Y Combinator partners tell MIT students to steer clear of big-name companies
tech.mit.edu
tech.mit.edu
At large companies, you often end up working on a tiny piece of a module, and then you work you way up. You don't learn much that way.
There are companies that try to give you more control, but no one is going to throw you into the deep end at those companies. That's exactly what you need if you want to turn a bunch of academic training into practical experience.
At large companies, you end up working on a stack written by someone out of college 10 years ago when the company was a startup, cursing them and wondering wtf they were thinking. :-)
Maybe the learning there is a meta-lesson instead of some direct technology. Understanding that a large codebase has a life of its own; how to resist rewriting stuff if it doesn't benefit the business; how to test legacy code; etc.
At a big company, you write a tiny piece of software that has to fit a number of constraints that have evolved over years. Things like "This has to work in Chinese" and "This has to work in Arabic" and "This can't be O(N^2), you'll burn a million dollars in CPUs" and "This will crash the whole server if something goes wrong" and "This is a race condition. You're going to have a helluva time debugging that" and "Nobody else will be able to read this in a month". It can take you years of trial and error to amass that experience on your own, or you may never if (as is likely) your startup never takes off. If, ten years into your career, all you know how to do is cobble open-source programs together, you have a big problem on your hands.
At a startup, you get to build the whole stack yourself. You face problems like "What database should I use to store this data? How can I measure and improve its performance? What's the best front-end technology to deliver the data to the client? How do I setup my build?" So you learn how to, very quickly, get something up and running from nothing. If, ten years into your career, all you know how to do is make little tweaks to already-existing programs, you have a big problem on your hands.
You really need both, but I would recommend doing the big company first. (Disclaimer: I did it the other way around, doing startups first.) Why? Because the big company also gives you a brand-name boost and some context about what decision-makers in the industry consider important, which makes it much more likely you'll pick a good startup when you move to do that. While if you screw up in picking an initial startup, it can be very hard to un-do that and qualify yourself for big-company jobs later in life.
Then do it again, preferably with a small company.
After that, do whatver you want. You've learned from the scars of veterans with the big boys, you've dug trenches with the new kids, now the world is your oyster.
Go choose your fate.
/am a boring developer at a boring big company
Except, CS graduates have no idea what it means to work in a corporate environment. I didn't - I learned about Big-O notation, binary sorts and searches, and lots of algorithms. I didn't learn how to navigate corporate politics, PCI or HIPPA regulations, the reasons security really matters, or how to write software which needs to survive for years past the deadline.
Perhaps even worse, recent college graduates going straight to startups are unlikely to find mentors to work alongside; they end up working without safety net, someone who can help soften the impact of their inexperience and facilitate catching bugs when the cost to fix them is 1x, instead of 100x. I didn't know how to take critiques of my code as critiques of my code, not my baby.
If they're successful, and their company hires people with experience at growing businesses, their world will be turned upside down as their projects are taken away from them and they are relegated to smaller and smaller roles (or worse, be promoted to management). They will go from being the star to a cog, and many will find it hard to accept; it will slow the company's growth and make the transition more painful than it needs to be.
I once had to walk a developer from a 4 year old startup through the hows and whys of separating variables from code. They knew and had experienced the pain points of having hard-coded values everywhere, but were unaware of the best practices and didn't know where to start.
I keep saying "cog" as if it's a bad thing. It's really not - the machine can't run without someone filling the role you fill. And yes, you are somewhat replaceable, but you knew this. That replacability is why we can job hop the way we do. And if you're willing to accept this, you can make the most out of it. Learn from your betters, hone your skills by mentoring others, replace yourself with code, and move on to something more challenging. Or, once you have the experience, create/join a startup, understanding what the future holds if you succeed.
Car insurance companies put out ads telling people to wear their seatbelts. It's not because they care what happens to you. If that were the case, other companies would probably have ads like that too.
The insurance companies do it because a few million spent on ads that prevent 2 or 3 major accidents could easily save them some money.
In an essay I wrote a couple years ago I advised graduating seniors to work for a couple years for another company before starting their own. I'd modify that now. Work for another company if you want to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own startup, go ahead. (http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html)
I encourage you to read the whole essay if you want to understand why they say what they say, rather than cynically dismiss it as bias.
Maybe because it's cheaper for Sam's YC companies to poach talent from Acme Co. rather than Google or Apple.
Somehow, I doubt it. I think the average MIT graduate is just as naive (and inexperienced) as graduates from other universities. If so, then most should join big, established companies.
Startup life is not for everyone. Some people might do better (even financially) staying at more stable companies. There's nothing wrong with that.
