20-30 people (was there a few years with ebbs and flows). We had long hours and the first few years it was exciting. We built a lot of stuff and didn’t know about certain practices - especially DevOps, so when we got one, there was a lot of work to do.

For me, it taught me autonomy. You had to learn to own something and be able to educate others on how it worked to raise the bus factor above 1, optimally above 3 (it’s a start up after all).

Startups are often founded with the goal of being bought. Depending on where you work, they might care about code quality, testing, design, and all those nice things, but being first to market is probably the biggest concern. We had to strike a balance between being very agile and being able to deliver quality, maintainable features. Code was a vessel, an enabler, a necessity.

You had to hit the ground running when you arrived and be ready to learn a lot on the job. A prototype really meant something thrown together quickly that worked for a limited amount of usecases with fake data. Investors and customers had to be able to see the value first before wanting the real thing.

Ultimately, getting bought by a larger company made me leave. Things quickly changed from quirky, fun, stressful yet rewarding to procedure and corporate. Decisions weren’t made by devs anymore but had to go through a horde of people. Teams were made around individual products instead of people being able to move freely between them to understand the vision of the company.

In retrospect, it was a nice stage in my life and I definitely learned a lot. If you haven’t done it before, I’d recommend it if:

• you can deal with pressure
• like throwing stuff together or being on the other end of making a prototype viable
• want to start a business yourself someday (going through the phases of a startup teaches you about that)
• like being able to have a vision of the entire company (products, customers, fellow employees, …)
• want to be at the forefront of something possibly new

Like any job, you can try it out for a few months and see whether you like it. If you don’t do not force yourself to hang around. Your salary might not raise as fast regardless of how fast the startup is moving.

Good luck!

P.S This is but one experience from one country in Europe!

Anti Commercial-AI license

Don’t do it. Can wholeheartedly say fuck startups, especially if you’re not an expert in your field.

YMMV but they’ve been an extreme version of the horrible crap that goes on in corpos; ex layoffs because why keep your senior devs when someone newer is much cheaper and the company only has a few millions untill next round of funding.

Recently left an organization that was failing to shed the “start up mentality.” I joined at just over 100 people when two years before they had about 40. They were over 400 five years later.

They had a lot of growing pains with regard to communication. They also were a very top heavy org because all of the original employees were promoted to directors with no management experience. People spoke often about being the xth person hired. In all hands meetings.

Honestly, I’ll be avoiding them like the plague now. I worked my 40 hours a week while begging to expand the department. Left when I was put on probation for not getting enough work done. Also never accept an unlimited pto agreement. Good way to never take vacation.

I have worked as an early employee at a startup that was then successfully acquired. In my experience it was great, although I think it did not match the situation at most startups. I think there were six people when I started working for them, as a freelancer at first, and then eventually we grew to about 15 and I joined full time.

I did not get any stock, I was 100% remote (I live in Europe and the company was in the US, I never even met any of my bosses or coworkers), and I never worked long hours.

It was also early in my career. I started as a freelancer, and this was my highest paying job until then, so I gladly took it. The work was hard (low-level and high-performance stuff), but as I said, I did not have to work over 40 hours per week. I did have meetings in the late afternoon though, and sometimes in the evenings, because of my time zone.

After we got acquired, I told them that because I didn’t hold any stock, I still wanted some payout, so they roughly doubled my salary. The work also became more corporate and there was less of the hard but interesting stuff. Eventually I left when the company that acquired us was itself acquired, and now I work for another established company for even more money.

TL;DR: the startup was acquired, I did not get a payout but it launched my career so I’m very happy I was involved.

I’ve worked at 2-3 (one I left after a few months, I felt very out of my element). Overall, I don’t broadly recommend them, and if you’re going to do one and it’s not your own, I recommend doing it a little earlier in your career since the public / IPO’d tech money can be double your salary (e.g. it’s half your comp). For some anonymity, I’m distinguishing these by pre/post-Series B (seed / A is considered “early stage,” no PMF; B-C is “scale up”, D+ is… something else, I forget).

• One I joined at post-Series B as one of ~50 engineering staff, 150 people total. We got bought shortly after. Everyone was generally nice. The stack was pretty awesome. When I left, it was maybe ~400 people overall.
• One I joined at pre-Series B Startup as one of … maybe ~20 engineering staff, one of ~50 people? It had grew to ~35 Eng staff I think (unfortunately, not much on my team) and ~80 people and then started to decrease in size (layoffs). Everyone was nice. I think you need much more than nice when you don’t have PMF / do not like your product.

