Sure, if you want to work at a startup, I would say early career is the best time to do so. Best case scenario, you learn a lot, your company has a successful exit, and you make some decent cash.
The other side of the coin is that for every well run startup where you can learn a lot, there are a bunch that are terrible, where you won’t learn as much, your stock options won’t ever be worth anything, you’ll be overworked, and you’ll overall end up behind where you would have been starting at a more established company.
My experience has been mostly the latter, so I’m a little biased here, but it seems like the default HN bias leans the other way, so I’m trying to counterbalance that. Yes, I did learn from my couple of startup tours, but I’m not sure if I became a better engineer as a result of working at those places. IMO, my time at larger, public companies has been more valuable to me in career terms.
The other aspect here is a lot of people have a different idea on what joining a startup is. I've heard of people saying, "Oh, I'm joining a startup!" And then it's Uber just before they IPO. Maybe technically Uber was a startup at that point but I've been at a seed stage company - they're not even remotely comparable experiences. I worry people who have only worked at startups with 10+ engineers, super engineering driven culture, and lots of funding are giving the advice of, "work for a startup! It's great!"
Most of the time - it isn't great. It's terrible and not being a founder is the #1 reason I never want to join a startup again. All the risk - none of the reward and none of the power. Fucking sucks.
For an employee, whether they're looking to learn or earn, I think "go work at a startup" as a blanket piece of advice is a bad idea, unless they know how to spot the red flags a bad startup throws up. The earlier stage the company is, the more potential it has for both learning and earning. But, earlier stage bad companies haven't been weeded out as thoroughly as later stage companies. This is just survivorship bias, although, in this case, it works for you rather than against you.
The benefit is that in a small startup you get so much more exposure and are not siloed away.
Counterpoint to “more exposure and not siloed away”: this can easily lead to overwork, either self or externally imposed.
You might learn a lot by jumping into a startup, but your chances of failing are probably higher than if you start one 20 years into your career. The average age of successful startup founders is not in the 20s.
Then they joined a not-gonna-happen startup (to do with optical fibers) as a CEO, investing something like $50k of their own money to get the position, later increasing their stake to $150k. If the startup is about to die this is not very hard. They had a plan to turn things around and in at least one case (out of 4-5 tries) it worked. This guy was then forced out of the CEO job, but he was certainly very well compensated for his efforts (triple digit millions).
Of course he did try that 5 times, and lost everything 4 times out of 5. Including years of work. It's not for the faint of heart.
The other one made out well as well on one of his past efforts that was taken over by a competitor for a very nice price, after which he left. He's now working on a company that I'm not really holding out much hope for.
Why is Alcatell-Lucent kinda pointless?
If you want your entire career to be exactly like, let's say, the first year of your master study at university, with exactly defined problems to be solved, then get a thank you, maybe a nice compliment if you've done exceptionally well, then to see your solution disappear and never even be used anywhere (and certainly not voluntarily by a customer) or if your family has enough money to build a house out of 100 dollar bill bricks, it's the perfect place. A place where people use extreme social pressure, even crimes, to get the slightest of advances within the company, because there is no future there. I would make damn sure all my interests lie outside of work though, even in that case.
I also don't think you should try and exclusively maximize your dollar earnings in your 20's, personally. But it's just an opinion.
I think the OP is referring to the sum earning potential across remaining years. At a certain point job retraining isnt worth it because the low number of remaining years results in a negative EROI vs maintaining the course.
1) How did you get started? Is it feasible for more junior engineers to get into it or not so much?
2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?
I would say it's not so feasable as a junior unless you really can hit the ground running which only comes with experience, at least in ops. Most clients expect me to be productive within about a week of landing if not less, otherwise they would have found a permie. They also expect senior freelance people in such a space to be making or helping to make a lot of decisions for them, which is hard to do until you've made enough mistakes to learn what not to do, instead of just knowing the latest doo-daa or other.
Finding work isn't hard, you register with a few agencies (e.g hays, linuxrecruit, etc etc and then they farm your CV out to their clients, and then you interview and start working.. I've never spent more than a week looking for a new contract)
As for the amount of work -- endless, at least in devops...
Currently I am working as a senior devops/sre for a startup, k8s, cloudy stuff, big springboot stack (50 or so services across 10 instances, etc) -- I do the same work as the full time staff, mgt treats me as slightly more senior/more votes than those because I am really, but you have to walk a bit of a political line sometimes.
Any questions feel free :}
Have you considered relocating to the US?
I'm a devops contractor in the UK and looking at options to maximize income.
Nah, quality of life wouldn't be there for me, personally.
London is still probably highest rates for devops in the EU, Munich/Frankfurt/Amterdam/Paris aren't far behind but the work is more boring, Berlin rates are less but everything is quite cheap..
I'm not a digital nomad, have a house and a child :}
No anxiety really, just keep some money set aside and after some years you sort of know if you'll be able to easily find a job or not.
In the absolute worst case, if I couldn't get another contract, I could always go perm, but I've not had to make such a decision yet.
I got started with a combination of crappy freelance websites (I found some small assignments on elance etc), reddit/r/freelance, and had some small jobs for friends and previous employees. After that I found a great gig on Hacker News's "Seeking Freelancer" forum. Then I moved into longer term onsite contracts, hourly rates are a bit less flexible but you have more security and a more stable turnover.
2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?
As I said -- longer term contracts give you stability here. Other freelancers go for more lucrative short-term projects. There's lots of combinations. My first project was like 3 weeks, and I've been at my current assignment for almost 3 years now.
It's not happened to me yet, my earning potential has only increased as I've gained more experience (41 now), especially since I went freelance.
I would say in your 20's is a great time to take risks. Usually doing this will give you great experience you can then apply throughout your life, too. For example:
- Work for a startup. Here you are on Hacker News! The pay won't be as good as a bigger company and equity probably won't ever pay out anything much, but you will learn a LOT if you choose to work for a half decent startup.
- Go freelance. This is how I've learned the majority of the technologies I've worked with. For the first 15 years of my career I mostly stuck to what I knew, after going freelance my skillset grew significantly due to working with various different clients with different requirements. Note that if you go freelance it will be hard to go back to working in permanent positions. The freedom and money is really nice.
Starting a business - (Assuming you mean "build a product") - I personally wouldn't recommend this unless you have a good idea; early paying customers; the ability to commit to it and execute continuously. It's the most difficult career path to take. IMHO it's worth waiting and gaining experience and seeing what else is out there first before diving in. It takes serious drive, tons of effort and some luck to be successful. I've released a few of my own products and nothing has been successful - becoming a successful freelancer was MUCH easier.
Take risks, meet people, learn plenty of new things. If you can combine your interests with your career it can be great but be careful you don't end up burning out on something you privately enjoy because of combining it with work.
Good luck!