5 ms·

Reasons to Turn Down That Startup Job

102 points by tlo 11y ago

stared 11y ago
Waiting for the perfect time and feeling not competent enough without a patronage (i.e. points 1-3) are my biggest educational regrets. Sure, in startups there is a bias for being too independent and confident. But virtually all other places (including academia) are not good for skilled minds and independent spirits - they rather expect you to respect hierarchy and status quo. Surely, not everyone is mature enough to learn by trials and _erorrs_. But by listening to superiors one may never mature.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
This should really be "8 reasons to turn down that startup job as your first job" as most of the bullet points are really only geared towards someone in or leaving college. This should be obvious from the website's name but without context it took me a minute before I realized. That being said the #7 point of "The world needs fixing, not disrupting" seems to lose sight of what disruption really is and conflates it with simply taking advantage of people. Disruption fixes things. In fact I think one could easily argue that disruption fixes things far more effectively than anything else. Telling someone to go find "real problems to solve" is simply useless. I don't understand the point of trying to make the "service economy" a place "Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life". Sure there are issues in this area with SOME start-ups but going right into calling it a race issue without providing anything useful just screams useless rant. Just drop #7, rename to 7 reasons and update the HN title to make it more obvious of the target demographic. Just my thoughts.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  I agree with you 100%. You're going along reading a bunch of very reasonable and helpful advice, then BAM, politics, stereotyping, and class warfare! One can observe that most of the "problems" that today's startups are solving are not very interesting or inspiring without resorting to politically charged language and personal attacks (and for the record, I agree that the ideas he lists are silly at best). Have to give credit, though; he saved it for the end. If that's #1, I don't bother reading the rest and I would guess many others wouldn't either. So that's clever at least.
- wyclif 11y ago
  Thing is, #7 doesn't apply because he's referring to Amazon, and they are far, far away from startup territory. Sure, there are actual startups that have work/life balance issues that are as toxic (or more) as Amazon's, so I suppose it applies to them. I liked his other reasons, though.
- facetube 11y ago
  Honest question: have you ever worked a job in that service economy and fallen seriously ill? Things turn in to a shitshow really quickly when six-figure bills start raining in from oncology, your for-profit insurer starts denying claims after you've cleared the massive $5,000 deductible and $6,250 out-of-pocket maximum, you're technically "self-employed" and have no access to employee protections like paid sick time or FMLA, every bad health day you have is another couple hundred dollars foregone that could have gone to medical bills, and then the IRS piles on with self-employment tax to add insult to (literal) injury. Disruption in the US health care system would be great; until that happens, my excitement over having cat litter delivered to my door in an hour or less will, sadly, be dampened by the fact that some Americans are literally doing their own minor surgeries over a bathroom sink right now. Wart removal is a really common one, presumably because it routinely bills out $250-$350 per visit in larger practices, and the typical visit count is high.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    Your an employee with cancer, and your for profit insurance still deny's your insurance, you quickly run out of paid and unpaid leave through the FMLA and your still up shit creek with cancer. The employee designation doesn't seem much better as far as I know. The real problem are laws that try to offload welfare to employers when it should be paid through a govt. tax system. You have to take whatever IC income you get and divide it by 1.4 to get the equivalent pay as an employee after benefits. How is it like for people with no savings on medicaid or mediCAL?
    - facetube 11y ago
      Being an employee in the US can, in some cases, help preserve both your job and your employer-facilitated health insurance while you're sick. The company needs to have 50 or more employees for it to apply, IIRC, and you need to have worked there for at least a year. There are slightly more generous laws in some states. It's quite close to nothing, but still slightly better than nothing. I definitely agree that employment (or lack thereof) should have nothing to do with health care.
  - j-pb 11y ago
hittaruki 11y ago
As a developer my experience has been the direct opposite. Getting my first job at a startup was a the best decision for me. I think I have more width (rather than depth) of knowledge because of it, (since I worked in wider verity of roles). Maybe for a designer this is different. Probably the title should point this out?