I would venture to say that MOST people will do better financially if they stay at a large, established company. A new grad might think their 0.05% equity stake will make them rich, but most startups fail, and even the ones that don't are rarely homeruns. Established companies with deep pockets often pay better, and grant their employees RSUs. RSUs are much easier to cash out if the company is publicly traded.
I was recently granted a non-trivial pile of RSUs. Enough for a down-payment on a house in the Boston area. That's better than I'm going to do with 99% of startups, and my salary is reflective of a mature company with deep pockets. (Another thing startups often lack.) In many ways it's the best of both worlds. And if I leave? It'll be for another large company (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.) that'll make me whole for anything I leave unvested on the table. Good luck with that at a startup--liquidity matters.
I'm not alone -- I have friends at Apple and Google. Their RSUs vesting layers are crazy. For one friend, it's 70% of his gross salary, and he's not what we would call "senior management". He'd be stupid to join a startup.
I object to your phrasing (though not your thesis), because it's the type of phrasing used for other forms of hero worship: police, firefighters, military personnel, etc. It's the kind of wording used by star-struck wannabes, to be frank.
I also object to your use of "great", because I think that--with few exceptions--most startups aren't working on stuff that'll make the world a better place. Most startups work on stuff that'll get funded; that means you see lots of largely similar companies in startupland. (I suspect a contributing factor is also the relative lack of life experience of a lot of these founders: they simply haven't seen enough of the world to be more imaginative[1].) And that generally isn't stuff that will make the world better, because those kinds of problems are hard, and often require lots of financial and non-financial capital to work, even if at the end of the day, there's a lot of money to be made for the players that are successful.
> Not everyone is suited for this sort of thing
Normative phrasing aside, there're equally-valid alternative explanations: not everyone believes they are a beautiful and unique snowflake. Or, gambling is more fun when done at a casino. :)
[1] You alluded to a phenomenon in your other comment, about younger people not knowing how to tackle a problem they might encounter if they worked for a big company. I suspect that's more a function of lack of experience in that they couldn't even imagine the problem unless they'd worked in an environment where it would arise. I suspect this is why you see relatively few enterprise-y, B2B startups, despite the untapped goldmines in that space.
If you don't have the required credentials, getting into the startup world suddenly seems more appealing I think.
Experience at BigCo can be a mixed bag. I worked for two years at one, and it took me perhaps 10 years after that before I stopped noticing bad habits in myself that I'd acquired there—and I still wince at the memories. But the experience was valuable in one way: I learned a lot about users and their problems.
It's horrible and most of the time they will work you to death because it's a "start up" environment. They will try to get you to invest as much time of your life as possible.
Do not trade your life for money.
I thought you could learn new skills in start up because they usually are lean in money so you end up wearing multiple hats. That's good until you realize that most of the people that is in charge of technology are full of it. They buy in MongoDB hype or NodeJS hype without fully understanding the trade off.
You're better off learning new skills on your own time.
If you don't like big company cause of their crazy interview such as Google you can always try medium size companies.
I keep hearing about founders who are only good during fast-growth periods, then when the company gets big they have to move on. I think you'll find that most of those founders have no experience working in large organizations and simply don't understand how to organize people at growing scale. They want to hold on to the feel of when the company was exploding and had a 12 person flat org structure.
But that's because a 12 person flat org structure is easy. Those people will run themselves, and in a fast growth environment are too busy to play politics and form informal power structures.
But now the company is at 100 people, 200 people, 1,000 people. No about of book reading is going to get you prepared for how this company should run.
Not all that long ago, I worked at a startup that was under rapid growth, but was struggling to keep head count above 100. A few months in, I realized it's because the founders simply had no clue how to run a company at that size. It turn, it created a bad work environment and turnover was so high that they couldn't even hire their way to growth.
I constantly compared it to my own experience, where I ran one task on one program in one company and it grew from 4 to 80 people under me at one point. I learned some hard lessons during that time, but those are lessons I'm able to apply now wherever I go. To me, the growth issues were obvious and easy to fix. To the startup founders they were a continuous enigma, unyielding to their attempts at fixing with increasing benefits packages and lip service. I too finally got tired of the stubborn flailing and eventually left.
To cultivate and develop the skills needed to deal with differently sized groups, you have to work in those environments and learn how to do it.
Okay, maybe you don't have to, sometimes you can fake it with enough investment money and a good executive recruiter your investors force you to take on. You can hire suits who have that experience as buffer layer, professionals who do have that experience and can handle a big company. That's what Zuck did and that's what lots of successful startups do.
I worked for one of the biggest tech companies as a developer, and I learned no real skills in my tenure there. My responsibilities were just so narrowly focused and any knowledge I gained was specific to that codebase, which is not useful at all to potential future work.
The sad thing is, the best way to increase efficiency at that job was knowing the existing codebase better. I chose to quit instead.
