How to succeed as a Techie at a Startup

At the time of starting this piece, I was a 5 years experienced Software Engineer with experience primarily in MNCs such as Nvidia and Amazon. Then I joined a Hot late-stage Indian startup revolutionizing payments landscape in India.

After spending a few months at this startup as a Senior Engineer, I began to notice some clear differences in the way engineers operate at smaller and bigger companies.

I will try to note some of these differences here and also talk about things one can do to adapt better to a startup scene if they didn’t begin their career at one.

Attitude

Attitude is probably the most important denominator. Startups consist of very small teams, sometimes of size 1 or 2. You need to be very cooperative with other stakeholders at the same time have backbone to push back when you think the proposed approach is not actionable, since you are supposed to act as authority for your module/service.

Stress on fundamentals

I used to get by just fine if I didn’t know the fundamentals of devops stuff or DB design while at Amazon, but here you are supposed to know these things.

Hands-on approach

You are expected to be hands-on enough to implement a feature that took months to design and plan in a day, if someone up the ladder decided it has suddenly become a priority.

Release-iterate-release

You are expected to be very agile in releasing features with some tolerance for unexpected behavior, for which you can re-iterate, but the bias is towards getting into production.

Short review cycles

You are expected to write decent code in one go, and reviewer will not spend lot of time to find faults or malfunctions, you are expected to have written and tested your code robustly to the point that review and merge sometimes basically means merge code.

Quick thinkers

A successful tech startup can only be built by a small group of very smart and perseverant people, and if you want to work alongside them, you too need to be both very smart and very perseverant.