- rizzin 11y ago
  I'm with you here. After working at a startup for 1.5 years I became a solid full stack developer with the ability to very quickly adapt to the current task. There's a point about going "wide" instead of "deep" in the article, and I can surely say that working at that startup gave more "wide" than anything else. And by the way, at the job where I am at the moment, I had to use a severely limited skillset and had to use a couple of same technologies all over the place.
- bdcravens 11y ago
  Many startups see development as the product, and design as the pretty.
jaimex2 11y ago
More like 8 ways to become another drone.
joshkpeterson 11y ago
This article is aimed at designers, and maybe it makes good points for them. But for developers beginning their careers at a startup, most of these points just don't apply. I cut my teeth at an early startup, and just for example: people taught me how to be a better developer (#2), I went wider rather than deeper (#3), and I had a great mentor (#4).
tylercubell 11y ago
Also relevant: Fuck You, Pay Me by Mike Monteiro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
- gedrap 11y ago
  Although it's a good advice, I can't really see how is it relevant.
vincentbarr 11y ago
While I agree with some of the author's points, such as considering your tolerance/appetite for working within a chaotic environment before joining a startup, the article seems less about deciding whether to take a startup job and more about why one should choose to work at an agency instead of in-house for their first role. >4. You need to be going wider than deep right now. The author's argument is roughly that working a at a startup is limiting because you will work only a single problem because a startup is focused on solving only a single problem. I disagree. 1. A company that seeks to solve a single problem is a company that has focus; I would argue that many startups lack focus. Many startups do not know the specific problem that they are solving nor for whom. Much time is spent on product/market fit. So, I disagree with the premise that startups are solving for a single problem. Successful ones do, yes, and that brings me to (2). 2. The idea that you will work more broadly at a successful, time-tested company than you would at a startup does not seem accurate. Startups are known for allowing people to wear many hats for a reason (because they often require people to wear many hats). For individual contributors, roles at a Fortune 50 company will be far more specialized – and opportunities to join projects even slightly outside your domain of expertise will be far less prevalent. This is why I think the argument is really about in-house vs. agency work. Agency work will teach you their methods and provide you with exposure to a range of clients and industries, sure. 3. The premise that because your startup is focused on solving a single problem, you will not get to work on a variety of problems or get to 'try different things' makes me scratch my head... If only solving a problem were that simple, that efficient!
- zer00eyz 11y ago
  I think your criticisms of the explanation given are valid, but there is something to be said for breath vs depth. Programing and design are both hard in their own way, but fundamentally they are a skill you can hone. Once you have mastered those skills the rest of it becomes understanding your companies domain. As an example from a programers perspective it is fair to say that every system that deals with money interfaces with accounting. I have been in enough places and exposed to enough systems, that I understand that these things will need to happen, and how they need to happen. I also understand how to speak with the accountants to make sure the data they are getting is what they wanted or expected. It was only by seeing this repeatedly that the patterns and language became clear to me. I think it takes time to become a proficient coder in a professional setting, as well as understanding the language and needs that are common to almost every business. If your busy learning how to do your job, and how to deal with the person in accounting, and trying to focus on your startups domain it might get a bit overwhelming.
guelo 11y ago
At a startup you'll have way more responsibility and be making decisions at a much higher level than at bigcorp. You'll learn way more, move much faster, wear more hats. It's not even close. That mentor will put you on some narrow meaningless tasks, especially if you have some talent because then he'll be afraid of you. I'd advise the opposite, go startup when you're young and have less to risk and more to prove. If you have the energy and the talent you can run circles around the big guys.
- eropple 11y ago
