ab992_throwaway

Re:Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup on Monday November 26, 2018 @03:22PM (#18536461)

I guess this might fall under "You need experience and you have no other option to get experience.", but I ended up on the path of working for startups because

1. I never graduated from university (life came up, and I couldn't afford to keep going); but, also,

2. I don't live in the US (I'm Canadian.)

Any of the US bigcorps that want to hire programmers, expect them to get a visa and move to the US.

You know what you need, to get a work visa as a programmer coming to the US?

A college degree!

So, my employer pool was instantly limited to non-US companies. Mostly local Canadian companies. Most of those are very conservative and also expect a college degree. The only ones that aren't, are startups. So that's what I had to do.

The really annoying thing is, I ended up doing work for these Canadian startups that would netted me a $300k USD salary if I had been doing it for a US bigcorp. But, because Canadian salaries are lower, and startup salaries are lower, I was only getting ~$60k.

After years of doing that, I'm a Canadian startup founder... and still only making (i.e. paying myself) $60k.

I guess I'm an object lesson in the value of a college degree!