I would agree with @[email protected]. I came into the earlier stage company thinking it was “Big Company Things” vs. “Small Scrappy Startup” things. I had about as much meaningful authority at the chill, scale-up company and with no on-call. But at the earlier stage company, I was not able to propose large work, and I was also on-call when the 5 years of tech debt would show it’s age. Improvements were shelved in favor of Sales’ vision, because there was no product vision. And even things that were obvious like improving performance on a mission critical offering (e.g., something that would severely impact the customer) were floated around, but were too difficult to budget due to ostensible increases in infra cost and the opportunity cost of not delivering cute features for specific customers. It was a strange kind of stress. Overall:

• You definitely learn how to work independently (though I imagine there are better ways to learn that.)
• Your experience is super colored by the industry, imo. Direct to consumer takes more heat, imo rapidly changing industries with constant trends and pretty Unicorns also have more chaos (AI, blockchain). The two small startup guys I know work in a FinTech and IAAS company respectively, and I was surprised to find out their WLB was so good despite the size.
• Your focus is delivering fast, not doing stuff well. It can be good for learning, but is not good for quality.
• It can be really easy to work your ass off and also lack meaningful resume boosters because the scale of the system or traffic may be relatively low. Make sure you’re always working on something that you can spin and talk about in your next interview.
• You have a lot of financial barrier. For example, if you’re used to things like Kafka, get used to a cheaper or easier to manage alternative (SQS? Kinesis? one of those)
• Being in a stressful environment for a long time warps your perception, and the idea of a stressful environment differs for everyone. I found it stressful to be so close to a product without the ability to impact it; other people were fine just saying it wasn’t their problem. When I left, after a few months, I felt enormously better and different, and my social life had gained new dimensions (not new friends, just-- I could engage with it better).
• Startups are flat and without structure. Your best opportunity at getting promoted is at a place with a promotional structure and with layers of people.

Despite all I just wrote, I am looking to join another startup, in part because I’m not great at interviews, and because I’ve realized how highly variable the experiences are. I just spoke to one company where the founder was obviously passionate and opinionated-- maybe even high strung-- but had strong vision and seemed to be moving at light speed. Joining would be great, but explicitly, engineers would have little weight on the product roadmap and already some measurable tech debt. Another is mostly engineers and hiring for engineers who are interested in the product space. it seems leisurely but meaningful with a product I liked.

Out of college I did not work at a start-up but instead got a job at a “big, stable” corp. I got the following advice from the older engineers at big, stable corp. Some of those engineers are my personal friends 7 years later.

“Why work here where it’s slow and stable? You’re young, go take some risks, earn money, and most importantly get experience under your belt. Then come back with experience and coast. Your compensation grows slowly here so might as well come in with experience and start with a high salary. Also, everything is slow here, your peers at fast paced companies will out pace you.”

That was some of the truest shit I’ve ever heard. I’ve since left big,stable corp and am working at a company who was a start-up but opted to grow instead of being bought out. I am working on a family so cannot afford the risks of a start-up.

Yes, I work many more hours but the pay is way better and in the last 1 year I’ve learned more than i’ve learned at big,stable corp. There is just much less process and red tape and we are more hands on and wear many hats. At times this is exhausting but I find comfort that if I were to lose my job, I have tangible experience to get hired again where as at Big,stable I was picking up skills how to do reviews on processes and techniques unique to the company.

I’ve always worked at startups, probably a dozen in total so far. I was usually the only technical person in the company (or one of very few), with typically less than 10-20 employees total. Was always paid well and enjoyed what I did, but I understand that might not be typical. Usually the company would eventually get sold off or just go out of business and then I would move on to something else.

When one of the companies got bought out and surged from ~20 to 100+ employees, it wasn’t long before I and most others slowly left one after another because the new owners didn’t know anything about technology and ran everything into the ground, blowing through ~100 million dollars with nothing to show for it (we did more previously with 5 million than they ever did with 100).

Also in Europe, but I’ve worked at 3 different startups before becoming a contractor earlier this year.

• First one I worked for 5,5 years, joined at ~30 people and saw things grow to 180 people at which point the company was sold and I left about a year after that.
• Second one I worked for 7 years, was one of the first employees and responsible for building their frontend stack as well as various microservices from the ground up. Company grew to about 80 people, but I left after Covid layoffs. I wasn’t one of the layoffs, but culture went to shit quickly after that.
• Third I was also one of the first people and helped build a pretty exciting architecture from scratch. Stayed for 3,5 years, but unfortunately the company never found market fit during that time and the team never grew beyond ~20 people.

Overall I can say:

• If you value autonomy and you have a getting-things-done mentality this is the right gig for you.
• Culture differs very much per workplace, you may need to be lucky. (I don’t think that’s unique to startups though.)
• You need to be assertive and pro-active.
• Don’t do it for the money. Startups usually pay less, but in theory make up for it by offering equity. But most startups fail, so in most cases this will never be more than theory. Even if you do get an exit, chances are the payout is less than you would’ve earned working those years for a bigger corporation.
• The experience can be extremely rewarding because you can easily reach a position of influence.
• You will learn a lot.
• The experience can be frustrating because there is always pressure and a lot to do and you rarely have the means to do it all.
• You will need to improvise a lot.
• If you pull it off and your startup becomes successful the thrill is exhilarating.