Not a Hacker or a Hipster – How I Got My First Startup Job

https://medium.com/tech-london/not-a-hacker-or-a-hipster-how-i-got-my-first-start-up-job-922399a7dfbb#.qaysnclo5

by elemeno • 10 years ago

109 56 10 years ago

zappo2938• 10 years ago

"Apply for jobs you’re a bit under qualified for. Most job descriptions describe the perfect candidate. Those features are a wish list not a must have. This applies even more in start-ups where genuine passion for the company gets you a long way."

This sound like very good advice.

bobbles• 10 years ago

Yeah exactly, hiring managers have this list in their head, and what they're basically doing is crossing off items that dont apply for each candidate. essentially the ones with the least things crossed out will likely be top of the pile...

eksemplar• 10 years ago

In my experience it's a weighted list though, and things like having a compatible personality and a personal drive for wanting "this" job, often counts a great deal more than the technical skills on the job description.

Unless we're talking contracts of course, then you'll simply want the best technical candidate because you need someone who can deliver good quality on time.

bitwize2• 10 years ago

No. In major market cities (SF, Boston, NYC), chances are they're already moving forward with a candidate who does fit the qualifications. Tjey're not hard to fund in those markets.

35bge57dtjku2• 10 years ago

They are hard enough to find that they are willing to fly in candidates from across the country.

danielhooper2• 10 years ago

As a currently unemployed developer I take this advice everyday but it really hasn't generated any results (and it really shouldn't be at my current experience level).

I've heard countless times from other developers that they would be happy to hire a competent programmer with no familiarity with their stack because it's better than waiting 6 months to find a dev with the preferred experience. I've never seen or heard about this in practice.

exolymph• 10 years ago

Chutzpah goes very far. Ask for what you want, and explain why you deserve to get it -- then offer to demonstrate your fitness. It's an excellent approach!

gresrun• 10 years ago

Chutzpah must be followed up with hustle or people will quickly figure out you're just full of hot air.

fma• 10 years ago

Hire fast. Fire fast.

mwfunk• 10 years ago

I need to work on my chutzpah. I overspecialized in moxie and spunk (the personality trait, that is).

Chutzpah's critical though- you're usually not going to get what you want if you never ask for it. You can wait a really long time for people to just give you what you want, especially if you never express an interest by asking for it.

It sounds like common sense, but it feels like it took about 20 years too long for that to really sink in with me. I always assumed people understood me a lot more than they actually did.

conjectures• 10 years ago

Moxie and Spunk sounds like a great hipster brandname.

pmiller2• 10 years ago

I wonder how to apply this as an engineer. I'm looking around but finding very little that excites me.

rwallace• 10 years ago

Where are you looking? OP's idea of talking to people in coffee shops obviously only works in certain cities. If you're not in such a location, you need to look online.

na85• 10 years ago

talk to people around you, they’re surprisingly willing to be involved in what you’re doing if it’s interesting and not too onerous for them. Counters the general assumption that if you talk to strangers they’ll think you’re crazy.

Maybe if you're a young woman (as the author is) approaching someone at a coffee shop, then sure.

Reverse the genders and watch the interaction take on a dramatically different character.

slededit2• 10 years ago

And yet two guys were able to ask everyone in an entire coffee shop what they were working on with a 95% "super friendly" rate. Perhaps some problems are perceived rather than real.

https://medium.com/life-learning/what-are-people-working-on-...

MollyR2• 10 years ago

Also there are some big differences in social norms based on which region of the united states you are in.

Bartweiss• 10 years ago

I suspect that in a coffee shop in a good area, it really is this easy, male or female. People are generally pretty social if everyone is on equal footing, not obviously busy, and not creating discomfort.

Anyone who's tried to get petitions can attest that doing this on a street corner is a much different beast, but I think hallway testing (or lead finding, or whatever else) is more viable than most people think.

