Write code for a startup

It’s one of the best experiences you can have as a coder

This is kinda a reply to this article stating exactly the opposite: you should never code for a startup. As matter of fact, you needn’t dig a lot to find another article that says you should never do any kind of work for a startup.

Well, my experience has been exactly the opposite. All my stints outside academia have been in startups. All of them amazing experience. And it’s been so for the following reasons

1. You will never be in a silo. Big or medium size companies, they hire you for doing front-end development, you’ll be doing that, probably using the same framework used in the job interview. For ever or until you get tired of it. Meanwhile in a startup you’ll have the chance to be jack of all trades. In the first startup I was in I was developing a C++ driver to a DB2 database, and then XSLT style sheets for turning HTML into WAP (yes, it was a long time ago). Nowadays, in a couple of months I’ve been exposed to 5 languages, several technologies, done code reviews, written test code, GitHub actions… I think that whatever job you have, the best thing it can be is training for the next one. As well as offer some challenges, as well as people that can help you to get through them. A startup will be just that.
2. You’ll get to meet everyone, talk to anyone, been heard by anyone. You’ll meet the CEO, the CTO, all the C-suite, sometimes in a single day; they will know you on a first name basis, and of course you’ll be able to learn from them if that’s your thing. But you will get to meet the people behind the decisions that you’re coding, and maybe even have some influence on where everything goes. You’ll be so much more than a cog in a complex machinery, you’ll be the fiddle in a quartet.
3. The chance that you’ll be working on legacy code written by someone who hates him or herself, as well as the language used, is relatively slim. Code will be freshly baked, anyone who wrote that is around the corner, you can just ask what led to this or that and very possible refactor it into something incrementally better.
4. It’s true that startups tend to fail. The first one I was involved in didn’t last 7 months after I left (yep, I left, but for reasons totally unrelated to it being a startup). You might or might not get rich vetting your stock options; most probably you won’t. So what? You are not going to get rich in any mid-size company that do not usually offer that kind of thing either. Plus even if startups fail, people don’t. The network of alumni created by the company will probably offer you jobs in wherever they end up next.
5. But the most important thing is that, with your work, you’ll be the actual and real owner of a part of the product/s created by the company. When something is released or goes public, you’ll be able to proudly point to something and say “I created that screen, or reviewed the code that does this thing”.

So if you’re offered a job in a startup, by all means say yes. Coder or whatever.