9 ms·

Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup

90 points by RandallBrown 15y ago

benjaminwootton 15y ago
If you can find a good company and a day job where you have lots of freedom and control, potential to build something great, minimum corporate politics, and the ability to concentrate on building interesting stuff, that does indeed sound fantastic and in some ways more tempting than a startup. However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing. It sounds like it would be a pretty small jump.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing. You mean climb the technical ladder? Because if you're already in a great company environment, that's exactly what the technical ladder is for.
DaniFong 15y ago
"But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email. If I forgot to pay my companies electric bill the consequences are a little more severe." Huh. Maybe this is just a difference in outlook, but if I were forced to log my hours it would probably either send me into a fury or the depths of despair. Actually, more likely, I'd quit. Or be fired. It's happened before. Yet I have basically no problem having no safety net, and taking responsibility for my employees, millions of dollars, and the fate of the planet. Weird. The only discriminating factor I can see is that being forced to log hours makes me feel like a kid unworthy of trust. Any others? I feel like I've learned something about myself.
- RandallBrown 15y ago
  I was talking about doing estimations for tasks. It's a pretty normal "agile" thing to do. There's no trust issues, it's just a project management thing.
  - phillmv 15y ago
    How else do you know whether you're breaking even on a project?
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    It's still a ridiculous waste of time. It makes work about gaming the system and your boss (is it better to underestimate so he lets you do what you want, or overestimate so you don't get yelled at later?) rather than moving forward and getting shit done. It's inane, stupid stuff designed to make unimportant people feel important. A programmer who can't be trusted to control his own time shouldn't be hired in the first place.
    - imechura 15y ago
      I personally would not want a builder to home build a home with my money without a time and cost estimate. This is not about startups or established companies. If you don;t know what needs to happen for your vision to come to fruition and how much it is going to cost then you are leaving a lot chance. I just don't get why people are always complaining about estimates.
      - kamaal 15y ago
        Because they don't work. Even if you are out to build your home, the estimates given out to you are only going to good enough to win the contract from you. Nothing more. If you have ever built a home, you would have realized that the project generally went way out of budget and time. You can go back and look at what you had planned and estimated. You will also see that your execution was pretty close to the plan. But a lot of other things went wrong. It rained and all the sand got washed away. The cement company suddenly increased their prices. Something new came in, and suddenly you though a new bath fit was better than the old one. Things slip out of your hand one thing at a time. Workers get sick, attrition happens and all other sort things go wrong. And this is with things like construction, where not much thinking effort is required. Programming is more harder, The iterations of analyse, build, test, feedback, analyse... Take time, mistakes happen, you need to read, research etc. Unless you are a robot and work without any intelligent inputs and outside dependencies. No estimate ever has made sense.
mmj48 15y ago
Minified: Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup? Stability and lack of passion. --- Two good reasons, however, not too insightful (subjective).
- imechura 15y ago
  lack of passion... IMO, That is a narrow view. What is the goal here, start-up or business? If the goal is startup you may find that it never stops trying to start. There are great established companies to work for and great startups to work for. There are also terrible established companies to work for and terrible startups to work for. I would also like to note that at good, established corporations there are two kinds of technical staff. The passionate kind with a decent mix of technical skills, business acumen and communication skills who work hard,are presented with interesting opportunities and are rewarded for their hard work, and the other kind who seam to always be complaining about the corporate environment and how it is holding them back. Often the "other kind" possesses adequate technical skills but has not taken the time to develop the business acumen and communication skills necessary to be proficient in a high-stakes business. The first type will strive at any business whether established or start-up. The second type will likewise exhibit similar performance no matter the established date stamped on the business's letterhead.
  - mmj48 15y ago
    Are you replying to me or the article?
zavulon 15y ago
"Stability is a huge benefit of a regular full time job" That's a myth. While being an employee, there's no stability whatsoever. You can get fired any time - get laid off, become a victim of corporate politics, or get fired for whatever other reason. Just last month, someone I know got fired on the spot after 15 years at a company for not reporting some personal stuff between other employees.. something he wasn't involved with, at all. I'm sure everyone else heard stories of people being thrown out after 10-20-30 years of loyal service to the company for bullshit reasons. At the same time, when you run a business, you can't ever get fired, and everything depends on you. Whether you make money, or lose money - it's for the most part, your doing (market circumstances nonwithstanding). That's why running a business is a lot more of a stable job than working for the man.
- alain94040 15y ago
