5 Reasons To Work At A Startup For Your First Engineering Job

Looking for a job is always a difficult process, no matter if you have done it a few times already or it's your first time. Knowing what kind of engineering job you want beforehand can make your life a lot easier. But especially if you're looking for your first job, it's very unlikely that you will already know exactly what you want. So the best thing you can do is look at what the market has to offer. But the problem is that there is basically an unlimited number of choices out there in terms of engineering jobs. Having so many choices doesn't really help.

One important aspect of knowing what kind of engineering job you're looking for is knowing what kind of company you want to work at. In particular, the size of the company. Working at a small startup company can be entirely different from working at a larger corporate company, both with their own pros and cons.

Personally, my first job was being a frontend developer at a startup company for 2 years. When I was looking around for my first job, there were several ways I could go in terms of what company I wanted to work for. After some internal discussions, I made the decision that I wanted to work at a smaller startup company. Several thought processes and reasoning went into making this choice. Looking back at it now, 2 years later, several reasons were valid from back then and several reasons did I discover along the journey. In this article, I will go over these reasons for why you should work at a startup company as one of your first jobs based on my experience.

Opportunities to quickly broaden your horizon in a practical way

At a startup company, the engineering team is most of the time relatively small. Because of this, boundaries between roles and development fields are oftentimes not strict. So even if you are hired for a specific function, like React frontend developer, it's quite likely that in reality, you will have to participate in activities outside of this job title. Like touching some backend-related code, being involved in SEO optimisations, helping out with designs, etc.

The gist is, there are a lot of easy possibilities and ways to widen your scope at a startup company. As long as you're willing to take those chances and potentially do more than you're "supposed" to, it can be a really great way to gain a lot of practical experience in different skills in a relatively short time.

A more flat and informal culture

Startup companies often have a more informal culture compared to corporate companies. Working in such a culture can feel like the company is a family or just a group of friends. The culture is more open and relationships with your colleagues do not necessarily have to be only work-related, which can create deeper connections. Obviously, this is not for everyone and it's highly dependent on whether you fit into the existing culture or not. But if you do want to create deeper connections with your colleagues and fit into the culture of a company, it can be a great experience.

Turning an idea into reality can go really quick

One of the biggest advantages of a startup company is that there are generally not a lot of formal and strict procedures or set-in-stone protocols for basically everything. This means that the times between coming up with an interesting idea, working on it, and seeing it being applied in practice can be very short.

This is different from corporate companies, where for organisational reasons there are generally formal and strict procedures or set-in-stone protocols for everything. So if you have an idea and want to turn it into reality, you will have to at least go through several processes to validate it, fit it onto the roadmap, work out the details, and align it with other teams. All in all, it can take quite some time before you are even able to practically start working on your idea. This can be quite demotivating and a turn-off for creativity.

Seeing an idea that you personally came up with work in practice is probably one of the most satisfying feelings as an engineer. Working at a startup company is therefore a really nice way to let your creativity flourish, and observe the results of it frequently and quickly.

Fewer people to remember

Compared to corporate companies, startups will have (way) fewer employees. One of the hardest things in joining a new company is getting to know colleagues, knowing what they do, when you should reach out for them, and remembering all of that. The only way to really get good at this is by experiencing it a lot; thus working a lot with them.

This is not a luxury you have when just starting out at a company and can be quite a difficult process. But by choosing to work at a startup company, you can make it easier for yourself by reducing the number of people that you will have to remember.

A head start in career growth

It's not too uncommon in a startup company that, due to the low number of developers, projects will only have one responsible developer assigned. While this doesn't necessarily mean that you will have to take care of everything yourself, it does mean that you are in the driving seat in terms of the development side of things. This will automatically force you into a position to become a more autonomous developer, which can be a great asset.

In the beginning, this means that you'll most likely be responsible for technical decisions, communicating status and roadblocks to other stakeholders, and making sure that everything is on schedule. But down the line, it's likely that you'll also pick up some other responsibilities as you become more autonomous. Examples are being in charge of all the time management of a project, voicing an opinion on business decisions based on your technical perspective, and being accountable for the project entirely.

Basically, you're able to experience what it's like to be a senior or team lead position role while still having fewer years of experience attached to your career. Potentially you will also be able to start honing those skills and really make great progress. Together with being able to work well in an autonomous fashion, these skills can be very valuable in the long term for your engineering career.

In this article, I gave you 5 reasons to work at a startup company for your first engineering job based on my experience. To summarise, they are the opportunity to quickly broaden your horizon in a practical way, a more flat and informal culture, the fact that turning ideas into reality can go really quickly, there's less social overhead, and if done correctly you can get an enormous head start in career growth.