> You join a startup because of the many other benefits it provides
This. So much this. The exit is the lottery ticket. It'll likely fail.
But the real lure is getting to wear a ton of hats and fly by the seat of your pants. Any engineer in a < 20 person eng team is going to have a ton of exposure to how the business works, to making real-time decisions, and just generally being impactful. _THAT's_ why you go.
(And, that said, it's definitely not for everyone)
Love all of these responses. I'll add mine into the ring as well.
I came in by photojournalism -> photoshop -> graphic design -> web design through the 90's.
I was never really good as a designer. I was capable, but I didn't have that "real talent" that I could see in others. Instead, I was always interested in the technical aspects of design. I enjoyed color separation and complex printing jobs.
At around the same time, I realized I was getting tired of handing my designs over to the engineers who would slop them together. So I started dabbling with Macromedia Director (predecessor to Flash for making CD-ROMS [when that was a thing]), then flash, and then HTML and kept going farther and farther back in the stack. This was in the time of PERL and ASP, and I'd devour O'Riley books trying to learn as much as I possibly could. A book on regex. A book on data structors. Learning SQL.
I then had the fantastic opportunity to work with a group of people that stuck together through a series of companies (myself as the designer). At the last company, I was incredibly fortunate to have the architect take me under his wing and have daily master/apprentice style problems and reviews with me. Today you're writing a binary logger. Tomorrow a reader. Now an HTML parser. The architect was brutal, and I'd go home sometimes in tears... until I realized it wasn't about _me_. I had to check my ego at the door, and that this could be a dialogue if I was willing to participate and not to get defensive, and be OK unlearning some bad practices (To this day, I still think he's one of the most incredible humans on the planet).
Twenty years later, it's been an excellent career. I've built a lot of cool shit, and finally even had a decent exit. I'm in management now, but I can still find some "fingers on the keyboard" time here and there.
If I can give any advice:
- Never stop learning. Never stop asking questions.
- Don't get hung up on being a particular language specialist—it's fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals... everything else is just syntax.
- Interviews are going to suck sometimes, because there's some asshole in the loop that biases towards academia and thinks you're not worth their time... but don't let it get you down (pro-tip: you probably don't want to work there anyway).
- Celebrate your journey, don't shy from it, and be proud that you're doing this on your own; because it's a damned hard road sometimes.
(also a happy syno user here, been using it on several NAS's quite happily).
My rough understanding is synology did some pretty heavy modifications to btrfs in their implementation though... (a quick google finds me nothing to back this up, but i remember reading about it somewhere...)
It was late '99 or early '00 when I went to work at my first "tech" startup. We'd raised 70-something million, and all the stars were aligning. We'd go to lunch and bring a calculator so we could work through "worst-case scenarios" millions of dollars were in our future. I remember passing up other job offers that also included a lease of a new BMW as part of the signing.
Of course, with the down-turn, and given that we were effectively trying to position ourselves as CRM middleware, all bets were off. The business dried up, and our burn-rate was through the roof. Word got out the day before about the upcoming layoffs. The next day there were kegs of beer that sat out in the engineering pits.
IT had a helluva time, as a lot of people walked off with their laptops and company-issued phones. The dirty secret was that there was also a complete (still shrink-wrapped) palette of brand new 2U Dell servers in the loading bay that mysteriously went missing in the CO office that day.
Like a naive babe in the woods, I survived the first 2? maybe 3? RIFs. Even as I was building a website that listed all of our hardware and furniture for sale, and unracking and packing all the servers from the colo—I still didn't get it. Reality hit like a brick.
I was lucky enough to fall in with a good group of folks who continued to follow each other to other companies either as employees or as contract work for the next few years. There were maybe one or two scary months, but overall it was manageable. (Also lesson learned: your network is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING)