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FWIW: I kind of feel the opposite. Or at least I think the experience is a real trade-off. The skills I gained as a first employee at a startup were more along
by sanderjd 8y ago
FWIW: I kind of feel the opposite. Or at least I think the experience is a real trade-off. The skills I gained as a first employee at a startup were more along the lines of business and marketing. The engineering skills required were pretty trivial: manage a small Heroku setup, write early backend and frontend app boilerplate, spin up an initial db schema, integrate CSS from a contract designer, work on email templates, set up analytics, etc. Most startups never get big enough to start hitting the really tough challenges. On the other side of the coin, when I joined a big four company, I was immediately dropped onto a team with the challenges that come with huge scale and have grown more from that experience. I may have a skewed perspective because I already learned most of the skills I exercised as a first employee by being an early member of a team at an established small company, but I think even so the point stands; I was able to grow similarly with a bit more pay and a lot more stability without being at a startup. You're right about meeting investors though, but I'd argue that having a network of investors is not (or at least should not be) a requirement to be a software professional.
- autotune 8y agoThe more interesting skills someone learns when implementing Heroku is when they learn it doesn't scale and the challenges in migrating off of it.
- davidjnelson 8y agohaha! sadly true. I really wish they had the equivalent of aurora serverless.
- autotune 8y agoEven if they did whichever startups that end up using it would have to get a few more funding rounds :)
- davidjnelson 8y agoYou mean heroku because of the excessive cost of over-provisioning their db plans to support traffic spikes with new products?
- autotune 8y agoYes indeed. Have worked with several clients and chatted with several startups that ultimately decide to migrate off due to extremely high cost as they grow relative to other platforms.
- eldavido 8y agoI'm curious what language and data stack they're using? Asking because I've seen real scale (billions of devices running our software) and the real leverage is in how you architect your application (software and how the data is stored, retrieved, moves around) and things like choice of language. Not where it's hosted. Languages like Python and Ruby are just grossly inefficient. Single-threaded, huge memory profiles, and fully synchronous I/O. Whereas in C#, Tasks and async/await probably provide no shit 10-100x the performance in both compute and concurrency. It would probably be the same deal with Go or Java. The point is, we tend to hand-wave these kind of choices away on HN. "Just ship it, language doesn't matter". But increasingly, I think it does. You want to make a product with an aggressive free tier, where only like 1% of the user base pays, or some data-heavy analytics thing, these kinds of decisions can be make or break for a business.
- autotune 8y agoThis isn't just one startup, these are multiple startups I have talked to that all end up deciding to move off the platform due to cost. Solid containers orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are slowly reducing the need to have one specific cloud platform, but cost control is still extremely relevant with architecture design choices. As far as language is concerned, Ruby and Ruby on Rails is the usual choice with Heroku and is marketed specifically towards RoR devs (https://www.heroku.com/ruby https://www.heroku.com/ruby) and Postgres as db. Most startups who decide to go the RoR route are not going to decide to go with C# as far as the Microsoft ecosystem is concerned, which would be a different set of architecture design choices. If you wanted to market a more performant alternative Go would 100 percent be the way to do it. I would still somewhat disagree with your conclusion that language choice is imperative though, so much as how well you architect your application and infrastructure. A simple RoR app that pulls in a bunch of static assets from an S3 bucket is going to scale at whatever load compared to an ETL tool like Airflow that might need to process terabytes of data on a daily basis and has to have more planning from the start.
- sanderjd 8y agoYep, this is largely consistent with my experience.