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I’m not so sure. At least, running a does-nothing start-up is not likely to be seen as work experience in terms of applying to standard CS jobs. It may even be

by mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I’m not so sure. At least, running a does-nothing start-up is not likely to be seen as work experience in terms of applying to standard CS jobs. It may even be seen as a liability (e.g. “they clearly want to be the CEO / develop a product, how sure are we they will be invested in production quality software / craftsmanship / answering PagerDuty on the weekend?”). I also see a lot of resumes of people just out of college who were rapidly catapulted into some incubator / start-up camp etc. They often have had endless bullet points about “running a business” for ~2 years basically just burning someone else’s money. Do they know the first thing about working 40-50 hours per week grinding through Jira tickets and code review? I don’t believe it. A completely pure new grad who never tried to run a start-up on zero life experience is frankly a lot more likely to put energy and enthusiasm into the basic, unsexy realities of working a real job.

opportune 7y ago
This makes sense to me. I was envisioning more a scenario where you spend some time in the big corporate world before going to a startup, and bringing best practices with you. But I suppose in the context of the thread that’s not exactly relevant. I think if they were managing other engineers for an extended period and solving difficult technical problems as well, you could make an argument for hiring up to a team lead / senior engineer. Perhaps manager, if they have more extensive experience. Of course at most FAANGy places you will need at least 4-6yoe to be hired into these levels too. I think the people sending you those resumes probably don’t understand that they should tailor their resumes for the type of job they’re applying for. And yes, if the startup was truly “does-nothing” that’s absolutely a red mark regarding how valuable their experience was. But it could be somewhat valuable for product work, at least at the entry level

opportune 7y ago

This makes sense to me. I was envisioning more a scenario where you spend some time in the big corporate world before going to a startup, and bringing best practices with you. But I suppose in the context of the thread that’s not exactly relevant. I think if they were managing other engineers for an extended period and solving difficult technical problems as well, you could make an argument for hiring up to a team lead / senior engineer. Perhaps manager, if they have more extensive experience. Of course at most FAANGy places you will need at least 4-6yoe to be hired into these levels too. I think the people sending you those resumes probably don’t understand that they should tailor their resumes for the type of job they’re applying for. And yes, if the startup was truly “does-nothing” that’s absolutely a red mark regarding how valuable their experience was. But it could be somewhat valuable for product work, at least at the entry level