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Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

Why would employees lose years of their career? While it's true that early work-ex in a company that eventually becomes Google is great to have, it's not exactly a black mark on your resume if you have worked in a company that didn't do well. You still got plenty of engineering experience.

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I was at a failing startup during the .COM bubble. I lost my job in 2002 and was unemployed for almost a year due to the terrible job market back then. Definitely a very existential problem compared to the investors who either lost a small percentage of a large fortune or lost other people's money.

Sadly, four years of "heroic effort at failing startup" doesn't look as good on the resume as "worked at Google".

A lot of startups aren't even technically very advanced so the only thing you may have learned is to work 80 hours per week without complaining

That experience is invaluable to anyone who can adapt and apply the learned mistakes to future work. Especially so if being applied to a startup environment. You have to be laser focused, gritty, willing fight 24/7/365 for years. This doesn't just apply to the founder/CEO it applies to anyone involved early stage, every day is just too mission critical and the entire team needs to be aware of the consequences. For the most part or most teams, you don't learn that at Google. That's who i'd want on my team at least.

Disagree - not saying that a failed startup is better than Google, but honestly there is a lot of appeal to hiring someone who took a shot on something less established. Both have their merits.

i've had the opportunity to hire a decent number of people at a couple of startups. i hope you can find comfort in the fact i disagree with you. :)

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