Ask HN: Should I leave this startup?

[chussad]

Dear HNers,

I have been a reader of Hacker News for a while. This post is more of a "help needed" post. I am working right now with a social network in pacific northwest and joined this company few months back as a SDE. To give some background about me, I hold a masters from one of the good universities in pacific nw and also an undergrad in cse from india. After school, I worked with a small company before joining this social network startup for couple of years. They got acquired and the engineering staff was told to look for other opportunities.

Not a big deal, I got couple of offers and considering that I was on a work visa, I had to accept whatever offer I got so as to stay in US, I accepted this offer.

However, after working for a couple of months, I am not liking it. I was hired as SDE but they have asked me to work as SDET. I have no problems with testing if it was 5-10% of time. I tried to take it as a challenge but the features are being launched so quickly and so many releases every week that any automation I create, starts breaking with the next release. It has gone so bad that I have been limited to doing manual QA. There are a total of 2 QA for a team of 25+ engineer and with at least two releases and many other minor releases every week, it has gone really crazy with a 75+ hours a week being a norm.

I have worked in startup earlier and I really enjoyed working in startup where I connected well with product and coded all day long, but here I just don't feel good.

Having said all these things, I want to ask good folks at HN whether this has been their experience at working for startups and if it was, did they stayed there and made it work or switched to some other position? Also, will it look ok on my resume if I stayed with an organization for a short period (3-4 months)?

Thanks for your help.

[tomfakes]

I just had a discussion with someone else about fast release schedules and QA teams.

If an organization wants to ship often, then QA teams don't work. You need the developers to write and own the test system. The new feature isn't done until the developer has tests for it and all the existing tests pass (even if this means changing those tests due to functionality changes). If this is passed off to a QA team, the whole process will always be broken.

Your organization is broken, and you are setup to fail (2 QA and 25 engineers!)

You can stay and try to help fix it, but this will be hard for you, since you are new, and change needs to come from the top management, or an engineer that the team will listen to. Even the top engineer will find it hard, since a lot of programmers get used to having a QA team to avoid this process!

If it was me, I'd be looking for my next opportunity and planning to leave pretty soon.

[maxbrown]

"will it look ok on my resume if I stayed with an organization for a short period (3-4 months)"

I don't think it looks bad on its own - as long as you are adequately able to explain the quick move if asked about it in an interview.

As for whether or not to leave, you only live once. If you completely don't like it and you can afford to look for something else, go look. I would probably try to line up another position before leaving this one.

[alexjawad]

I was about to write the same as above. I totally agree.

[staunch]

In case anyone else wasn't quite sure what the acronyms are:

SDE = Software Development Engineer

SDET = Software Development Engineer Testing

[petervandijck]

Thanks for that :)

[petervandijck]

Doing QA for 2 more years will look bad on your resume when applying for an engineering job.

Your plan could be:

1. Look for another job.

2. Talk to your boss, tell them you'll quit if you don't get the engineering job you were hired for instead of a QA job (be clear)

3. Quit and start at the new job.

[erichcervantez]

I think most tech companies understand the volatility of a startup. I was with a startup for a while until our primary investor cut ties and left us with 35 salaries, a lease and plenty of network and utility bills to pay with barely a few thousand a month income from clients. It was a disaster and the subsequent company I ended up working for cared little about the details. All I had to tell them was "it was a startup". They nodded and continued with the interview. Three years later, I'm still happy to be with them. There's plenty of startups around if that's your thing...but in the end you should be happy when you hit the sack at night.