High paying, flexible, start-up with lots of work or regular hours, good paying, normal company with great work culture?
what would you pick?
Considering, on long term I want to start my own company,
- if I take first, I get first hand startup experiance,
- if I take second, I get to know how normal comapnies work, and get the time to work on my own ideas.
Edit: Just to clarify, the first is really small company in Hyderabad with just five employees in all and the other is ThoughtWorks, B'lore.
11:03
be pretty assured that you will not learn anything at a normal company, apart from getting frustrated very soon. ONe tends to learn adjusting to the frustrations and not how to deal with them after a while at a normal company. So dont even think twice, join the start up, make some mistakes, you will not be able to take such a decision never again in future.
Your call nonetheless :)
Considering you want to start a company, a start up will be a great experience. You can only work crazily at this age and stage. Soon, when you get married etc., you will want a personal life, and would like a regular paying, etc. company then. But don't make any hasty decisions. Debate it out with everyone you know. Maybe I will catch you online sometime, but this is exam week :(
Good luck ra.
To run your own company, you need to learn some process. Yes, how to manage code base, how to manage quality control, documentation, how to manage a lab - everything. A startup wouldn't have most things in place. And no one is interested in doing that hard work ... everyone is busy writing code to get the product out, which is more cool than setting up a regression suite that can run after every checkin.
When you have 2/3 people working, it is not an issue. But when you're taking the company to the next level, this is immensely helpful. After 7 years in MNCs, when I came to a startup, all these people around have worked all their life in startups, and didn't have much exposure to any process. No one had an experience to manage a lab with 200 boxes. And then I redesigned the entire office network.
So to run your company, just being geek isn't enough. You can run a chaai-shop with that. To open a store, you should learn inventory control, manage supplies, finances.
Most MNCs will have processes in place to tackle such problems. Go there (2 years), learn how they manage coding, testing, packaging.
It'll be helpful in your next startup, and your own.