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Comment by KB | Hacker News Reader

I'm 26 and just passed my fifth year at a very large company (18000+), with four years in IT and the past year in Software Engineering. I've been looking for an oppurtunity at a smaller company, since my current one is stifling my ability to learn and be productive.

The issue I'm finding is that small companies are typically looking for someone with more experience than I could currently offer. Has anyone else come across this issue? It seems to me (and others where I work) that we have to somehow pay our dues and get experience at a large company before we gather enough experience to become valuable assets to smaller companies.

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One route you could take would be to look for a startup with young founders. They won't insist on experience, because they don't have it themselves.

Another would be just to look for a good startup. All a good startup cares about is how good you are, not how many years it took you to get that way.

Its also possible I haven't been looking in the right places either. From what I've noticed, its hard to pinpoint jobs at small companies since they don't seem to advertise as much as the larger ones.

However, Jamie from snaptalent was nice enough to email me and pointed me to their job ads page. Unfortunately there's only one company on the east coast listed so far, but I'm hoping once they get rolling with more job ads that my chances for finding a small startup or company to work for will increase.

You can also try:

http://jobs.37signals.com/ (usually webapp jobs)

http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/ (not always small companies)

I keep my eye on the job boards for most of the major tech blogs and sites, but even there it tends to be larger organizations.

The other issue would be the mass amounts of jobs posted for work in CA. I would really like to stay here in the east (Boston) as oppose to moving halfway across the country for a job that very well may exist where I'm located already.

I think CA would be a great place to live, however it just doesn't fit into my current situation at the moment.

Are there any other resources out there for startup type jobs other than the major players (TechCruch, GigaOm, 37Signals, etc)?

Hey there, Sumon from Snaptalent here. Expect over the next few weeks for us to rampup the number of companies on here.

Who else on the east coast would love this? Some great startups there that we can help get for you

Email me: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com

We (over here at snaptalent) just put up joinstartups.com We'll keep this up to date with all the startup jobs (and only the startup jobs) from our network

Something that (stupidly) never occurred to me before I kicked of a startup - if you want to get a job with one, go along to networking meetups (e.g. opencoffee) and you'll soon find some opportunities.

Personally I'd much rather work with someone that is smart and never programmed before than someone that is a terrible coder with 5 years of experience in buzzword-of-the-month.

Last time I looked for a job I actually crossed out any place that wanted more than one year experience with anything. I guess I'll never be a Senior Java Engineer or a Senior .NET Architect or a Senior Oracle DBA, but is that really a loss? Asking for five years experience in some technology is like actively seeking out people that are content to actually do the same thing for five years. Any small company that wants that is going to get trounced by a competitor that learns new tricks.

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