I’ll Tell My Son to Work for a StartUp

When my son is looking for his first post-college job, I’ll tell him to go work for a startup. It’s some of the best career advice I can give him, and I hope he takes it.

My first job in the tech industry was for a small six-person company (yeah, that’s small). I’ve never regretted that job. Quite the contrary. Many times I’ve reflected on what a valuable experience it was and how it shaped me in important ways. Here are just a few of the reasons I’d recommend it to my kid.

You wear lots of hats.

This is the best reason to work for a small, even struggling, company. There’s lot of work to do and not enough people. That means you have the opportunities to play different roles. At my first company, I was hired as the technical writer. But also ended up doing customer support, creating marketing materials like press releases and brochures, working the booth at conferences, and even doing some programming for internal use. That positioned me to take any number of different jobs when I left the company. It also gave me much better insight into the business as a whole and what it takes to make a tech company successful.

You work a lot of hours.

Okay, maybe that doesn’t seem like such a good thing to you. But as you get older and acquire kids and other obligations, you sacrifice a lot more to work long hours than you do when you’re just out of college. Your first job is the perfect time to put in a lot of hours, totally focus on your career, and gain a lot of knowledge and practical experience in a very short time. Startups need and require the time committment. As a recent college grad, they’ll pay you back with a much fuller resume.

Your expectations are set low

I worked for small companies until I came to Microsoft. When I did join MS, I found myself with a lot of young techies fresh out of college. I remember how they griped about odd things—like the lousy selection of sodas in the kitchens, or the increase in cafeteria prices, or how long they had to wait on the phone for Help Desk. I couldn’t believe they were complaining about our free sodas or the Help Desk wait time. Where I’d worked before, nothing was free. You brought your lunch or went to the Jack in the Box down the street. And you had to figure out how to fix your computer yourself. I was amazed by the luxuries of Microsoft with its kitchens and shuttles and Christmas shipping service on campus. I felt totally spoiled.

Working for a startup first is kind of like having twins your first pregnancy. You might as well have them the first go around.  That way you don’t realize how hard you really have it.

You can afford to take the risk

Many of us will “settle down” with a house, kids, or at least a dog. All of those things make it harder to take risks. At the first company I worked for, I had to skip a paycheck a couple of times, when they couldn’t find the funding to make payroll. That wasn’t such a big deal for me, since I was just renting a room at the time. It’s a bigger problem when you’ve got to pay the mortgage. Likewise, most startups fail. That means you lose your job–something that’s more bearable when you can still go home to your parents or room with friends. Not so much when it can put your entire family out on the streets.

A few of those startups, though, will survive. Some will even make it big. And one of the ways these companies compensate for lower pay or fewer benefits is by giving you a piece of the company. My first startup didn’t make it big, but I did have stock in the company and I eventually (over a decade later) made over a hundred thousand off them. While the money was great, I have to say that it was not the most valuable thing I got from that company. And now you know what I mean.