  I understand your argument, but I believe it's still statistically incorrect. I don't have research to back it up, but I'm faily confident that full-time employees are more likely to have a job a year from now with same or higher income, than startup entrepreneurs. Yes, accidents can happen to everyone. You can get fired. Your startup can fail. Somehow, startups seem to fail more often than large companies. They fail in slow motion, us at startups fail fast.
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    I'm faily confident that full-time employees are more likely to have a job a year from now with same or higher income, than startup entrepreneurs. I'm pretty sure that on "same or higher income", entrepreneurs have better 1-year odds-- because their incomes are a lot lower.
    - loganfrederick 15y ago
      He means Expected Value I think. Average out all the entrepreneurs and their income today, compare that to their expected value in a year, and then compare that to the expected value of all full-time employees. Of course this is a really vague metric created by the parent post, but his/her point stands.
dmor 15y ago
You say that you know if you worked on someone else's idea you wouldn't be able to find the passion to sustain you. I would challenge you on that - how can you be so sure? I joined Twilio very early and it wasn't my idea. However, I took my passion for making software developers happy (and my even more fundamental professional passion for helping people be productive) and connected it with their specific idea. I never would have thought of Twilio, but I'm so happy to be part of making it exist. Don't ever stop prospecting for other people and ideas that you could get behind, because when you find them it is magical.
AshleysBrain 15y ago
Microsoft was a startup once. When does a startup transition in to being "the man"?
- nbashaw 15y ago
  It's a gradient transition. Being employee #10,000 is different from being employee #100 is different from being employee #1.
- jakejake 15y ago
  I don't know at what point you become "the man" but it's an interesting question at what point you are no longer considered a startup. There's probably several paths that lead to loss of your "startup" status. Being bought out, going IPO, becoming profitable, being in business 3+ years, etc.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    > being in business 3+ years And if you're been in business for 3+ years, but change direction (like from consulting to products as many in the industry do), are you considered a startup again?
    - jakejake 15y ago
      Good question. 3 years was an arbitrary number. Maybe you could say that you're a startup as long as you're still relying on venture capital?
- sudoscience 15y ago
  When it is a household name or well established in the field.
- alexro 15y ago
  Steve Blank seems to answer it the best http://steveblank.com/2012/03/29/nail-the-customer-development-manifesto/ http://steveblank.com/2012/03/29/nail-the-customer-developme...
jonmb 15y ago
It really all depends on what you feel happy doing. There's no one-size-fits all. Some people are meant for startups, some aren't. I think it's best to always see yourself as self-employed. You yourself are your product. You can sell your product to a company for 40 hours a week, or you can run a startup (where you still have a boss btw -- they're called "clients" or "users"). Or a mix of both, which is what I do.
michaelochurch 15y ago
But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email. People actually work for companies where they "log [...] task estimation hours"? I'm afraid of what throwing up in my mouth on a regular basis will do to my throat. I'll pass. Here's why your job in a TPS labyrinth isn't stable: your boss might only be sending you the email because his boss made a point of it. It might be a one-off that he thinks about once and never again. Or he might actually care. You just don't know. He might fire you when you stop doing that shit (either because you forget, or get sick of it). He might consider you not to have done any work unless you log it in the system, and you might be too busy actually doing work to log that shit. Or, you might get along great with him and be just fine. If you have decent social skills, you can get a 90% guess at which way things are going to go, but that's far from certainty, and the boss who won't throw you under the bus for his own benefit is very rare. Big companies are only a better option than any other job (in terms of job security) if they subvert manager-as-SPOF and that's really hard to do. What seems to work (perversely) is bureaucracy and obfuscation: if you make it very, very hard for a manager to bad-mouth reports to the managers they want to transfer under (in large part, this requires transfer talks occurring without the original manager's knowledge) you can actually create a culture in which managers don't hold all the cards. Big-company vs. startup is a hard question. There are really great parts of big companies, and there are shitty startups. There are even startups that have those kinds of inane processes. The whole gamut exists. But I would rather be eating clay than work at a company where people are micromanaged down to "task estimation hours".
- RandallBrown 15y ago
  By task estimation hours I simply meant estimating how long tasks will take. It's a pretty normal part of most software development practices. I don't work at a TPS labyrinth.
BadassFractal 15y ago