It's when you go down to the second tier and below that student debt becomes a serious problem, as lots of schools try to match the Ivy experience but without the benefit of a large old-money endowment to subsidize financial aid.
different type(s) of startups being funded?
Under the current structure, raising capital can swamp developing a product when the minimum skin is say $12 million even eating ramen. Some businesses require 100 staff and not requiring the founders to sell unrealistic visions of equity turning into wealth compensating for below market salaries is a way to build better company culture when the work demands 35 or 60 people.
Would you rather work on a part of a big product or create a complete product yourself/with another engineer?
- I have created whole products from scratch by myself with my tech lead doing code reviews
- I have worked on "legacy" code as well
I find both satisfying for different reasons. Legacy code has a bad rep, but "legacy code" should really be called "valuable code", because it has already demonstrated its market value. It has nothing to prove. I've learned things from reading legacy code: little stuff like language features, and bigger stuff like architectural tips.
Both are different, both can be rewarding. Greenfield isn't synonymous with better or more fun. I personally enjoy being the commando[1] (with infantry tendencies as well), but the other stuff can be good, too, and we each have different preferences. That said, being the "commando" can be exhausting, and I wouldn't want to do it all the time.
[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/
In other words, I suspect the audience was largely self selected. And in fairness to Altman he wasn't pitching the rainbows and unicorns to people in the middle of the bell curve. MIT students are a cohort statistically more likely to succeed in Silcon Valley tech culture than Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges.
But again, I agree there's self interest involved. That's also true for Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft recruitment.
> "Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges"
The surface text is that MIT students are better positioned to succeed at YC than people from more pedestrian socio-economic backgrounds. Altman isn't directly recruiting at community college students for reasonable reasons [by which I am not saying that there aren't potential founders among community college students, but that it is easier to optimize on eliminating false positives among MIT students than among students at less selective institutions]. You're on your own for the hermeneutics.
If you are trying to recruit the best of the best, it makes sense to recruit there. But you will have stiff competition from everyone else seeking the same. You're probably also looking at CalTech, Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton with the same eyeball. And sama is saying that some of those companies that set out to recruit the very best and most prestigious graduates are not always the very best companies to work for. That's it. If you graduate from MIT, you don't have to work for Apple, Google, Facebook, or any other company that anyone has actually heard of.
I came from the middle of the bell curve, and my first job was working for a start-up. I didn't need sama's advice, because I was just looking for the first thing I could find, rather than the first thing that would not spoil the purity of my perfect, pre-planned resume. That's why he was aiming at those busy beavers in Boston. He's just saying that people might be happier if they chased after the rainbow unicorn farts rather than prestige.
I have worked closely with graduates of Alabama, Auburn, and Alabama A&M, including the smaller satellite campuses. Those are not "cow colleges". Their graduates are not bumpkins. They are overly religious and entirely too enthusiastic about football, in my opinion, but they still know how to do the work. They also know how to chase their dreams, even when afforded fewer opportunities to do so.
Recognize that "bumpkin" and "cow college" are derogatory or dismissive terms, you may have used them without thinking about why you shouldn't, and that you may need to reflect on that a bit.
There are highly capable graduates from community colleges, e.g. Hanselman. But investing is about maximizing the odds with finite time to collect information. Altman is chasing the odds by taking his dog and pony to Cambridge, Mass rather than Troy, Al. It's business.
I apologize for offending you. The reference was self-depreciating on one level and an obscure reference to a respected tech leader that Altman's recruiting optimization tactic would miss. I'll point out that your stereotyping is 'Alabama bumpkin' by value rather than reference.
Working for larger companies will make you dislike bureaucracy but also understand how it mitigates risk (and hopefully allow you to find a happy medium). It also will push you to compete under pressures that you won't normally just put on yourself, it will teach you how to take customers seriously, how to build systems and applications seriously.
This is not to say big companies get all this right; far from it. But working for them will make you much more bulletproof than working on your startup by yourself.
This is why most successful startups are NOT started by 20-something kids, but actually 40-something former corporate employees.
So that when small company gets acquired later on by the big company, Sam makes a lot of money.
YC companies acquired by google: BufferBox, Flutter, TalkBin, the Fridge, Bump, reMail, Omnisio, Appjet, Zenter
YC companies acquired by facebook: Carsabi, Midnox, Parse,Sendoid, GazeHawk, Divvyshot, Parakey
etc.
edit: upon reflection, my comment probably reads somewhat flippant. That's a pity, but it's a pity too the crass manner in which Sam says the things he says in his YC campaign tours.
Like Zuck? Drew Houston? It's easy to rattle off a dozen names who wouldn't have started their company if they'd worked at a big company for 5 years.
The correct answer is "figure out what works for you." And stop being cynical. It's really crummy to see Sam Altman, one of the nicest and most genuine people, dumped on here just because nobody here knows him.
