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The article doesn't mention if you join the start-up as a 1) partner (who holds a portion of the company), or 2) as a full-time employee. Even most people will be in #1, but I think it is worth-while to call this out. Personally I have experience in #2, and it was a three-year old start-up. The experience was awful. First, I was all on my own, I was told I would wear a lot of hats and would learn a tonne. The reality was I googled a lot, and just copied and pasted the solutions and code snippets off Internet and hoped those would work well enough to meet my need. Take a look at stackoverflow and you will understand what I meant. To make this really concrete, say setting up a server. Before VMs were more popular, I would need to actually get a Dell (bcos it was cheapest, period), removed the Windows, installed Linux, then the fun began: apache, postfix, mysql, spamassassin, etc etc. Do you have time to thumb through each of the excellent documents? We are not even starting to code!!!! On top of that, I also needed to do powerpoint (we had to use Windows because those VCs we met loved Windows), helped to proof-read the product specs to make sure it wouldn't promised anything that would take even Microsoft 80 years to build, and clear the thrash before I left office. Second, as an employee I didn't have much say on the product design, and technical roadmap, this is especially true if you are someone who is fresh from school, I joined with 6 years of professional experience, but still I didn't have much say on the product features. I was just the guy who did the implementation specified by the biz guy (the CEO), nothing more. I also thought it could be this particular company was fucked up, however talking to engineers from other companies reviewed this phenomena is far from unique. This kind of work is not much fun if you have a tight deadline and changing requirements from the sales (usually the CEO), especially the one who peddles the products doesn't have a technical background. On top of that, you are most probably doing so many things that you will not likely to have time and energy to sit down and run through the work that you have done. Make no mistake, I am not saying corporate life is good (I am now working for a US MNC), it has its own set of shit, that I will leave for other day to bitch about |
While it's by no means unique, that doesn't mean it's not fucked up. There are a lot of terribly-run companies out there. Misplaced loyalty keeps them alive longer than it should. You should quit whenever a company sucks; life's too short.