[devnulled]

I guess my startup experiences were different. In one startup I worked at, I learned A LOT about data, databases, JDBC, connection pooling, JVM tuning, etc, because the volumes of data and we were working with were just unheard of at the time and the traffic to that data was not cacheable. I had to disassemble a vendors JDBC driver and tell them why it crashed all the time for instance.

In another, it was lots of JVM knowledge (both threading and memory management/garbage collection), caching, distributing work which needed to be calculated, etc. We found several JVM thread locking bugs and worked with Sun to fix them. I worked with some really great people in their 40's at this one and learned a lot from them.

I suppose the majority of startups are different these days though? Mostly RoR and Node based social things. The biggest worry is if the Facebook Like and Share buttons work.

If you are working somewhere that is only a CRUD website at it's core and doesn't have anything else going on, I suppose there isn't much to learn on the backend side of things.