I'm also reminded of the study about asking people for their seat on a subway - it's almost impossible to ask, but surprisingly easy to succeed.

tfm• 10 years ago

Doesn't seem to matter whether the author already knew that she had a knack for talking to strangers without appearing crazy, or held with the "general assumption" and was genuinely surprised when the experiment turned out well. The important thing is that it worked!

Now, perhaps it will not work so well for every person. Perhaps in the general case people will instead recoil in horror at being approached nicely for small interesting favours. Perhaps a more universal lesson to take away from this is that success is more likely if you play to your strengths, and push every advantage at your disposal. The author is a Cambridge Law graduate, so one might safely presume reasonably skilled at speaking - I'm not exactly sure how surprised she was that she could engage strangers in professional conversation at a coffee shop - but the experiment is available for others to replicate! I'm not sure what parameters would have to be changed for the interaction to take on a "dramatically different character" though, maybe don't get drunk beforehand.

odonnellryan• 10 years ago

Reverse the genders and watch the interaction take on a dramatically different character.

I dunno, give it a shot. I generally don't have much interest in just randomly starting up conversation, but when I talk to a stranger about something it rarely goes poorly.

dominotw4• 10 years ago

Oh man!!. I tried this once and approached a group of young men at a coffee shop; one of the guys stood up and yelled 'step back terrorist' .

Never again!!

eonw• 10 years ago

this is true, in business, at conferences and such i am typically kind of shy. One day my fiance pointed out that everywhere i go i end up meeting and talking to people(gas stations, bars, national parks). Then i started applying the same approach to business, and its netted a number of new and interesting contacts.

you don't know if you don't try.

xapata2• 10 years ago

Perhaps some, but in my experience not as much as you're suggesting.

CameronBanga• 10 years ago

Few things grind my gears like the idea that a person who cares about products being usable and well designed is inherently a "hipster".

brashrat• 10 years ago

few things grind my gears like hipsters telling me how much THEY care about products being usable LIKE IT'S SOME SORT OF NEW IDEA, like they are the ONLY ONES WHO CARE.

beards and winter hats in summer seem, counter intuitively, to incubate a lot of unique little snowflakes.

digi_owl• 10 years ago

If you want to preserve snow through the summer, heavy insulation is key.

thevibesman• 10 years ago

This seems like your baggage not the author's; I'm not sure that she ever said what she meant by hipster. I read it differently.

katpas3• 10 years ago

So my use of the word hipster (and the title of the post) is a reference to this quote which I think is the original source.

"At SXSW, Rei Inamoto, the chief creative officer for AKQA, shared a nugget of wisdom that I’ve observed to be true: “To run an efficient team, you only need three people: a Hipster, a Hacker, and a Hustler.” - http://www.forbes.com/sites/andyellwood/2012/08/22/the-dream...

It was a colloquial way to get across the point that I couldn't code or design at the point I was looking for a role at a start-up.

rdl2• 10 years ago

I LOLed so hard at "The thing was at first I couldn’t find one start-up I wanted to devote the next year or so of my life to building."

Hint: startup is more like 7-10y+ unless you're just playing at it, or it fails. If you go into it expecting it to be a year, it probably will be.

sleepychu• 10 years ago

I think the author wanted to work out if startups were a thing they wanted to do.

uola3• 10 years ago

I think it's a fair characterization of some sort of minimum commitment as an employee. Especially if you're new to the industry sticking around for 5+ years is going to be a waste of time, rarely will the company match your market value.

AdieuToLogic3• 10 years ago

Keep in mind what was written in the article regarding the author's job at the time was:

  The job was technically sales ...

And:

  Yesterday was my last day there as I’m
  now moving on to something new — planning
  to develop my currently non-existent
  technical skills full time.

So categorizing the author as being new "to the industry" at that point in time (2015/07/30) is nonsensical unless peripheral exposure counts. Not to say this remains the case, mind you, just that the perspective you describe is not applicable to the person the author was at that time.

