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However, being an employee in an early stage startup is a great way to jumpstart your career, whether you have entrepreneurial aspirations or not. In an early s
by rdouble 13y ago
However, being an employee in an early stage startup is a great way to jumpstart your career, whether you have entrepreneurial aspirations or not. In an early stage startup you are going to be rubbing noses with investors, working on interesting/tough problems with very smart people, taking on huge amounts of responsibility, getting in way over your head every day, and generally beefing up your resume.
Early stage engineers do not usually work on interesting problems at a startup. You are hired to do the uninteresting stuff. A startup may or may not beef up your resume. It's still easier to get hired if you have Apple or Google or Facebook on your resume than a failed startup. You generally do not rub noses with investors, but you might be invited to an informal lunch if the company is still very small. You do take on a lot of responsibility and get in over your head. It's a good jumpstart to a career if you can't get a job at Google or Facebook or Palantir or Apple or Goldman Sachs.
- eli 13y agoDo you think people looking to jumpstart a career are typically in a position to decide between offers from Apple, Google and a startup?
- rdouble 13y agoI guess I don't really know what "jumpstart" a career means. Does it just mean to start a career? If they are good programmers, sure, why not? It sounds like a typical story, actually. Wasn't that Marissa Meyer's story? (except Google was the startup at the time)
- eli 13y agoI think you'd have to be a pretty exceptional candidate. Google reportedly [1] receives over a million resumes a years as of 2010. I'm guessing there are a pretty small number of positions open to people with minimal experience. [1] http://thenextweb.com/google/2010/09/14/one-half-of-one-percent-of-google-applicants-get-hired-heres-how-it-works/ http://thenextweb.com/google/2010/09/14/one-half-of-one-perc...
- rdouble 13y agoMost of those resumes are ridiculous and amount to little more than spam. The candidates from the pool of people Google actually wants to hire definitely have multiple offers.
- eli 13y agoSounds like a truism: it's easy to get a job at google... if you're the sort of person google wants to hire.
- polarix 13y agoIf you're talking to investors regularly, it's probably worth your while anyway.