<story><title>Myths About Working as an Engineer at a Startup</title><url>http://karllhughes.com/2014/myths-working-engineer-startup/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>silverbax88</author><text>FTA:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“Rock star” engineers sometimes work at startups, but usually they work for big companies who can pay them twice the salary and have multiple indoor water polo pools and racquetball courts.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;THIS is something the &amp;#x27;startup world&amp;#x27; and a lot of people on HN are not aware of. Really, really bad-ass programmers usually work for big corporations for good salaries. Not always, but usually. The reason I mention it is because there is a myth that startups are built with the latest, greatest tech by the brightest minds. Often this just isn&amp;#x27;t true...many startups are hacked together by inexperienced programmers fresh out of college. Sometimes this works, but often it means that nobody on staff is really a master coder, nobody on staff has ever had to fend off Russian hackers attempting to take down your code at 3 am, nobody on staff has had to deal with thousands of users who wake up one morning, can&amp;#x27;t log in and no money is coming into the company. These are the battles that most programmers learn in the trenches of big companies, fighting tough battles, fixing complex problems under fire. It&amp;#x27;s not ideal, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure if you can really become battle-hardened without going through &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; battles with real jobs on the line.&lt;p&gt;This is what happened at Twitter - when the government came after them because they were getting hacked too often, Twitter went out and hired &amp;#x27;real&amp;#x27; programmers and got things working. That&amp;#x27;s something that gets missed a lot in the &amp;#x27;startup story&amp;#x27;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>macNchz</author><text>&amp;gt;nobody on staff has ever had to fend off Russian hackers attempting to take down your code at 3 am, nobody on staff has had to deal with thousands of users who wake up one morning, can&amp;#x27;t log in and no money is coming into the company. These are the battles that most programmers learn in the trenches of big companies, fighting tough battles, fixing complex problems under fire. It&amp;#x27;s not ideal, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure if you can really become battle-hardened without going through real battles with real jobs on the line.&lt;p&gt;You make an interesting point, though I&amp;#x27;m not sure that learning these lessons has to happen at a &lt;i&gt;big&lt;/i&gt; company. I&amp;#x27;m currently an engineer at a startup, but I came here from a small company—a ~30 person digital agency—where we were dealing with a lot of what you mention quite regularly. Because we had so many applications in production for a diverse range of clients (some at fairly large scale), and a small team of developers, the sorts of challenges you mention came at us &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; faster than they appear to arrive for us at my current company, which is focused around one product.&lt;p&gt;The fact that the dev team at my agency was small meant that, when facing issues like this, we were flying by the seat of our pants, learning as we went along and jumping between roles, and learning was happening very quickly. I&amp;#x27;ve come to realize, after having left, that the range of experience I had in the small-team agency environment was, I think, extremely valuable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Myths About Working as an Engineer at a Startup</title><url>http://karllhughes.com/2014/myths-working-engineer-startup/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>silverbax88</author><text>FTA:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“Rock star” engineers sometimes work at startups, but usually they work for big companies who can pay them twice the salary and have multiple indoor water polo pools and racquetball courts.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;THIS is something the &amp;#x27;startup world&amp;#x27; and a lot of people on HN are not aware of. Really, really bad-ass programmers usually work for big corporations for good salaries. Not always, but usually. The reason I mention it is because there is a myth that startups are built with the latest, greatest tech by the brightest minds. Often this just isn&amp;#x27;t true...many startups are hacked together by inexperienced programmers fresh out of college. Sometimes this works, but often it means that nobody on staff is really a master coder, nobody on staff has ever had to fend off Russian hackers attempting to take down your code at 3 am, nobody on staff has had to deal with thousands of users who wake up one morning, can&amp;#x27;t log in and no money is coming into the company. These are the battles that most programmers learn in the trenches of big companies, fighting tough battles, fixing complex problems under fire. It&amp;#x27;s not ideal, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure if you can really become battle-hardened without going through &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; battles with real jobs on the line.&lt;p&gt;This is what happened at Twitter - when the government came after them because they were getting hacked too often, Twitter went out and hired &amp;#x27;real&amp;#x27; programmers and got things working. That&amp;#x27;s something that gets missed a lot in the &amp;#x27;startup story&amp;#x27;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcphilip</author><text>Personal anecdote:&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve worked 5 years in 3 startups, 5 years in 2 large development teams, and my experience has shown that there are, percentage wise, better developers working in startups.  This is in Austin, so it may not reflect the valley, but the absolute best programmers I&amp;#x27;ve worked with are trying their hands at startups.  There&amp;#x27;s a sweet spot of people aged 28-35 that are really skilled developers that still have an appetite for risk that are working in startups.</text></comment>