I fairly frequently have conversations with people who are excited about starting their own project and, within a few minutes, convince them that they would learn less starting project than they would working for someone else. I think this is basically the only opinion I have where I can regularly convince EAs to change their mind in a few minutes of discussion and, since there is now renewed interest in starting EA projects, it seems worth trying to write down.
It’s generally accepted that optimal learning environments have a few properties:
You are doing something that is just slightly too hard for you.
In startups, you do whatever needs to get done. This will often be things that are way too easy (answering a huge number of support requests) or way too hard (pitching a large company CEO on your product when you’ve never even sold bubblegum before).
Established companies, by contrast, put substantial effort into slotting people into roles that are approximately at their skill level (though you still usually need to put in proactive effort to learn things at an established company).
Repeatedly practicing a skill in “chunks”
Similar to the last point, established companies have a “rhythm” where e.g. one month per year where everyone has a priority of writing up reflections on how the sales cycle is going, commenting on each other’s writeups, and updating your own. Startups do things by the seat of their pants, which means employees are usually rapidly switching between tasks.
Feedback from experts/mentorship
Startup accelerators like YCombinator partially address this, but still a defining characteristic of starting your own project is that you are doing the work without guidance/oversight.
Moreover, even supposing you learn more at a startup, it’s worth thinking about what it actually is you learn. I know way more about the laws regarding healthcare insurance than I did before starting a company, but that knowledge isn’t super useful to me outside the startup context.
This isn’t a 100% universal knockdown argument – some established companies suck for professional development, and some startups are really great. But by default, I would expect startups to be worse for learning.
I think I agree with this. Two things that might make starting a startup a better learning opportunity than your alternative, in spite of it being a worse learning environment:
You are undervalued by the job market (so you can get more opportunities to do cool things by starting your own thing)
You work harder in your startup because you care about it more (so you get more productive hours of learning)
It depends on what you want to learn. At a startup, people will often get a lot more breadth of scope than they would otherwise in an established company. Yes, you might not have in-house mentors or seasoned pros to learn from, but these days motivated people can fill in the holes outside the org.
Startups aren’t good for learning
I fairly frequently have conversations with people who are excited about starting their own project and, within a few minutes, convince them that they would learn less starting project than they would working for someone else. I think this is basically the only opinion I have where I can regularly convince EAs to change their mind in a few minutes of discussion and, since there is now renewed interest in starting EA projects, it seems worth trying to write down.
It’s generally accepted that optimal learning environments have a few properties:
You are doing something that is just slightly too hard for you.
In startups, you do whatever needs to get done. This will often be things that are way too easy (answering a huge number of support requests) or way too hard (pitching a large company CEO on your product when you’ve never even sold bubblegum before).
Established companies, by contrast, put substantial effort into slotting people into roles that are approximately at their skill level (though you still usually need to put in proactive effort to learn things at an established company).
Repeatedly practicing a skill in “chunks”
Similar to the last point, established companies have a “rhythm” where e.g. one month per year where everyone has a priority of writing up reflections on how the sales cycle is going, commenting on each other’s writeups, and updating your own. Startups do things by the seat of their pants, which means employees are usually rapidly switching between tasks.
Feedback from experts/mentorship
Startup accelerators like YCombinator partially address this, but still a defining characteristic of starting your own project is that you are doing the work without guidance/oversight.
Moreover, even supposing you learn more at a startup, it’s worth thinking about what it actually is you learn. I know way more about the laws regarding healthcare insurance than I did before starting a company, but that knowledge isn’t super useful to me outside the startup context.
This isn’t a 100% universal knockdown argument – some established companies suck for professional development, and some startups are really great. But by default, I would expect startups to be worse for learning.
I think I agree with this. Two things that might make starting a startup a better learning opportunity than your alternative, in spite of it being a worse learning environment:
You are undervalued by the job market (so you can get more opportunities to do cool things by starting your own thing)
You work harder in your startup because you care about it more (so you get more productive hours of learning)
It depends on what you want to learn. At a startup, people will often get a lot more breadth of scope than they would otherwise in an established company. Yes, you might not have in-house mentors or seasoned pros to learn from, but these days motivated people can fill in the holes outside the org.
It depends what you want to learn
As you said.
Founding a startup is a great way to learn how to found a startup.
Working as a backend engineer in some company is a great way to learn how to be a backend engineer in some company.
(I don’t see why to break it up more than that)