After working for several years in a similar environment to the one the author is in right now, I had the exact opposite experience. Wrote soulless boring enterprise software for a customer I never met, using some of the most ancient development techniques, while having the department boast about innovation and "spearheading engineering excellence" every other day. Shared buildings with hundreds of other ninetofivers who couldn't care less about the quality of their work, all they wanted was the great health insurance, the chance to get a green card in a decade or two, and the option to buy a nice home in the area for their 2-3 kids. Clock in, clock out, occasionally play office politics for that sweet principal position in 10-15 years. Experienced every agile aberration known to man, including predicting down to the hour every single thing I would be working on, and then have the boss breathe down your neck when you're off. The best part is when he tells you that he cannot "trust you" anymore due to the latest estimate being off by several hours, and you should multi-task more to get things done quicker. How about keeping your reported work hours purposefully low, even if you're working weekends? Your boss will think that you were good enough to get it done in a couple of days, and will promote you over the guy who's honest with his hours. Happened ALL THE TIME. When I left, the few good friends I had while there asked me what my best memories were after half a decade. Not a single one, everything I enjoyed (including software projects) was outside of work. If I never have to hold a lowly corporate job again, I'll die a happy man. I'd rather make a third of what I was making there, but at least I'll be proud of the work I'm doing and I will look forward to doing more of that every time I wake up. Randall, you're in your mid 20s, brother, what is this comfort you are talking about? What do you have to lose? Go fuck up a couple of businesses, give it your best shot, get a few battle scars, and then maybe we'll talk about wanting comfort. You're way too young to settle down, it's sad to see someone like you waste his talents.
- LVB 15y ago
  I've worked for 15 years in a couple of large companies and this simply has not been my experience. I've worked on interesting stuff, met a huge variety of people, even got to live overseas for a few years. While a large company environment isn't a startup environment, that doesn't mean it has to be stifling or boring. Every company is different. Broad generalizations that working for a small/large company will necessarily mean X, Y and Z are likely inaccurate. The key is the ability to be honest to yourself about what you want/need, what you have, and to have the guts to pull the trigger and make changes if necessary.
cageface 15y ago
The real sweet spot I think is a company of about 200-300 people. It's big enough to provide real stability but not big enough to develop a lot of the pathologies of bigger companies.
- rdouble 15y ago
  That's actually the worst size. There are all the pathologies of a startup combined with all the pathologies of a bigger company.
imechura 15y ago
I often hear people complaining about "corporate politics". What do people think that really means? As if you won't have politics in your startup, with your V.Cs, clients, partners and competitors. Everything in business is politics if you cannot handle your co-worker jockeying for position prior to performance reviews, good luck dealing with a partner or investor who wants to edge you out of your startup. One more note, working for a corporation can provide a technical person with a lot opportunity not available at a startup and vice-versa. For instance, at a startup you will not likely get the valuable and lucrative experience removing and replacing a mainframe application that has been a core business system for 30 years. There are hundreds of companies out there at this very minute who are spending hundreds of millions attempting (and struggling with) this very feat. So while RoR and Django developers are a dime a dozen, others are building a skill that commands a premium at fortune 1000 companies across the nation and builds relationships with Sr. Architects, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs to boot.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
moocow01 15y ago
Eh - I know there are an endless number of conversations on here about startups vs. corporate jobs but I'd say the conversation is way too generic to be at all meaningful. Ive flip-flopped from startups to corps and places in between. There is the same shit (or potential for shit) everywhere just in different packages. - Startups can have just as much politics as corps - it really just depends on the actual folks you interact with - Big corps can have incredibly interesting problems due to their scale and impact while startup work can be exciting because of the progressiveness of it - and in actual practice about 90% of what both groups do is usually pretty boring. - Soulless work - I've found writing enterprise business software to be pretty much equivalent to building VC-powered social/local image-sharing flavor of the month apps in terms of being personally exciting. Mileage will vary. Etc. - I could go on. Point being that if you take averages Id say startups are similar to big corps - the problems are just disquised in different packages. The real trick is trying to find unique scenarios/jobs that minimize the crap.
tucif 15y ago
You can also start without an idea, if what you really want is creating a startup. http://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html http://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html Yet, I think you might want to develop more abilities before that so you have better resources and a wider perspective.
briandear 15y ago
Cool shit? Working for Microsoft? I must have missed something.
kbronson 15y ago
Most unsubstantial article ever, with 69 upvotes and counting.
korginator 15y ago
Did we ever stop to think this is just one person's point of view that's completely influenced by his personality, and that you could be 100% the opposite, before passing summary judgments for and against the poor guy? I've had mixed experiences in both sectors, and it doesn't make sense to generalize here. I've worked in a small-ish department in a large company where we had lots of flexibility with the backing of a large corporate. I've worked in startups with zero creativity and the momentum of a third-world government org. I've also worked in a startup that was run by a maniacal CEO who was so out of touch with engineering that even after 6 years of development the company was unable to scale volumes or make good stuff.

