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I am curious what your experience has been working for a start up company as opposed to a more established one. What was the environment like? How secure is your job future? Is it just one person that will make out like a bandit if the company sells or if you get in on it early, can you expect anything? Most of these might be software start ups but anything ins applicable.
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Sep 18, 2014 19:31
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Working for one or starting yourself? If the latter, its usually chaos especially if the boss(es) haven't a clue. A lot of it is run on gut feeling based decisions and things can go from good to absolute poo poo within seconds. Expect that it to be a highly volatile and aggressive work environment. Also, as an employee, you're basically working "for a friend" in terms of relations. They do and will ask you to do things both out of scope of your position and comfort zone with little or no incentive. Get fired, good luck leaving on good terms. Get laid off, good luck filing for unemployment. Boss late with payroll? Pray they arent having money issues.....lots of stress across the board. As an owner/operator - its hectic, frustrating and thrilling. There is no such thing as "off hours" as your rear end is on the line 24/7. I remember it being constantly busy with the most mundane and little tasks you wouldn't think that take up much time. But then there's having to deal with employee management, even keeping yourself on task is a bitch when you've got owner responsibilities on top of the work that needs to get done too. Sometimes you simply forget something that is critically important and that can have severe consequences. Companies that sell out usually the founder takes the lion's share and if the peons have an agreement, it best be in writing and legally enforceable, else you're going to get hosed. I've seen it happen four separate times to co-workers and friends. When money's involved, there's going to be greed and a long line for handouts. Slayerjerman fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 21:05
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I work for an early-stage bootstrapping startup located in the Rust Belt. The company went through a well-regarded incubator, has enough seed money to write paychecks (paltry ones), and actually has a small amount of revenue (though not nearly enough to be self-supporting). The goal is to build up a good, focused product before hawking it to VCs (they're much more conservative here than they are in all that Silicon Valley madness). I'm officially the UI/UX designer, but because we're so small (five people), I end up doing a lot of other stuff too, namely implementing the features and improvements I design. Also webmastering. As far as learning new skills and having a say in what gets done, it's awesome. Now that I work here and have added a bunch of programming and web stuff to my design skills, I get all sorts of hits on LinkedIn. For pay and work/life balance, it's less good. Since we're still in bootstrap mode, pay is poo poo, but since it's such a cheap city, it's quite doable. It's easy to get caught up in long hours, but my thankfully boss was very understanding that the trade off for paying me below market is that I was going to cap my work week at 40 hours and said to not feel guilty taking off at six when they all stay til god knows when. None of that 80+ hr workweek bullshit until I have a competitive salary and equity. As for job future, at this company? It's always a tossup, but at least it's been pretty stable. And elsewhere, I think I'll be okay. I've developed some very useful skills, so if poo poo hits the fan, I don't think I'll have a particularly hard time finding another job. It also helps that there aren't a lot of UI/UX designers here, so they're in demand. I've heard plenty of stories about other companies around here going down in flames. One of them ceased operation over the course of a day and suddenly put all the stuff in their office up for sale. The CEO was apparently a shady mofo and there was some shady accounting going on. Another one, which had a lot of potential for a nice acquisition (they had a very useful algorithm for something or other), but there was a bunch of in-fighting and other poo poo, so they sold way too early and got a lovely price. If there's founder drama, GTFO.
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Sep 19, 2014 22:22
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I spent about 6 years working for startups before moving to "corporate." My first, I was employee # 5 or 6, and my roles ranged over time from sales, to support, to programming and web development. My next couple, I did web development (.NET/C#/Javascript/Whatever front-end framework was cool at the time). Overall, I'd recommend it if you are looking to get widely varied experience, and you're OK with being outside of your comfort zone. But if you're looking for a good or stable paycheck, look elsewhere. My salary jumped 60% moving from a startup to a larger company. Also, you'll find that it's very difficult to advance in a startup (especially a funded one), because they tend to bring in outside help with "more experience," even if yours matches or exceeds the new person's, and I've read and have found personally that very little advancement happens from within, especially given how fluid roles are (i.e. why promote someone when they already have to do the higher level job anyways because the team is so small?). It's a lot more likely you'll need to switch companies to advance. Don't let them fool you with the shares you're getting either. Unless you're getting a very large amount, such as >1% of the total shares, not just the common option pool, but of the entire company, you're probably not getting anything worth mentioning. They're not likely to show you their cap table and share structure, and even if you have what looks like a lot to start, as they get more funding, your shares will dilute until their worth approaches zero. Besides, most startups fail anyways, so it's 90% likely out of the gate that your shares are entirely worthless in any situation. Are you already working for a larger company, or is this your first job out of college? If it's one of your first few jobs and you can afford a couple years making a crappy salary with no likely exit event, go for it, if not, stay away.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:07
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