Entrepreneur

Why Would A Software Engineer Join A Startup?


The loss of talented workers is one of the biggest concerns for any corporation. These knowledge workers exist at all rungs of the corporate ladder — recruits fresh out of university, midlevel managers, senior leadership. But why are they not content with their roles? This despite securing respectable positions in well-known companies, with salaries that are the envy of peers in their industry.

Take the example of Aditya Agarwal, former CTO at Dropbox. After graduating from Carnegie Melon in 2004, he joined Oracle in the summer of 2005. While Agarwal joined the tech sector, his colleagues from Carnegie Melon headed east to join Wall Street. But Agarwal was restless, and, as luck would have it, a friend introduced him to Mark Zuckerberg.

When Agarwal met Zuckerberg, he knew there was something special about him and his vision. He realized Mark was a “driven individual” and that it would be “fun to hang out and work” with him and his team. Here were two like-minded individuals who wanted to “build and build.”

So in 2005, Agarwal joined Facebook, eventually becoming the director of product engineering. By 2010, he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. In early 2011, he and his wife founded Cove, a stealth collaboration startup. Dropbox acquired Cove in March 2012. After that, Agarwal joined Dropbox. 

There are many things that we can learn from Agarwal’s success story. For one, we see fire in the belly. He aspired to work with driven individuals and create exciting products like Facebook and Dropbox that make an impact on society and change lives.

Secondly, Agarwal followed his heart and became an entrepreneur in the tech sector instead of following his friends to the financial industry. These decisions and career moves paid off. In a couple of years, he found himself in a senior leadership role at Dropbox.

And finally, it’s important to consider the transformative trial-by-fire experiences and the risks taken by Agarwal. All of this allowed him to gain rich and unique experiences in a shorter time; it would have taken him a much longer time to achieve this had he followed the standard career trajectory at a larger company.

What Drives Individuals?

study by Gallup Research reveals that employees quit large companies mainly because of the lack of career advancement or promotional opportunities (32% of respondents). Another Gallup study cites the lack of engagement — your least engaged employees are the ones who are most likely to quit. The study says, “When your best employees are not engaged, they are as likely to leave your organization as your employees who tend to have performance issues and are unhappy.”

To engage employees, you need the right environment, work culture, and free access to top management and fellow employees. The environment should foster continuous learning and development for an individual’s growth. It should encourage innovation and allow employees to explore and apply their knowledge.

Leading companies around the world are on the bleeding edge of innovation because they encourage their employees to explore. For instance, some companies establish a “garage” and provide all the tools and resources for their employees to experiment, innovate and invent. They even offer funding for projects.

This is more likely to happen in a smaller company with fewer employees (i.e., a flatter organization).

Former YouTube CEO Chad Hurley says he enjoyed the freedom of working in a startup like PayPal. He claims the PayPal experience gave him the confidence to do his own thing. “It helped me realize the payoff of being involved in a startup,” said Hurley.

The Startup Culture

When comparing work environments and cultures, there are stark differences between a startup, micro or small business and a medium- or large-size corporation.

A startup environment is quite different. There is an inherent interplay of energies and passions between different parts of a startup to create an amazing product or experience for the user. Seeing such an interplay, which leads to an evolving product, is truly a unique experience. This cannot be gained at a large company where different departments are entirely disjointed.

In contrast, a regular corporation is departmentalized, and one is confined to the work of that department. There is little scope for innovation and improvisation. Projects drag on for months, and product development involves many people who are often in different locations. One has to grapple with the challenges of bureaucracy, office politics and a tiered chain of command. As a result, approvals for new ideas and proposals take longer.

Growth opportunities for engineers

Engineers have more creative freedom in a startup. They have access to resources and people at all levels in the organization. The proximity that you have to the founders, CEO, CMO and passionate technologists in different fields is unbeatable. Such proximity to a wide variety of people is quite rare and unheard of in a larger company. This opens the possibilities of starting a company in the future with the learnings of these leaders.

Also, one gets opportunities to hone their leadership qualities faster than at a large company. Typically, one becomes a manager after 10-plus years of experience at these companies. At my current startup, we have ambitious engineers with six months of experience, leading teams of three people successfully!

Conclusion

Working in a startup puts you on an accelerated career trajectory. There is also a spirit of ownership, sharing and collaboration, with everyone wanting to create the next big thing that will change lives.

The experience can best be summed up in the words of the late Steve Jobs when he was wooing Pepsi executive John Sculley to join Apple: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”  



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