90 points by RandallBrown 15y ago

If you can find a good company and a day job where you have lots of freedom and control, potential to build something great, minimum corporate politics, and the ability to concentrate on building interesting stuff, that does indeed sound fantastic and in some ways more tempting than a startup. However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing. It sounds like it would be a pretty small jump.

sliverstorm 15y ago
However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing. You mean climb the technical ladder? Because if you're already in a great company environment, that's exactly what the technical ladder is for.

DaniFong 15y ago

"But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email. If I forgot to pay my companies electric bill the consequences are a little more severe." Huh. Maybe this is just a difference in outlook, but if I were forced to log my hours it would probably either send me into a fury or the depths of despair. Actually, more likely, I'd quit. Or be fired. It's happened before. Yet I have basically no problem having no safety net, and taking responsibility for my employees, millions of dollars, and the fate of the planet. Weird. The only discriminating factor I can see is that being forced to log hours makes me feel like a kid unworthy of trust. Any others? I feel like I've learned something about myself.

RandallBrown 15y ago
I was talking about doing estimations for tasks. It's a pretty normal "agile" thing to do. There's no trust issues, it's just a project management thing.
- phillmv 15y ago
  How else do you know whether you're breaking even on a project?
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  It's still a ridiculous waste of time. It makes work about gaming the system and your boss (is it better to underestimate so he lets you do what you want, or overestimate so you don't get yelled at later?) rather than moving forward and getting shit done. It's inane, stupid stuff designed to make unimportant people feel important. A programmer who can't be trusted to control his own time shouldn't be hired in the first place.
  - imechura 15y ago
    I personally would not want a builder to home build a home with my money without a time and cost estimate. This is not about startups or established companies. If you don;t know what needs to happen for your vision to come to fruition and how much it is going to cost then you are leaving a lot chance. I just don't get why people are always complaining about estimates.
    - kamaal 15y ago
      Because they don't work. Even if you are out to build your home, the estimates given out to you are only going to good enough to win the contract from you. Nothing more. If you have ever built a home, you would have realized that the project generally went way out of budget and time. You can go back and look at what you had planned and estimated. You will also see that your execution was pretty close to the plan. But a lot of other things went wrong. It rained and all the sand got washed away. The cement company suddenly increased their prices. Something new came in, and suddenly you though a new bath fit was better than the old one. Things slip out of your hand one thing at a time. Workers get sick, attrition happens and all other sort things go wrong. And this is with things like construction, where not much thinking effort is required. Programming is more harder, The iterations of analyse, build, test, feedback, analyse... Take time, mistakes happen, you need to read, research etc. Unless you are a robot and work without any intelligent inputs and outside dependencies. No estimate ever has made sense.

