Ask HN: Should I leave this startup?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2325795
by chussad • 15 years ago
9 7 15 years ago

Dear HNers,

I have been a reader of Hacker News for a while. This post is more of a "help needed" post. I am working right now with a social network in pacific northwest and joined this company few months back as a SDE. To give some background about me, I hold a masters from one of the good universities in pacific nw and also an undergrad in cse from india. After school, I worked with a small company before joining this social network startup for couple of years. They got acquired and the engineering staff was told to look for other opportunities.

Not a big deal, I got couple of offers and considering that I was on a work visa, I had to accept whatever offer I got so as to stay in US, I accepted this offer.

However, after working for a couple of months, I am not liking it. I was hired as SDE but they have asked me to work as SDET. I have no problems with testing if it was 5-10% of time. I tried to take it as a challenge but the features are being launched so quickly and so many releases every week that any automation I create, starts breaking with the next release. It has gone so bad that I have been limited to doing manual QA. There are a total of 2 QA for a team of 25+ engineer and with at least two releases and many other minor releases every week, it has gone really crazy with a 75+ hours a week being a norm.

I have worked in startup earlier and I really enjoyed working in startup where I connected well with product and coded all day long, but here I just don't feel good.

Having said all these things, I want to ask good folks at HN whether this has been their experience at working for startups and if it was, did they stayed there and made it work or switched to some other position? Also, will it look ok on my resume if I stayed with an organization for a short period (3-4 months)?

Thanks for your help.

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