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So after your startup experience, somebody will shell out the big bucks to pay for your experience and professional growth? Or is it just that you can write mor

So after your startup experience, somebody will shell out the big bucks to pay for your experience and professional growth? Or is it just that you can write more deep sounding blog articles in the future?

dmichulke 11y ago
If you're asking whether companies pay more for you as an employee, I don't think so. Sometimes I even get the feeling that they like you less because you might be a threat to management (since you typically ask them about IT and the business aspects of what they do) But if you ask whether they give you more money because you are now in another relationship with them (consulting?), then absolutely, yes.
- eli 11y ago
  I'd be wary of employers who seem uncomfortable answering questions about the business side of the company.
  - delphinius81 11y ago
    Same. If you get the impression management feels threatened by your skills and experience, it is not a place you should work at. Management should recognize what you can bring to the company at an individual and corporate level and groom you for a tech/business leadership role. If a company isn't prepared to do that, then they probably just want to use you.
golergka 11y ago
Yes. In my experience, they will. People who hired me (or offered to do so) told me, directly, that having this experience was a competitive advantage in their eyes. It's one thing to hire just a developer. It's another thing to hire a developer who knows first-hand what's it like to run a startup, what's important for management and what concerns do they have.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  It might be a competitive advantage relative to a random, older company that isn't well-respected in the tech industry, but compared to working at an Amagoobooksoft, I think you'd be at a disadvantage.
  - golergka 11y ago
    Google or Facebook — may be, they're known for their exceptional engineer culture. But Amazon and other beurocracy-heavy companies with manager-oriented culture look like a disadvantage in the CV to me.
johanneskanybal 11y ago
Apart from the fact that not everything is about money, yes, more often than not it will be a great thing when landing new jobs.
hibikir 11y ago
If you prove you are actually any good, yes. This is also true if you worked at a place that is small, but not a startup. The best decision I made in my career was to ride the 2003 recession in a small catalog company that wrote its own code and wanted to grow. Since they were that small, I had responsibilities that had nothing to do with what people of my experience had to do in big companies. I was making stack and architectural decisions quickly. Since we didn't have an army of people, I had to do infrastructure, project proposals, requirements gathering, database administration, and decisions on stack changes. We just couldn't afford specialists. My pay was not exactly competitive, but when I left for a bigger company, I had major advantages over my coworkers, because I had such a breadth of experience compared to them, pigeonholed in roles that did a lot less, and never had to care about what was good for the business, just doing what the next guy in the totem pole said. Your idea of big bucks might be different from mine, but making over 300k in the Midwest sounds pretty good to me. And it's not just my story: The rest of the people in that team are all doing extremely well. One is a senior architect in a cloud provider. Another is a pretty big conference speaker. The last one is the top technical gun in a consulting firm. All my friends that didn't take risks to go for better experience are doing far less interesting work, for far less money. That said, a startup just makes it easier to get a job that teaches the right things. If all you end up doing is writing a web app in Rails, you might as well do that in a bigger place that pays better. It's not really about the office being cool, or thinking the company has a good chance at making it, but about finding ways to get a competitive advantage over other developers for the long haul.
- vfc1 11y ago
  +100 corporate experience in big fish companies is completely overrated, people learn a LOT more in a smaller companies.
  - barrkel 11y ago
    You learn broad in a small company and deep in a big company. Which is better depends entirely on the problem.
- smiley325 11y ago

dmichulke 11y ago

If you're asking whether companies pay more for you as an employee, I don't think so. Sometimes I even get the feeling that they like you less because you might be a threat to management (since you typically ask them about IT and the business aspects of what they do) But if you ask whether they give you more money because you are now in another relationship with them (consulting?), then absolutely, yes.

eli 11y ago
I'd be wary of employers who seem uncomfortable answering questions about the business side of the company.
- delphinius81 11y ago
  Same. If you get the impression management feels threatened by your skills and experience, it is not a place you should work at. Management should recognize what you can bring to the company at an individual and corporate level and groom you for a tech/business leadership role. If a company isn't prepared to do that, then they probably just want to use you.

golergka 11y ago

Yes. In my experience, they will. People who hired me (or offered to do so) told me, directly, that having this experience was a competitive advantage in their eyes. It's one thing to hire just a developer. It's another thing to hire a developer who knows first-hand what's it like to run a startup, what's important for management and what concerns do they have.

w1ntermute 11y ago
It might be a competitive advantage relative to a random, older company that isn't well-respected in the tech industry, but compared to working at an Amagoobooksoft, I think you'd be at a disadvantage.
- golergka 11y ago
  Google or Facebook — may be, they're known for their exceptional engineer culture. But Amazon and other beurocracy-heavy companies with manager-oriented culture look like a disadvantage in the CV to me.

johanneskanybal 11y ago

Apart from the fact that not everything is about money, yes, more often than not it will be a great thing when landing new jobs.

hibikir 11y ago

If you prove you are actually any good, yes. This is also true if you worked at a place that is small, but not a startup. The best decision I made in my career was to ride the 2003 recession in a small catalog company that wrote its own code and wanted to grow. Since they were that small, I had responsibilities that had nothing to do with what people of my experience had to do in big companies. I was making stack and architectural decisions quickly. Since we didn't have an army of people, I had to do infrastructure, project proposals, requirements gathering, database administration, and decisions on stack changes. We just couldn't afford specialists. My pay was not exactly competitive, but when I left for a bigger company, I had major advantages over my coworkers, because I had such a breadth of experience compared to them, pigeonholed in roles that did a lot less, and never had to care about what was good for the business, just doing what the next guy in the totem pole said. Your idea of big bucks might be different from mine, but making over 300k in the Midwest sounds pretty good to me. And it's not just my story: The rest of the people in that team are all doing extremely well. One is a senior architect in a cloud provider. Another is a pretty big conference speaker. The last one is the top technical gun in a consulting firm. All my friends that didn't take risks to go for better experience are doing far less interesting work, for far less money. That said, a startup just makes it easier to get a job that teaches the right things. If all you end up doing is writing a web app in Rails, you might as well do that in a bigger place that pays better. It's not really about the office being cool, or thinking the company has a good chance at making it, but about finding ways to get a competitive advantage over other developers for the long haul.

vfc1 11y ago
+100 corporate experience in big fish companies is completely overrated, people learn a LOT more in a smaller companies.
- barrkel 11y ago
  You learn broad in a small company and deep in a big company. Which is better depends entirely on the problem.
smiley325 11y ago