mmj48 15y ago

Minified: Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup? Stability and lack of passion. --- Two good reasons, however, not too insightful (subjective).

imechura 15y ago
lack of passion... IMO, That is a narrow view. What is the goal here, start-up or business? If the goal is startup you may find that it never stops trying to start. There are great established companies to work for and great startups to work for. There are also terrible established companies to work for and terrible startups to work for. I would also like to note that at good, established corporations there are two kinds of technical staff. The passionate kind with a decent mix of technical skills, business acumen and communication skills who work hard,are presented with interesting opportunities and are rewarded for their hard work, and the other kind who seam to always be complaining about the corporate environment and how it is holding them back. Often the "other kind" possesses adequate technical skills but has not taken the time to develop the business acumen and communication skills necessary to be proficient in a high-stakes business. The first type will strive at any business whether established or start-up. The second type will likewise exhibit similar performance no matter the established date stamped on the business's letterhead.
- mmj48 15y ago
  Are you replying to me or the article?

zavulon 15y ago

"Stability is a huge benefit of a regular full time job" That's a myth. While being an employee, there's no stability whatsoever. You can get fired any time - get laid off, become a victim of corporate politics, or get fired for whatever other reason. Just last month, someone I know got fired on the spot after 15 years at a company for not reporting some personal stuff between other employees.. something he wasn't involved with, at all. I'm sure everyone else heard stories of people being thrown out after 10-20-30 years of loyal service to the company for bullshit reasons. At the same time, when you run a business, you can't ever get fired, and everything depends on you. Whether you make money, or lose money - it's for the most part, your doing (market circumstances nonwithstanding). That's why running a business is a lot more of a stable job than working for the man.

alain94040 15y ago
I understand your argument, but I believe it's still statistically incorrect. I don't have research to back it up, but I'm faily confident that full-time employees are more likely to have a job a year from now with same or higher income, than startup entrepreneurs. Yes, accidents can happen to everyone. You can get fired. Your startup can fail. Somehow, startups seem to fail more often than large companies. They fail in slow motion, us at startups fail fast.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I'm faily confident that full-time employees are more likely to have a job a year from now with same or higher income, than startup entrepreneurs. I'm pretty sure that on "same or higher income", entrepreneurs have better 1-year odds-- because their incomes are a lot lower.
  - loganfrederick 15y ago
    He means Expected Value I think. Average out all the entrepreneurs and their income today, compare that to their expected value in a year, and then compare that to the expected value of all full-time employees. Of course this is a really vague metric created by the parent post, but his/her point stands.

dmor 15y ago

You say that you know if you worked on someone else's idea you wouldn't be able to find the passion to sustain you. I would challenge you on that - how can you be so sure? I joined Twilio very early and it wasn't my idea. However, I took my passion for making software developers happy (and my even more fundamental professional passion for helping people be productive) and connected it with their specific idea. I never would have thought of Twilio, but I'm so happy to be part of making it exist. Don't ever stop prospecting for other people and ideas that you could get behind, because when you find them it is magical.