I will add that a person actually in the industry would be wise to "stick around" their first job or two for at least a year. Failing to do so is a red flag for many companies as bouncing around early in the CV is often interpreted as leaving before being fired.

katpas3• 10 years ago

I wrote the post, as some people have picked up in the comments, the one year is a reference to the minimum time I wanted to spend working for someone at a start-up. I used the word build as when you're an early employee that's the dynamic.

My plan wasn't to leave after the year, just to re-evaluate if I was learning what I wanted to be in the role. As it turned out, I did leave as I wanted to develop my technical skills instead of carrying along the VC/Biz-dev career path.

I agree that if you're starting your own thing then 7-10 years is a good minimum time frame.

rdl2• 10 years ago

Ah, ok! That's a lot more reasonable.

AdieuToLogic3• 10 years ago

What cracks me up is this proclamation made by said author[0]:

  Over the 200 waking hours, I managed to
  hit the standard needed. It felt like
  multiple lucky answers and lots of Googling
  that got me there, but that’s how learning
  works. I learnt enough Javascript to
  get accepted onto the course and I spent
  another 3 months, with 15 others,
  Googling things together and creating
  a new app each week.

  Now I’m being paid to build early
  MVP’s (minimum viable products) for
  start-ups. So I can code.

I mean, really? This certainly cannot be modus operandi for start-ups can it? Three months of "Javascript Googling" allows someone to brag about:

  being paid to build early
  MVP’s (minimum viable products) for
  start-ups.

And leveraging that incredibly weak argument into a summary of:

  So I can code.

Wow. If that's all it takes for someone to be hired into a start-up, then the whole "funding is drying up" meme prevalent recently is really making sense.

0 - http://www.gadgette.com/2016/02/19/how-i-learnt-to-code-in-a...

onion2k2• 10 years ago

200 hours self-taught followed by 3 months at, say, 80 hours a week is 1160 hours in total. I imagine there are people who spend less time learning to code during a 3 year university course. Plus her learning would be very specifically focused on startup-oriented JavaScript instead of trying to cover everything. I see no reason why the statement "So I can code." should be wrong.

dominotw4• 10 years ago

Man that kind of makes me sad that I've wasted so much of my life over the past decade learning one useless 'skill' after another.

Its a sad realization that someone who only started coding 3 months ago is kicking my ass finding jobs at startups meanwhile I am being rejected( when they respond) constantly .

cm32• 10 years ago

It would be okay if prototypes would be prototypes, but in the software field prototypes are too often taken into production. It's like a designer giving you a small model how they envision it. You don't expect to shrink yourself and live in the model house out of paper. It should be the same with software. Just recall the struggle with Twitter's MVP that failed to be available. Maybe we should differentiate between builders, designers and visionaries in the software field.

mmartinson• 10 years ago

I agree that there is a lot of space for distinction between the kind of work that people are doing in the software field, but I see prototypes being thrown into production as a hugely positive thing, not a problem.

Part of the beauty of the current startup landscape is feasibility of throwing a working prototype written by a junior, garbage code and all, into production to see if it gets any traction. It costs little money, offers a chance to hungry juniors to prove themselves and later drives the demand for senior engineers to clean up or rewrite the codebase into something that can scale.

w8rbt• 10 years ago

Great article. It seems that she has an outgoing, friendly personality. Companies need those types of employees just as much as they need good technologists.

dominotw4• 10 years ago

After some more standard interview prep and a short interview at Crowdcube a few days later accompanied by my newly filled little black book I got taken on for the job.

Meanwhile, I am being humiliated by stupid whiteboard interviews .

I really need to work on my (non existent ) people skills.

marodox• 10 years ago

Meanwhile, I am being humiliated by stupid whiteboard interviews .

I just went through my most humiliating whiteboard interview last week. Never knew how bad it could get until that...

dominotw4• 10 years ago

I've come to a realization that no matter how much we complain about it, there is no way around it.

No matter how experienced you are you have to face this everytime you change jobs.

Not a Hacker or a Hipster – How I Got My First Startup Job

Related Stories