  I consult for companies from ten-person startups to a few thousand employees, and, from my perspective, it's all the same thing. While everybody pretends their particular organization size and type is supreme, it all comes out in the wash. Sure, startups move marginally faster. The time for reflection and self-analysis is lesser and most people seem to get less out of what they do, learn less from their mistakes, have generally poorer leadership that can't devote the time to helping more inexperienced employees learn the lessons they should learn from those mistakes and help them grow both as practitioners of a craft and as human beings. And I'm gonna be honest: the assumption that a mentor has fear-based motives for ensuring that your work has greater benefits than the risk it poses is so utterly unrelated to reality in the general case, so monstrously projective and in itself pathologically fear-based, that I have trouble believing somebody would state it in good faith as such a universality. (To the newbie: your highly-self-regarded work is risky. Unknown commodities are always risky. If you are not analyzing your actions as a leader through the lens of risk, you are a bad leader. Many startups don't do this. They have bad leaders, too. But the understanding of and formalization of this is not something taught to entry-level employees at that move-fast-die-fast startup, because all too often, nobody else knows about it either.) This is not to say that there are not startups where one can learn and thrive, because obviously they exist in some proportion. I would say, and the failure rates of startups and the it-was-my-first-job candidates I've seen ejected from the crashing wrecks strongly push me in this direction, that it certainly seems significantly harder to learn how to be directed and effective (as opposed to thrashy and high-effort) in such an environment. But it's certainly possible. Nor would I say that there isn't a very good time to leave a big company--I bailed two years to the day and probably stayed six months longer than I needed to in order to be a good engineer rather than a good coder. But there is no generalization that holds, in either direction, as universally as your post asserts, and the assumption of such is foolish.
jarjoura 11y ago
I don't know, because I'm an engineer, but what I learned from Apple, was not the work I was doing, but it was from being surrounded by such brilliance. I would go to lunch (or dinner) with the guy who wrote the javascript engine. Or pop into the office, during a beer bash, of the engineer who wrote the original UIScrollView and pick his brain about why they did things a certain way. The actual day to day work though, was pretty routine. I was mostly fixing bugs and rebuilding parts of features that had to ship in yearly timelines. Every project I worked on that wasn't canceled was spent in refactor mode for a good portion of the year. Let's rewrite this for 64-bit for example, or let's rework this for this new framework. The actual customer should never notice a change in the product, and usually the visual changes are subtle if any. Lucky few got to work on the shiny demo-able new features and even fewer lucky folks got to lead teams from their new products. Lastly, most of the tooling that I got really good at and used to great advantage was proprietary except for Xcode and Instruments. :( So leaving to go to a startup I literally had to learn a whole new set of tools and APIs. Then again, I learned so much more about how to build a product from the ground up at a small 11 person startup than I ever did at Apple. At a company like Apple, I gained skills adding a feature to an existing product. At a startup, I gained skills building a product from nothing but an idea.
- onion2k 11y ago
  At a company like Apple, I gained skills adding a feature to an existing product. At a startup, I gained skills building a product from nothing but an idea. Being able to take an idea and turn it in to a product is a brilliant skill that startups absolutely need, but equally, once the product is out there being used, you need the other skill set to maintain the product and add new things without annoying the users. Having people around who can do both is exceptionally useful because it means the team continues to do productive work for much longer without having to bring new people in. To that end, I always recommend people get at least a few years experience at an established company before joining a startup.
  - sown 11y ago
    > Being able to take an idea and turn it in to a product is a brilliant skill that startups absolutely need, but equally, once the product is out there being used, you need the other skill set to maintain the product and add new things without annoying the users. But guess who gets the glory? :(
trustfundbaby 11y ago
I hate to tell you this, but right now the startup world, or at least the ones making the majority of the noise, have their heads up their own ass and don’t realize it stinks. They’re solving problems for the top 5% of the population. How can I get poor people to do my chores? How can I get people to drive me around without having to pay them health insurance? How can a drone deliver my toilet paper within 15 minutes while the person who fulfilled my order sits at her desk crying because she’s working a 15-hour day and can’t take time off to get that lump in her chest looked at. This is known as the service economy. Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life. ------ so. fucking. real.
