job offer advice needed
Hello ycers,
I have a question for all of you.I have almost run out of money saved from a couple years of freelancing and as a jr. dev, trying to bootstrap a startup, so I needed some cash. Over the weekend I applied for jobs and interviewed at two companies. Both of them are heavy .NET C#/C++ houses, and they both offerred me 40,000/yr + benefits. But thats where the similarities stop.
The first company i interviewed with had a Tom Brady look-alike for a "technical director", everyone was wearing some variation of Zegna (might has well have been, but could have been Target), creative colored walls, and was essentially a profitable "product" company ( 10-12 employees ), with $1.2mm earnings on $3mm in sales. They do a bit of extremely expensive consulting ($200+/hr), but their bread and butter is in their enterprise product. Their adherence to OO and relational db principles was rigourous to a fault, as demonstrated by the robust 4'x 2' diagram of their db on the wall of the TD's office. They just seem like a perfect fit. The td ended the interview by saying that it would be a very steep learning curve for me to understand their system, even with my (decent) understanding of software dev.
The second company's contrast to the first was so profound, that during the interview, I was tempted to laugh at the many unprofessional attributes of the place. Having previously worked as a (gasp) VB dev at a small firm (~20 employees, mostly fix-it IT guys), I thought I was used to a lax environment. But this wasn't lax, this was sloppy. I won't get into the details, but suffice it to say that twice I had to jump out of the chair provided to guests to evade the live-in cat. Being a web development company with no proprietary product, they were not profitable, and still funded by who-knows and the few $40 - $80k websites that they developed . They were very folksy, and I actually laughed quite a bit during the interview. Taking 40k from them seems like a cakewalk.
I'll end by saying that I think I would learn a lot about complex software and whats right(wrong) with it/how to build it, or I could just take the easy job,hack in my spare time, and make enough money to get on my feet until i decide I have something good enough to show VCs/yc. But then, yeah...I was wondering if "run upstairs" applied in this situation.
So
As a 20yr old, cs dropout, self taught programmer and aspiring startupper, which job would you take?
I appreciate all advice