Winning the start-up game: get dirty quickly
Get involved as quickly as you can
This is part one of a series arming you with the tools needed to thrive in the start-up world.
The start-up life: it’s not for everyone. Start-ups, in my experience, can be chaotic, shambolic, infuriating, and tempestuous places. In the beginning, you will often find yourself flailing about in the water’s deep end with your head being pushed under. You will have sleepless nights, stress-ridden mornings, and late evenings. There will be moments when you wonder whether any of this is worth it—a grim picture on the surface. However, one thing about start-ups is also true: the best moments of your career will happen at a start-up. You will make friends for life and create a plethora of stories. You will gain experience at neck-break speed—and you will become a better engineer.
This thesis represents my relationship with start-ups. I spent the first seven years of my career working for companies that made no profit and had a handful of employees. I used these companies to get my foot on the first rung of the software industry ladder.
For now, my start-up years are behind me. In those years, I was immersed in this world. It is my hope that some of the lessons I acquired will be of value to you, too. In today’s post, we’ll start at what I believe is the fundamental tool for surviving start-up life: gaining the trust of those around you as quickly as possible.
My career began in a start-up about eight years ago. At the time, I was in the middle of a computer science degree. Unlike my peers, I had elected to enrol on a distance-learning degree. I had no desire to get the “university experience”; glorified alcoholism with a massive bill at the end wasn’t my aspiration. So, whilst my peers set sail for their various campuses, I stayed home with my parents and textbooks.
Three years into the four-year degree, I was ready to get out of my room, away from the textbooks and into the world of work. I embarked on the journey of applying for jobs. I can’t say I knew what I was doing. I had been studying software engineering for three years, but I had no idea what engineering discipline I wanted to pursue. I just wanted a job in the industry—I was willing to clean the toilets if necessary.
I stumbled upon a small company some ten miles from where my parents lived. The company was looking for software testers. The level of required experience was minimal; it was a junior position. Whilst I didn’t know what kind of engineer I wanted to be, I knew that quality assurance would not be my final destination. But at this point, I didn’t care. I saw an opening into the world of work, and I was going to take it.
After an hour-long interview with the company’s founders—you can tell this was a start-up—I got the call from the office manager later that day to inform me that I had the job. The salary was £14,000 a year, there were no perks, the work day was from 08:30 to 17:30, and I was expected to work hard. I was elated. I had broken into the industry.
After my first few days at the company, it was clear that it was in the early stages of becoming a software house. Things would often break, disputes would flare up, there were little to no processes, and the company was small. At that size—about twenty people—everyone knows everyone. This gets us to the first lesson for surviving the start-up world: become competent fast and gain the trust of those around you. When you’re a junior tester in a company of twenty people, you realise how visible you are. And, at that size, everything you do matters. This is empowering at a young age but also overwhelming. The sooner you gain your colleagues’ trust, the better.
The best way to gain this trust is to get dirty quickly. Get involved. It doesn’t matter at this stage if you make mistakes—you must make them as matter of course. What matters is that you demonstrate you are willing to do the work. Not only will you do the job, but you’ll do the tasks other people will avoid. Someone asks for a volunteer: put your hand up. In this role as a software tester, I was given the unenviable task of managing the paperwork for all the known defects. The company had this bizarrely onerous system for managing bugs in the application. Every bug was printed out on a particular form, and every Wednesday, the entire development team would work on fixing defects. This was good in theory, but it was hell for software testers like myself in practice. At 16:00, we’d be inundated with piles of these forms that we had to verify in the system.
Everyone knew it was an imperfect system. But the important thing for me was the company saw me getting on with it. I didn’t complain; I just did the job. If you can start stringing together moments like this, before you know it, you will have the trust of those around you. For it is the case that the trust you earn in a start-up won’t just exist between you and your engineering manager: it will likely exist between those above you—including the company’s founders. Assuming the company can remain healthy, a trusting relationship between an employee and an employer in a start-up can almost be a job for life.
Become competent; gain trust. Get dirty quickly.