Animats 11y ago
From the article: "I hate to tell you this, but right now the startup world, or at least the ones making the majority of the noise, have their heads up their own ass and don’t realize it stinks. They’re solving problems for the top 5% of the population. How can I get poor people to do my chores? How can I get people to drive me around without having to pay them health insurance? How can a drone deliver my toilet paper within 15 minutes while the person who fulfilled my order sits at her desk crying because she’s working a 15-hour day and can’t take time off to get that lump in her chest looked at. This is known as the service economy. Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life." YCombinator company list: http://yclist.com/ http://yclist.com/ How many of those fit the above criteria?
- collyw 11y ago
  he does say "or at least the ones making the most noise".
- lucasnemeth 11y ago
  I find the rant of the article exaggerated and ridiculous. But actually a lot of those companies do fit the criteria.
enra 11y ago
I think this rings somewhat true designers. However like any advice, it's very generalized and won't necessarily apply. I definitely learned a lot working as a freelancer and in a agency solving different kinds of problems. The startup problem set is usually narrow with variety of random things. Many startups are also not that willing to actually invest in design (time or money wise), and it might not even make sense since they are just trying not to die. Many startups are not also not founded by designers, and won't really understand design which also makes it harder to learn or practice good design. (As devs, think about a startup founded by sales MBAs and try to teach them good dev practices and make them understand what it is the value in it.) I've also never worked at a startup where I could see someone as my design mentor. Most of the time, you will just have to figure things out by yourself. I'd still say that you learn a lot at a startup, and it can be a good place for junior or more senior designers. It's about creating and nurturing one overall experience and product and learning as you go. To do and learn good design, as a junior design, the team you're joining matters a lot, as a senior designer, the management matters a lot.
unabst 11y ago
Let's not forget for whom we work. Replace the word startup with "that one inspired guy trying really really hard to accomplish something awesome who's personally asking you for help" and I think the post reads a bit differently. Like, do you buy their vision and feel the awesome vibes there? This rules out #5 and #6 and #8 as motivation. With what's on the line at startups, I doubt you'd even get an offer if they didn't think you were ready. This rules out #1 through #4. Reason #7 seems more to me as reason for than against working for a startup. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... aren't places to go either to "solve real problems" as a designer. Or am I missing something?
mikkom 11y ago
Please note: This advice is for designers who have just graduated from art school. The answers are for question: "Q: I graduated from school this year and I’ve been looking for my first job. After interviewing around, I finally got a job offer at a small startup. How do I decide if it’s the right offer to take?"
spamizbad 11y ago
Boy do I disagree with these. You're probably going to see more senior Agency people grumbling about startups for two reasons: 1) Agencies are getting priced-out of the market for talented designers. Go on glassdoor and compare how much mid-level designers at agencies make compared to tech companies. It's close to double. As an aside, #7 is really rich. There are tons of design firms out there who utilize of 1099 designers (some with masters degrees!) who gross less than 38K a year for full-time work. Mike's Mule isn't one of those companies, but the design industry isn't without it's own 1099 abuses. 2) The startup world requires "product designers" who have a specific set of design skills that agencies aren't well equipped to provide. Namely- ongoing data-driven product development (as opposed to "Just enough research"), systemized/componentized view of design (as opposed to "The customer is always right/Take what I have created for you or I'll walk like Saul Bass"), and a more collaborative "agile" workflow (As opposed to waterfall). Based on my experience as an engineer working with agencies, they are reluctant to allow their designers to directly interact with engineering teams -- we always had a PM or an senior designer (who wasn't on our project) act as this mediator, putting us in a time-boxed meeting when in reality we just needed to sit down with 1 designer and just work through a few issues over <1 hour. Because of this, agencies aren't just losing talent: They're also losing potential clients. Startups tend to prefer tight-knit product teams, where the designer is (or at the very least SHOULD BE!) a major component.