AshleysBrain 15y ago

Microsoft was a startup once. When does a startup transition in to being "the man"?

nbashaw 15y ago
It's a gradient transition. Being employee #10,000 is different from being employee #100 is different from being employee #1.
jakejake 15y ago
I don't know at what point you become "the man" but it's an interesting question at what point you are no longer considered a startup. There's probably several paths that lead to loss of your "startup" status. Being bought out, going IPO, becoming profitable, being in business 3+ years, etc.
- randomdata 15y ago
  > being in business 3+ years And if you're been in business for 3+ years, but change direction (like from consulting to products as many in the industry do), are you considered a startup again?
  - jakejake 15y ago
    Good question. 3 years was an arbitrary number. Maybe you could say that you're a startup as long as you're still relying on venture capital?
sudoscience 15y ago
When it is a household name or well established in the field.
alexro 15y ago
Steve Blank seems to answer it the best http://steveblank.com/2012/03/29/nail-the-customer-development-manifesto/ http://steveblank.com/2012/03/29/nail-the-customer-developme...

jonmb 15y ago

It really all depends on what you feel happy doing. There's no one-size-fits all. Some people are meant for startups, some aren't. I think it's best to always see yourself as self-employed. You yourself are your product. You can sell your product to a company for 40 hours a week, or you can run a startup (where you still have a boss btw -- they're called "clients" or "users"). Or a mix of both, which is what I do.

michaelochurch 15y ago

But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email. People actually work for companies where they "log [...] task estimation hours"? I'm afraid of what throwing up in my mouth on a regular basis will do to my throat. I'll pass. Here's why your job in a TPS labyrinth isn't stable: your boss might only be sending you the email because his boss made a point of it. It might be a one-off that he thinks about once and never again. Or he might actually care. You just don't know. He might fire you when you stop doing that shit (either because you forget, or get sick of it). He might consider you not to have done any work unless you log it in the system, and you might be too busy actually doing work to log that shit. Or, you might get along great with him and be just fine. If you have decent social skills, you can get a 90% guess at which way things are going to go, but that's far from certainty, and the boss who won't throw you under the bus for his own benefit is very rare. Big companies are only a better option than any other job (in terms of job security) if they subvert manager-as-SPOF and that's really hard to do. What seems to work (perversely) is bureaucracy and obfuscation: if you make it very, very hard for a manager to bad-mouth reports to the managers they want to transfer under (in large part, this requires transfer talks occurring without the original manager's knowledge) you can actually create a culture in which managers don't hold all the cards. Big-company vs. startup is a hard question. There are really great parts of big companies, and there are shitty startups. There are even startups that have those kinds of inane processes. The whole gamut exists. But I would rather be eating clay than work at a company where people are micromanaged down to "task estimation hours".

RandallBrown 15y ago
By task estimation hours I simply meant estimating how long tasks will take. It's a pretty normal part of most software development practices. I don't work at a TPS labyrinth.

BadassFractal 15y ago

After working for several years in a similar environment to the one the author is in right now, I had the exact opposite experience. Wrote soulless boring enterprise software for a customer I never met, using some of the most ancient development techniques, while having the department boast about innovation and "spearheading engineering excellence" every other day. Shared buildings with hundreds of other ninetofivers who couldn't care less about the quality of their work, all they wanted was the great health insurance, the chance to get a green card in a decade or two, and the option to buy a nice home in the area for their 2-3 kids. Clock in, clock out, occasionally play office politics for that sweet principal position in 10-15 years. Experienced every agile aberration known to man, including predicting down to the hour every single thing I would be working on, and then have the boss breathe down your neck when you're off. The best part is when he tells you that he cannot "trust you" anymore due to the latest estimate being off by several hours, and you should multi-task more to get things done quicker. How about keeping your reported work hours purposefully low, even if you're working weekends? Your boss will think that you were good enough to get it done in a couple of days, and will promote you over the guy who's honest with his hours. Happened ALL THE TIME. When I left, the few good friends I had while there asked me what my best memories were after half a decade. Not a single one, everything I enjoyed (including software projects) was outside of work. If I never have to hold a lowly corporate job again, I'll die a happy man. I'd rather make a third of what I was making there, but at least I'll be proud of the work I'm doing and I will look forward to doing more of that every time I wake up. Randall, you're in your mid 20s, brother, what is this comfort you are talking about? What do you have to lose? Go fuck up a couple of businesses, give it your best shot, get a few battle scars, and then maybe we'll talk about wanting comfort. You're way too young to settle down, it's sad to see someone like you waste his talents.

