Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

Re:Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018? by drb91 on Monday June 11, 2018 @03:37PM (#17287762)

> I just don't see the attraction of joining a startup as an early employee. You can learn a whole lot from a "usual suspect", where the world's experts reside, and a whole team of competent and hard-working people are also.

I’ve noticed people tend to specialize at larger places, and not everyone wants to go deep rather than wide. Startups are a super easy way to optimize for a wider skill base, albeit at a sharp cost of depth.

YMMV, but it depends on the type of education you value.

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Re:Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018? by hello_moto on Monday June 11, 2018 @04:58PM (#17288532)

I can't speak for other because people choose different walk of life but I thought I share what I felt about specialization vs generalization w.r.t to large companies and startups.

Generalization will limit career and compensation eventually. There will be a point where the market will have a glut for general skillset.

Specialization, on the other hand, usually leads to higher compensation and valuable skillset.

This does not mean that Specialist can't be Generalist. It could be that Specialist was once Generalist and get bored :).

By 2012-2014, the landscape of web development has not changed drastically so if a Generalist stops doing what he/she did and chose to be a Specialist from 2014-2018 (say, in Storage design, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, or AI), that doesn't mean he/she can't go down to the product/web layer and contribute: it's still MVC doing CRUD backed by MySQL/PostgreSQL and with a touch of some client-side stuff.

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Re:Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018? by shamino on Monday June 11, 2018 @03:48PM (#17287869)

I see your point, and I agree. I'd also say that even though people are "deeper" at larger places, there are so many different "deep" people that you tend to get "wide" if you need to. Just ask a different person.

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