102 points by tlo 11y ago

Waiting for the perfect time and feeling not competent enough without a patronage (i.e. points 1-3) are my biggest educational regrets. Sure, in startups there is a bias for being too independent and confident. But virtually all other places (including academia) are not good for skilled minds and independent spirits - they rather expect you to respect hierarchy and status quo. Surely, not everyone is mature enough to learn by trials and _erorrs_. But by listening to superiors one may never mature.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

This should really be "8 reasons to turn down that startup job as your first job" as most of the bullet points are really only geared towards someone in or leaving college. This should be obvious from the website's name but without context it took me a minute before I realized. That being said the #7 point of "The world needs fixing, not disrupting" seems to lose sight of what disruption really is and conflates it with simply taking advantage of people. Disruption fixes things. In fact I think one could easily argue that disruption fixes things far more effectively than anything else. Telling someone to go find "real problems to solve" is simply useless. I don't understand the point of trying to make the "service economy" a place "Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life". Sure there are issues in this area with SOME start-ups but going right into calling it a race issue without providing anything useful just screams useless rant. Just drop #7, rename to 7 reasons and update the HN title to make it more obvious of the target demographic. Just my thoughts.

fredkbloggs 11y ago
I agree with you 100%. You're going along reading a bunch of very reasonable and helpful advice, then BAM, politics, stereotyping, and class warfare! One can observe that most of the "problems" that today's startups are solving are not very interesting or inspiring without resorting to politically charged language and personal attacks (and for the record, I agree that the ideas he lists are silly at best). Have to give credit, though; he saved it for the end. If that's #1, I don't bother reading the rest and I would guess many others wouldn't either. So that's clever at least.
wyclif 11y ago
Thing is, #7 doesn't apply because he's referring to Amazon, and they are far, far away from startup territory. Sure, there are actual startups that have work/life balance issues that are as toxic (or more) as Amazon's, so I suppose it applies to them. I liked his other reasons, though.
facetube 11y ago
Honest question: have you ever worked a job in that service economy and fallen seriously ill? Things turn in to a shitshow really quickly when six-figure bills start raining in from oncology, your for-profit insurer starts denying claims after you've cleared the massive $5,000 deductible and $6,250 out-of-pocket maximum, you're technically "self-employed" and have no access to employee protections like paid sick time or FMLA, every bad health day you have is another couple hundred dollars foregone that could have gone to medical bills, and then the IRS piles on with self-employment tax to add insult to (literal) injury. Disruption in the US health care system would be great; until that happens, my excitement over having cat litter delivered to my door in an hour or less will, sadly, be dampened by the fact that some Americans are literally doing their own minor surgeries over a bathroom sink right now. Wart removal is a really common one, presumably because it routinely bills out $250-$350 per visit in larger practices, and the typical visit count is high.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  Your an employee with cancer, and your for profit insurance still deny's your insurance, you quickly run out of paid and unpaid leave through the FMLA and your still up shit creek with cancer. The employee designation doesn't seem much better as far as I know. The real problem are laws that try to offload welfare to employers when it should be paid through a govt. tax system. You have to take whatever IC income you get and divide it by 1.4 to get the equivalent pay as an employee after benefits. How is it like for people with no savings on medicaid or mediCAL?
  - facetube 11y ago
    Being an employee in the US can, in some cases, help preserve both your job and your employer-facilitated health insurance while you're sick. The company needs to have 50 or more employees for it to apply, IIRC, and you need to have worked there for at least a year. There are slightly more generous laws in some states. It's quite close to nothing, but still slightly better than nothing. I definitely agree that employment (or lack thereof) should have nothing to do with health care.
- j-pb 11y ago

hittaruki 11y ago

As a developer my experience has been the direct opposite. Getting my first job at a startup was a the best decision for me. I think I have more width (rather than depth) of knowledge because of it, (since I worked in wider verity of roles). Maybe for a designer this is different. Probably the title should point this out?

