Comment by txcwpalpha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by txcwpalpha | Hacker News Reader

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I have recently interviewed at one of the largest, oldest educational institutions in the US, and also interviewed at one of the largest tech companies in the world. Both of them used the phrase “want to work at a startup?” in the job descriptions and both hiring manager said something along the lines of “we have a great startup culture”.

At this point the word is meaningless to me. If anything I have noticed that “we are like a startup” is really code for “we are incredibly disorganized and chaotic but for some reason we are proud of it.” Any time something went wrong with one of these companies (was late to a meeting, forgot to attach something to an email, etc) the excuse was "sorry, that's just how it is working at a startup haha!"

I recently had an interview at Mozilla. I remember the interviewer responding to one of my culture questions with "We aren't a startup by any measure... Firefox is one of the oldest software artifacts on the internet still being maintained."

+10 for candor

I do consulting and have worked with clients ranging from 3 person seed stage startups to Intel and Nike, so pretty much the whole spectrum.

Really the only difference to me is that startup executives treat your time like it doesn't matter, 100% of the time. At bigger companies, we will schedule a meeting and talk about something. Many of my small inexperienced clients just send Slack messages one after the other at 6PM on a Friday that make no sense and clearly have no thought behind them beyond "this worked for my friends startup, lets try the same thing!!"

It just feels like 95% of startup founders I meet nowadays are so scatterbrained they can't communicate and will certainly never prepare for anything, all while expecting their employees to always be 100% prepared.

Today I learned: My father is a start-up exec.

You have a "startup culture" (because there are sodas in the break room).

I am a "full-stack developer" (because I once worked through a React tutorial).

Recruiting and interviewing is a crapshoot, all around.

Marketers are great at diluting the meanings of words

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