Does a failed startup count against you on your resume? | Hacker News Reader

Does a failed startup count against you on your resume?

blogs.msdn.com

9 pointsthorax21 comments

Ugh. Every time I read something from the MSDN jobs blog, I come away with the same, greasy feeling that I get when I've spent more than 30 seconds talking to a recruiter who cold-calls people for jobs requiring fifteen years of Ruby experience.

If you want to know what a pirate thinks of your sailing skills, you don't ask his parrot.

Yes. Why would a big corporation want to hire someone who can come up with ideas and implement them without "adult supervision"? That would make the 100 layers of management useless, and nobody wants to be useless.

The ideal candidate will be smart but have no ambition to do anything on his/her own. A failed startup means he has that ambition.

I think most people who like to come up with ideas and implement them wouldn't want to work at a large company for the reason you mention. Small companies and other start ups would probably value their ideas and initiative.

Isn't this sarcastic?

uh, yea

Thank you because I am autistic.

I love people who take risks and follow their passions, but if your resume lists a series of short stints at failed startups, I think it’s natural to question a person’s career management skills.

What are "career management skills"? Two interpretations come to my mind.

The author could mean a tendency to constantly worry about how one's resume will look to big companies. If this is the case, why does Microsoft care? A person who, whenever considering a new project, worries about how it will affect his resume is more likely to get stolen by a competing big company, since big companies generally prefer conservative resumes. However, a person who isn't scared to have a resume with many jobs at failed startups is more likely to get stolen by a startup, since they generally don't care if a person has such a resume (they may even prefer it), and also because the person probably has lots of contacts in the startup world. In the American technology industry today, headhunting is a danger regardless of how conservative the employee's resume is.

Another interpretation is that by "career management skills" the author means a willingness to take a steady, well-paying job when one has a family to support. This makes sense: what would you think of someone who insists on working for startups, even at the cost of having trouble feeding his three children and being forced to live in a dangerous neighborhood? But perhaps he doesn't have a family. Or perhaps the spouse has a steady job to support the kids. Or perhaps he has a trust fund or a bunch of money from a previous startup. There are so many exceptions that a resume full of failed startups is not a reliable signal of this kind of irresponsibility.

Neither of these interpretations makes much sense. But there's a less charitable interpretation: "I love people who take risks and follow their passions, but not too much, because then they'd balk at the crap we'd make them do."

I'd rather keep working at failing start ups than apply to a company with that attitude.

Jer

Whenever I hear about whether doing this or that counts for/against you on your resume, I'm reminded of this:

  This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can:
  FUCK.  THAT.  SHIT.

http://xkcd.com/137/

In concentrated high tech areas it might not count against you, but for me in San Diego it is something employers find to be a negative. To them it shows that I might not be "dedicated" to the job I am applying for. I get a lot of "How do we know if you are going to stay" and in general a lot of questions that just start with "How do we know (whatever)", it really starts going downhill once that starts in.

It's a reasonable question to ask; I ask it every time I interview a contractor who suddenly wants a permie job after years of contracting. They all say something about wanting to settle down and build a career. In the majority of cases, they just can't find a contract right now, and when they do, they scarper.

A failed startup I'd count as valuable experience (supervising people is a pain for me, I want people who can think and act on their own initiative) but at the same time, I'd want a decent explanation for the abrupt career shift. "Because I need to make some money" is perfectly valid, and gets top marks from me for honesty.

If a person had been a contractor for some period of time I agree that is perfectly reasonable.

Myself I have never been a contractor and really do hate side projects of which I have taken a few and found myself tied to them far beyond what I could charge so I quickly got out of that. I did make the mistake of mentioning I have done some web sites in the past directly on my own. That is a job interview killer because employers do not want you to have any other responsibilities other then for the company, so even if you have done a few websites on the side in the past, just don't mention it. It didn't help me to mention that, it was not a positive like I thought it was. If you want to use that experience, say you did it not for someone else but to learn how to do "x" because it seemed interesting (might be modifying some cms, shopping carts, etc whatever) and there can't be any business reason, you just did it for fun and not for anyone else.

Even little things can be a job interview killer. Right out of High School I decided I would get a simple job as a person who takes telephone sales at a company that sells cpu's and memory. It was entry level with entry level pay. I had relatively no experience so I mentioned I had helped few people with there computers (innocently enough, not even as a business, just the 'hey you know computers help me with x' type thing). The 3 women (I have no idea why it required 3 people but...) said that the company was going to go into computer repair and that they couldn't possibly hire me because I would take all of there business. Then they started making jokes at my expense, I have to say I nearly cried. I have never desired to be in the computer repair business myself

I have more stories like that, it gets really bad when you work on your startup for two years and then need to get a job.

I have some simple suggestions if a person is NOT applying at a startup or a web only business:

1. You didn't own the startup, working at the startup was a mistake you would never want to repeat. You were told that there were paying clients and that it was cash flow positive. They lied to you and you don't like being lied to.

Reason: You might leave there employment for some startup opportunity or that you might be a free thinking human being and somehow impervious to instruction. OR even worse you will compete with your new employer, your a mole out to steal there business.

2. You do not have any side projects, you have never taken any side work like a simple website project. You would never think of doing such a thing! If you are married say your wife forbids it, then laugh and talk about how much trouble you would get into!

Reason: Employers want your full attention, if they think you are going to make any money on the side then heck you might even start doing that work during work hours or there work is going to be less important. None of that is true but people are plain stupid and you cannot afford to "chance" that the person might be a thinking human being.

I have more sage advice but this is already getting a bit long and I am pretty sure most of the people here live in areas where it is ok to have "outside" learning experiences. Not where I live :)

I recruit for investment banks and hedge funds; it's a positive, even if it's not a tech startup.

I've done some tech recruiting and I agree, definitely a plus.

Investment banks are not really like other large companies, tho'; they're more like a a federation of independent entities. You don't work for the bank, you work for the head of whatever desk or P&L. If a head of desk makes money, no-one cares what he does, he can run his own little fiefdom, a business within a business. This is one reason that banks infrastructure is such a mess, if the head of Dollar-Yen wants something he won't wait for central IT to get round to it, he'll give his geeks a budget and say make it happen.

I have a year of "failed startup" on my resume, and it's always either been positive or neutral in the eyes of employers.

no, you probably learned more by failing at your startup for 3 years, than your peers who spent it working as low level corporate drones doing useless things.

Only if it appears under "Objectives".

So how about when you have a startup on your resume that didn't fail and got acquired?

My experience: Yes, a series of failed startups counts against you with many companies. Then again, if any of those had succeeded you wouldn't be applying there, and if you applied there on a lark they would have counted the successful startup against you.

My conclusion: Certain types of companies do not care to hire the kind of risk-taking individuals who chose to work for startups instead of putting in their five-to-ten at a more stable company.

In my experience, no one really cares which companies you worked for unless they've heard of them. Well-known companies a plus. Failed ones are neutral, at worst.

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