How do you think a fresh-out-of-college junior with less than a year of experience going to be at execution?
Knowing nothing but that, I'm going to take a statistical guess, and say: "Probably not great." I'm going to make another statistical guess, and say: "They probably don't even know what they don't know."
Also, joining someplace that's not consultancy-focused (like Google or Facebook) isn't necessarilly going to help with building relevant experience.
Yes, you're going to learn a lot about how to move protobufs around from one distributed system to another, and how to do on-call, and how to work in the cloud.
No, this is not the most useful set of skills to have, when the insurance broker down the street wants to pay you $XYZW to build them a custom SalesForce widget.
> Also, joining someplace that's not consultancy-focused (like Google or Facebook) isn't necessarilly going to help with building relevant experience.
It's soo much more important to have worked for one of these companies. If you have Google on your resume it will work magic. Clients love that. It'll help with leads, it will help with negotiation, and it will help close deals.
Honestly the two things I wish I'd done before I started my company was work for amagoobooksoft and put in some time at a sales job.(cold calling or some type of lead gen)
I have to disagree.
I've worked for several tech consulting firms(8 years of experience) and then started my own consulting company 2 years ago. And in my running a successful consulting firm involves 3 key skills(in order of importance).
Sales - This is definitely the hardest and most important skill. And unfortunately is also the skill developers usually have the least experience in. This involves finding leads and closing deals. This will take a long time to do and is emotionally very rough for most developers.
Customer/Relationship Skills - If you're already a nice a polite person who doesn't mind eating the occasional shit sandwich this mostly involves repeatedly learning the lesson that however important you think communication it's more important you think.
Execution - This is mostly involves a combination of being able to correctly identify requirements and technical execution skills. Most developers usually have plenty of experience hear.
The experience most developers lack is sales. And most consulting shops won't put you anywhere near a sales or account management role unless you have previous sales experience or have spent significant time at the company. A much faster route to learn these skills is to just start a company and start doing them. (while reading a bunch of books and talking to anyone you can who has relevant experience)