How working in a young Startup made me gain the equivalent of 5 years of experience.

by Cyrielle Albert, November 28th, 2020

I have been working in a start-up for exactly 17 months and I can assure you that I have learned more during these 1.5 years than during the 3 years of my bachelor's.

[To explain the context, in 2016, I decided to start an engineering degree at ESEO in France. At the beginning of my 4th year, I decided to join a young start-up as a software engineer intern for 5 months. It appears that they liked my work and offered me a job as a software engineer, which I accepted.

So I decided to pause my study to work full time for a bit more than one year. The reason for that is that I was convinced that this additional year of working there would help me become much more confident, experienced, and knowledgeable. Today I, for sure, do not regret a second of it.]

If you have never worked in a start-up, you probably have in mind the cliché of the start-up environment, which includes Ping Pong table, flexible desks, sweaters as the dress code and, many beers after work. Well, you are not very wrong.

If you have been part of one before, you know that besides that, is hidden many extra hours, cry (maybe), and hard times. For me, that is why I learned so much.

ONE JOB, SEVERALS TITLES

I realized the job title did not put me in a box.

I arrived in this company as a software engineer intern working on the backend (with Python to be precise).

When I was there, I also worked for some months as an electronics engineer, I negotiated contracts with potential suppliers, learned JavaScript & React Native and started to do Frontend development, learned Objective C to create an iOS app, and developed an algorithm based on neuroscience even before being graduated.

Many things, which need many people. We were 4, all each doing different things. So I had to complete the team, find what was missing, and fill the void.

Some things were new, so I had to put myself in a position where I can handle it by taking online classes or contacting specialists in these domains.

It was so enriching to see all parts of the product development to understand how to build my part.

LOSERS DON'T EVEN TRY

An important mindset I switched to when I started working, is to commit to tasks even if I had no idea how to do it.

Before the internship, I had only worked on a few coding projects at school but was always given and supervised by teachers.

So when I started in the company, I was lost. I did not know where or how to start, and not even what would be the different steps for building it. I had tasks I had no idea how to deal with so I usually did not want to commit.

I can remember I had this voice inside my head panicking: «What if I can't do it? What if I tell them I do not know how to do it? » I was so scared of just saying that I did not know.

Today, I think it was a stupid mind-set. No one knows everything. Unfortunately, the first things I had to work on were unknown to me.

After some time, I started to realize that I successfully did a bunch of hard tasks. That is when I started to commit to more and more unknown tasks.

It made me face so many difficulties. I spent so many hours on Stack Overflow begging for help. I did it. I even got better at asking for help.

If I had never decided to work on new things, I would never have learned so much. The only way to lose, it to decide to stay in the comfort zone. Now, I would say, that before working in a start-up, you have to be prepared for working on new things.

WORKING FAST

Working in a start-up usually means working on an innovative product.

Our first step was to validate the business part of the idea, prove that people are interested and that we could earn enough money on it. In other words, we needed to be faster than our potential competitors were, but at the same time, we could not present a bad product, which would not attract clients.

So to make sure we produced high-quality work, fast enough we have been testing different management methods like Agile or Scrum, which were, of course, adapted to the team, and project management tools like Jira or Confluence.

Even if they are not mentioned in the job role, it has been a full part of my daily tasks. It took me some time to get used to all of those and not waste time trying to figure out how it works.

In parallel, I worked on my soft skills as well, so that I could become more productive and fit better with the others, with the help of the team of course.

To be honest, the first months were the hardest. Then I am not sure, if I just started getting used to it or if what we did was good enough to slow the machine.

When you have no choice but to work fast and provide something concrete, it is hard at the beginning but you figure out a way to do so.

It is a skill I am proud to have and show now.

Conclusion

These years have been for me, the best way to evaluate the skills I developed during my study and finally use those on a business project. It has been tiring I cannot deny it but it pushed me so out of my comfort zone that I learned unexpected things and gained confidence for the future. Even if I did not mention them, it would not have been possible without the Team I worked with, a source of support and motivation every single day.