rizzin 11y ago
I'm with you here. After working at a startup for 1.5 years I became a solid full stack developer with the ability to very quickly adapt to the current task. There's a point about going "wide" instead of "deep" in the article, and I can surely say that working at that startup gave more "wide" than anything else. And by the way, at the job where I am at the moment, I had to use a severely limited skillset and had to use a couple of same technologies all over the place.
bdcravens 11y ago
Many startups see development as the product, and design as the pretty.

jaimex2 11y ago

More like 8 ways to become another drone.

joshkpeterson 11y ago

This article is aimed at designers, and maybe it makes good points for them. But for developers beginning their careers at a startup, most of these points just don't apply. I cut my teeth at an early startup, and just for example: people taught me how to be a better developer (#2), I went wider rather than deeper (#3), and I had a great mentor (#4).

tylercubell 11y ago

Also relevant: Fuck You, Pay Me by Mike Monteiro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

gedrap 11y ago
Although it's a good advice, I can't really see how is it relevant.

vincentbarr 11y ago

While I agree with some of the author's points, such as considering your tolerance/appetite for working within a chaotic environment before joining a startup, the article seems less about deciding whether to take a startup job and more about why one should choose to work at an agency instead of in-house for their first role. >4. You need to be going wider than deep right now. The author's argument is roughly that working a at a startup is limiting because you will work only a single problem because a startup is focused on solving only a single problem. I disagree. 1. A company that seeks to solve a single problem is a company that has focus; I would argue that many startups lack focus. Many startups do not know the specific problem that they are solving nor for whom. Much time is spent on product/market fit. So, I disagree with the premise that startups are solving for a single problem. Successful ones do, yes, and that brings me to (2). 2. The idea that you will work more broadly at a successful, time-tested company than you would at a startup does not seem accurate. Startups are known for allowing people to wear many hats for a reason (because they often require people to wear many hats). For individual contributors, roles at a Fortune 50 company will be far more specialized – and opportunities to join projects even slightly outside your domain of expertise will be far less prevalent. This is why I think the argument is really about in-house vs. agency work. Agency work will teach you their methods and provide you with exposure to a range of clients and industries, sure. 3. The premise that because your startup is focused on solving a single problem, you will not get to work on a variety of problems or get to 'try different things' makes me scratch my head... If only solving a problem were that simple, that efficient!

zer00eyz 11y ago
I think your criticisms of the explanation given are valid, but there is something to be said for breath vs depth. Programing and design are both hard in their own way, but fundamentally they are a skill you can hone. Once you have mastered those skills the rest of it becomes understanding your companies domain. As an example from a programers perspective it is fair to say that every system that deals with money interfaces with accounting. I have been in enough places and exposed to enough systems, that I understand that these things will need to happen, and how they need to happen. I also understand how to speak with the accountants to make sure the data they are getting is what they wanted or expected. It was only by seeing this repeatedly that the patterns and language became clear to me. I think it takes time to become a proficient coder in a professional setting, as well as understanding the language and needs that are common to almost every business. If your busy learning how to do your job, and how to deal with the person in accounting, and trying to focus on your startups domain it might get a bit overwhelming.

guelo 11y ago

At a startup you'll have way more responsibility and be making decisions at a much higher level than at bigcorp. You'll learn way more, move much faster, wear more hats. It's not even close. That mentor will put you on some narrow meaningless tasks, especially if you have some talent because then he'll be afraid of you. I'd advise the opposite, go startup when you're young and have less to risk and more to prove. If you have the energy and the talent you can run circles around the big guys.

