Okay, to begin with, I had no idea how my resume landed into a startup's
hands. It was a small company working on the ongoing trend of data
mining in social networking domain - pulling out information about what
you commented, tweeted or posted to analyze how you behave around with
others - of course, with Machine Learning techniques. Nice idea.
Scheduled to meet up at a restaurant in a leading furniture store
(Huh?). Wondered why. As it was a busy Sunday where families swarmed
into the vast store along to kill some time and their wallets' weights.
As expected, there wasn't any space for a decent talk amid the noise and
long queues. We then, switched to a local food store nearby to continue.
The interview began. Synopsis, work and technologies came to the table.
Explanation of what you did in your previous companies were drawn and
summarized. The talk wasn't more of technical requirements but was
rather, a "cultural" talk whether you "fit" in the organization with
what you have or don't. But what intrigued me was this question, "Why do
you want to work for a startup?". No final answer. Or rather, a
convincing one, to put it straight.
I started to think. A valid question from the interviewer's perspective.
How can I use my skills in the best possible way? What makes me thrive
to apply for a startup? Why am I not applying for bigger companies? Why
do I feel that startups are challenging? Is it just a fad seeing the
cult or is it really the passion which propels me to apply for them?
They're demanding, can I make it through? I know all of these might not
be having a proper answer at all. Amid all of them, a proper reasoning
emerged - being knowledge hungry, having a sense of ownership and
conviction that at least, something valuable is being put into those
lines of code for the company I could be a part of. The usual juggernaut
of a big company employee, constantly broke into the conversation which
was not actually a question, but a statement - "Do you have it in you?"
Agreed, being from a bigger organizational belt of experience and having
seen projects with dozens of teams working in parallel, a startup can be
really different. The level of responsibility is huge, the workload
tremendously large and a continuous risk of staying afloat hovers. A new
role today, a newer role tomorrow. Contacting people, keeping up the
motivation all the time and an inert surrounding thought remains. But,
it doesn't mean we cannot work in it just because we don't have any
"experience". I see some people focusing on this in interviews. It
doesn't mean we're not willing to sacrifice salary concerns, the primary
concern. It doesn't mean we aren't passionate for the outcomes of what
we might be doing in a startup, for the pure satisfaction of the effort.
And, it doesn't mean we cannot put in longer hours of work effortlessly
without a cringe of rebel, for the value it is adding to the company.
Founders, people are willing to work in startups. Demotivating them by
just draping fine lines won't work for the betterment of either parties.
You lose a good candidate who's prepared to strive for excellence.
Similarly, the candidate looses a fine opportunity to make it a little
bigger. One paragraph of resume which says about his startup experience
works wonders.
Being skeptical in people's abilities is bad. But being skeptical in
their intentions is in fact, worse.