I know him. Or I did, once. He's not the type of person you describe. Just the opposite: what sets Sam apart is how much he believes in you. You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world. It's rare for your own parents to believe in you in the way Sam does. So why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities? And yes, you're right, you can spend years climbing the modern equivalent of the corporate ladder in order to get people to believe in you and let you take a risk. But:
in my experience nothing opens doors for you like having solid experience at a well known and well respected company.
Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it.
Sam is saying, "If you want to do a startup, here's what works on average." Nothing more.
What does this mean? And why are you emphasizing it so much? Sam is an investor, he believes in people who he thinks will succeed. By definition, he's not going to believe in a very large set of people. But he will believe in people who seem promising... it really is very useless to point out that he 'believes' in people.
> Why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities?
Because there's greater security in working for a big company, generally speaking, than starting a startup. Though as others have mentioned, the audience here were a self-selected group of MIT students... it's not as outrageous for Sam to have said what he has said there. I do have a problem with him abusing his platform when he starts generalizing this kind of advice (previously he's said it's better to start a startup than work for a company to a more general audience -- it's just a bad thing for him to say, but that's a topic for another day).
I'm sure Zuck is a smart guy who works hard, but he also happened to be in the right place at the right time. If he had started Facebook a year earlier or a year later, no-one would have heard of it, or him. You could be the next Zuck but you're more likely to get rich playing the lottery.
You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world
Every salesman, has a lot of charisma. So?
A dozen is not a lot. If you understand statistics. I'm not saying you are wrong but you don't have a convincing point.
Outliers. It's all well and good to strive to do the same, but it isn't going to happen for the vast majority of people. And how can you presume what they would've done after going to work?
>Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it.
The business world is much, much larger than those 1000 alum. They are a drop in the bucket.
Where is all your data on the failures?
I have no qualms with the incubator industry, but I think most people have it backwards: the best path for most people is getting work experience first. For a few driven people with good ideas, head to start up world.
Agree completely on Sam. Wanted to add though that assuming most people on HN have done a startup at one point and 90% of them have failed, then at this point a significant portion of the community may see themselves as having been burned by YC's advice. Or it may just be the fact that the majority of the community no longer grew up reading Slashdot, or at least no longer identifies with that set of values and beliefs. Or maybe the commenters just aren't representative of everyone else.
I'm not sure what's actually the case, but clearly ten years ago the idea that working for large corporation sucked was kind of the raison d'etre of the community, whereas judging by the comments that seems to no longer be the case. Similarly, one of the most upvoted submissions this weekend was a talk making fun of pg & lisp.
Regardless of what exactly is going on, it seems like there is a mismatch between YC's messaging and the community that has been revealing itself over the last several months.
As far as Zuckerberg, Drew Houston, and other big winners in the startup game, well, you might as well interview lottery winners for their secrets of success. No doubt these guys are very smart and hardworking, but so are the far more numerous legions of startups that fail.
Do you think that big companies really don't believe in their employees? Is there some "don't believe" switch that gets triggered after the head count gets above a certain level? How do you think big companies come up with new products or services, or improve existing ones?
Does this sound like a company that does not believe in its employees?
Like Instacart (Amazon), Parse (Google), or Zenter (Amazon & GoDaddy)?
Or going beyond YC, Twitter (Google), FourSquare (Google), Instagram (Google), Quora (Facebook), Asana (Facebook), Cloudera (Google, Yahoo, Facebook), YouTube (PayPal), Yelp (PayPal), Palantir (PayPal), SpaceX (PayPal), Tesla (PayPal), WhatsApp (Yahoo), StackOverflow (Microsoft), Android (Apple), EBay (Apple), NeXT (Apple), Nest (Apple), Amazon (D.E. Shaw), Oracle (Ampex), and Apple (Hewlett-Packard)?
Empirically, having a "brand name" on your resume isn't necessary to found a great company, but it helps a lot. The companies above comprise almost all of the modern tech industry. The ones missing are almost all founded by founders recently out of a brand-name college or grad school: Google (Stanford), Microsoft (Harvard), Facebook (Harvard), Viaweb/YC (Harvard), DropBox (MIT), SnapChat (Stanford).
I'm sorry, but this is really bad advice for engineers graduating from MIT in 2015 and predisposed to starting a new company.
You have your whole career to settle into a big corporate job for a long stretch; why do that right out of college? An entrepreneurial software engineer graduating from anywhere, let alone MIT, should almost certainly move to San Francisco after college and start or join a startup. If it doesn't work out, they'll find themselves looking for a job in an extremely favorable market.
Letting assumptions about what's "easier" cow you into taking some job for five years is no way to live, certainly not for a recent MIT grad with the most highly sought after skill set in the world.