eropple 11y ago
I consult for companies from ten-person startups to a few thousand employees, and, from my perspective, it's all the same thing. While everybody pretends their particular organization size and type is supreme, it all comes out in the wash. Sure, startups move marginally faster. The time for reflection and self-analysis is lesser and most people seem to get less out of what they do, learn less from their mistakes, have generally poorer leadership that can't devote the time to helping more inexperienced employees learn the lessons they should learn from those mistakes and help them grow both as practitioners of a craft and as human beings. And I'm gonna be honest: the assumption that a mentor has fear-based motives for ensuring that your work has greater benefits than the risk it poses is so utterly unrelated to reality in the general case, so monstrously projective and in itself pathologically fear-based, that I have trouble believing somebody would state it in good faith as such a universality. (To the newbie: your highly-self-regarded work is risky. Unknown commodities are always risky. If you are not analyzing your actions as a leader through the lens of risk, you are a bad leader. Many startups don't do this. They have bad leaders, too. But the understanding of and formalization of this is not something taught to entry-level employees at that move-fast-die-fast startup, because all too often, nobody else knows about it either.) This is not to say that there are not startups where one can learn and thrive, because obviously they exist in some proportion. I would say, and the failure rates of startups and the it-was-my-first-job candidates I've seen ejected from the crashing wrecks strongly push me in this direction, that it certainly seems significantly harder to learn how to be directed and effective (as opposed to thrashy and high-effort) in such an environment. But it's certainly possible. Nor would I say that there isn't a very good time to leave a big company--I bailed two years to the day and probably stayed six months longer than I needed to in order to be a good engineer rather than a good coder. But there is no generalization that holds, in either direction, as universally as your post asserts, and the assumption of such is foolish.

jarjoura 11y ago

I don't know, because I'm an engineer, but what I learned from Apple, was not the work I was doing, but it was from being surrounded by such brilliance. I would go to lunch (or dinner) with the guy who wrote the javascript engine. Or pop into the office, during a beer bash, of the engineer who wrote the original UIScrollView and pick his brain about why they did things a certain way. The actual day to day work though, was pretty routine. I was mostly fixing bugs and rebuilding parts of features that had to ship in yearly timelines. Every project I worked on that wasn't canceled was spent in refactor mode for a good portion of the year. Let's rewrite this for 64-bit for example, or let's rework this for this new framework. The actual customer should never notice a change in the product, and usually the visual changes are subtle if any. Lucky few got to work on the shiny demo-able new features and even fewer lucky folks got to lead teams from their new products. Lastly, most of the tooling that I got really good at and used to great advantage was proprietary except for Xcode and Instruments. :( So leaving to go to a startup I literally had to learn a whole new set of tools and APIs. Then again, I learned so much more about how to build a product from the ground up at a small 11 person startup than I ever did at Apple. At a company like Apple, I gained skills adding a feature to an existing product. At a startup, I gained skills building a product from nothing but an idea.

onion2k 11y ago
At a company like Apple, I gained skills adding a feature to an existing product. At a startup, I gained skills building a product from nothing but an idea. Being able to take an idea and turn it in to a product is a brilliant skill that startups absolutely need, but equally, once the product is out there being used, you need the other skill set to maintain the product and add new things without annoying the users. Having people around who can do both is exceptionally useful because it means the team continues to do productive work for much longer without having to bring new people in. To that end, I always recommend people get at least a few years experience at an established company before joining a startup.
- sown 11y ago
  > Being able to take an idea and turn it in to a product is a brilliant skill that startups absolutely need, but equally, once the product is out there being used, you need the other skill set to maintain the product and add new things without annoying the users. But guess who gets the glory? :(

trustfundbaby 11y ago

I hate to tell you this, but right now the startup world, or at least the ones making the majority of the noise, have their heads up their own ass and don’t realize it stinks. They’re solving problems for the top 5% of the population. How can I get poor people to do my chores? How can I get people to drive me around without having to pay them health insurance? How can a drone deliver my toilet paper within 15 minutes while the person who fulfilled my order sits at her desk crying because she’s working a 15-hour day and can’t take time off to get that lump in her chest looked at. This is known as the service economy. Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life. ------ so. fucking. real.