LVB 15y ago
I've worked for 15 years in a couple of large companies and this simply has not been my experience. I've worked on interesting stuff, met a huge variety of people, even got to live overseas for a few years. While a large company environment isn't a startup environment, that doesn't mean it has to be stifling or boring. Every company is different. Broad generalizations that working for a small/large company will necessarily mean X, Y and Z are likely inaccurate. The key is the ability to be honest to yourself about what you want/need, what you have, and to have the guts to pull the trigger and make changes if necessary.

cageface 15y ago

The real sweet spot I think is a company of about 200-300 people. It's big enough to provide real stability but not big enough to develop a lot of the pathologies of bigger companies.

rdouble 15y ago
That's actually the worst size. There are all the pathologies of a startup combined with all the pathologies of a bigger company.

imechura 15y ago

I often hear people complaining about "corporate politics". What do people think that really means? As if you won't have politics in your startup, with your V.Cs, clients, partners and competitors. Everything in business is politics if you cannot handle your co-worker jockeying for position prior to performance reviews, good luck dealing with a partner or investor who wants to edge you out of your startup. One more note, working for a corporation can provide a technical person with a lot opportunity not available at a startup and vice-versa. For instance, at a startup you will not likely get the valuable and lucrative experience removing and replacing a mainframe application that has been a core business system for 30 years. There are hundreds of companies out there at this very minute who are spending hundreds of millions attempting (and struggling with) this very feat. So while RoR and Django developers are a dime a dozen, others are building a skill that commands a premium at fortune 1000 companies across the nation and builds relationships with Sr. Architects, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs to boot.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

moocow01 15y ago

Eh - I know there are an endless number of conversations on here about startups vs. corporate jobs but I'd say the conversation is way too generic to be at all meaningful. Ive flip-flopped from startups to corps and places in between. There is the same shit (or potential for shit) everywhere just in different packages. - Startups can have just as much politics as corps - it really just depends on the actual folks you interact with - Big corps can have incredibly interesting problems due to their scale and impact while startup work can be exciting because of the progressiveness of it - and in actual practice about 90% of what both groups do is usually pretty boring. - Soulless work - I've found writing enterprise business software to be pretty much equivalent to building VC-powered social/local image-sharing flavor of the month apps in terms of being personally exciting. Mileage will vary. Etc. - I could go on. Point being that if you take averages Id say startups are similar to big corps - the problems are just disquised in different packages. The real trick is trying to find unique scenarios/jobs that minimize the crap.

tucif 15y ago

You can also start without an idea, if what you really want is creating a startup. http://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html http://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html Yet, I think you might want to develop more abilities before that so you have better resources and a wider perspective.

briandear 15y ago

Cool shit? Working for Microsoft? I must have missed something.

kbronson 15y ago

Most unsubstantial article ever, with 69 upvotes and counting.

korginator 15y ago

Did we ever stop to think this is just one person's point of view that's completely influenced by his personality, and that you could be 100% the opposite, before passing summary judgments for and against the poor guy? I've had mixed experiences in both sectors, and it doesn't make sense to generalize here. I've worked in a small-ish department in a large company where we had lots of flexibility with the backing of a large corporate. I've worked in startups with zero creativity and the momentum of a third-world government org. I've also worked in a startup that was run by a maniacal CEO who was so out of touch with engineering that even after 6 years of development the company was unable to scale volumes or make good stuff.