if you are young-ish and planning to stay in this industry. good luck!

I'll also say that this experience sets you up nicely to work in a position adjacent to programming, should you desire that. I'm talking about:

* product management

* technical training

* developer relations

* technology consultant

Being able to move between the clouds and the dirt as well as solving problems (or marshalling others to help you solve them); these are skills that are golden.

Hard to convince when on a resume, ime, so make sure you keep your network up to date and/or learn in public.

This is not to invalidate the point made by sibling comments, just that I'd like to offer a different perspective borne of a different experience. Should you ever decide to move into a Big Co, you may find that they don't value your startup experience to the extent you think they should. Most Big Co's take a pretty linear approach to hiring. Jump through leetcode hoops and a "system design" module. Sadly the fact that you ran tech base of an entire company by yourself does not matter to them. Now, of course, not all Big Co's hire like that and you may not even want to go to Big Cos. But life situations change (marriage, kids, emergency expenses...) and you never know how long things will last. At least for me, it was a rude awakening how little value companies actually put on startup experiece.

Same here. The reason I'm not taking another job/position is exactly that my current one offers me free hands to work on R&D stuff on a scale where with some help I get to implement stuff myself. Next obvious step would be a technical manager in the same organization, but I can't seem to be able to push myself knowing other things that would be required of me (non-technical).

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