Animats 11y ago

From the article: "I hate to tell you this, but right now the startup world, or at least the ones making the majority of the noise, have their heads up their own ass and don’t realize it stinks. They’re solving problems for the top 5% of the population. How can I get poor people to do my chores? How can I get people to drive me around without having to pay them health insurance? How can a drone deliver my toilet paper within 15 minutes while the person who fulfilled my order sits at her desk crying because she’s working a 15-hour day and can’t take time off to get that lump in her chest looked at. This is known as the service economy. Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life." YCombinator company list: http://yclist.com/ http://yclist.com/ How many of those fit the above criteria?

collyw 11y ago
he does say "or at least the ones making the most noise".
lucasnemeth 11y ago
I find the rant of the article exaggerated and ridiculous. But actually a lot of those companies do fit the criteria.

enra 11y ago

I think this rings somewhat true designers. However like any advice, it's very generalized and won't necessarily apply. I definitely learned a lot working as a freelancer and in a agency solving different kinds of problems. The startup problem set is usually narrow with variety of random things. Many startups are also not that willing to actually invest in design (time or money wise), and it might not even make sense since they are just trying not to die. Many startups are not also not founded by designers, and won't really understand design which also makes it harder to learn or practice good design. (As devs, think about a startup founded by sales MBAs and try to teach them good dev practices and make them understand what it is the value in it.) I've also never worked at a startup where I could see someone as my design mentor. Most of the time, you will just have to figure things out by yourself. I'd still say that you learn a lot at a startup, and it can be a good place for junior or more senior designers. It's about creating and nurturing one overall experience and product and learning as you go. To do and learn good design, as a junior design, the team you're joining matters a lot, as a senior designer, the management matters a lot.

unabst 11y ago

Let's not forget for whom we work. Replace the word startup with "that one inspired guy trying really really hard to accomplish something awesome who's personally asking you for help" and I think the post reads a bit differently. Like, do you buy their vision and feel the awesome vibes there? This rules out #5 and #6 and #8 as motivation. With what's on the line at startups, I doubt you'd even get an offer if they didn't think you were ready. This rules out #1 through #4. Reason #7 seems more to me as reason for than against working for a startup. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... aren't places to go either to "solve real problems" as a designer. Or am I missing something?

mikkom 11y ago

Please note: This advice is for designers who have just graduated from art school. The answers are for question: "Q: I graduated from school this year and I’ve been looking for my first job. After interviewing around, I finally got a job offer at a small startup. How do I decide if it’s the right offer to take?"

spamizbad 11y ago

Boy do I disagree with these. You're probably going to see more senior Agency people grumbling about startups for two reasons: 1) Agencies are getting priced-out of the market for talented designers. Go on glassdoor and compare how much mid-level designers at agencies make compared to tech companies. It's close to double. As an aside, #7 is really rich. There are tons of design firms out there who utilize of 1099 designers (some with masters degrees!) who gross less than 38K a year for full-time work. Mike's Mule isn't one of those companies, but the design industry isn't without it's own 1099 abuses. 2) The startup world requires "product designers" who have a specific set of design skills that agencies aren't well equipped to provide. Namely- ongoing data-driven product development (as opposed to "Just enough research"), systemized/componentized view of design (as opposed to "The customer is always right/Take what I have created for you or I'll walk like Saul Bass"), and a more collaborative "agile" workflow (As opposed to waterfall). Based on my experience as an engineer working with agencies, they are reluctant to allow their designers to directly interact with engineering teams -- we always had a PM or an senior designer (who wasn't on our project) act as this mediator, putting us in a time-boxed meeting when in reality we just needed to sit down with 1 designer and just work through a few issues over <1 hour. Because of this, agencies aren't just losing talent: They're also losing potential clients. Startups tend to prefer tight-knit product teams, where the designer is (or at the very least SHOULD BE!) a major component.