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I would like to work for a startup but only for a couple of months

6 points by jonathanmv ↗ HN
I love the startup pace and the possibilities of the early days, however I want to work on my own projects and ideas. Does one excludes the other?

How would you feel if I, as an applicant to your startup, tell you that I want to work with you but just for a couple of months (max. 4 months)?

18 comments

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cimmanom
I’d roll my eyes. It’d take a month just to onboard you, and then I’d have to go through the miserable hiring process (which eats tons of time I don’t have and takes long enough that I should probably start on your first day of work) to replace you. Consider looking for contract work if you want short-term gigs.
embedded
Not a chance at our 3-yr old startup. That's less than a summer project, and nobody expects much from summer interns. Maybe you haven't written highly async Go services in containers orchestrated by kubernetes. You would spent those two months just ramping up on our code base and customer issues just to be productive. And if by some miracle you actually produced production code, nobody wants the author of that code to immediately walk out the door. Experienced programmers understand that 80% of the cost is in the maintenance over the lifetime of the code. That is a lot easier to do if the author is still around.
youwouldthinkso
I wouldn't bother unless I have specific project that will fit in that time frame and is a one-off/never looked at again type of project. At that point, it's basically a short term contract project that I can outsource to anyone.
swatcoder
It depends on your seniority and speciality. It takes quite a while to warm new team members into real productivity on mainline technical labor. Often, the first month or two of a new hire has a negative impact on total team efficiency. It's a similar principle to why you can't just staff up at the last minute before a deadline.

The exception is if you're an expert in some specialty that's relevant and underserved on the team. In that case, the relationship becomes more of a consulting role, where you do a very specific thing very effectively and in a way that it can be smoothly handed off to long-term maintainers.

Another opportunity is direct contracting for very early stage entrepreneurs. Building the prototypes or MVP's that help them understand and articulate their ideas. Even then, four months can be pretty narrow window in the real world and there's often a bias for people who'll stick around for the next phase.

One final possibility -- and the least reliant on other people's accommodation -- would be for you to just expand the period of your cycle. Can you commit 12-18 months at a time? That's actually pretty normal in the startup world, and if you manage your finances well, it can set you up for an equally long stint of solo work.

jonathanmv
MVP's and rapid prototyping are my specialities. Where do you think one can find people looking to develop rapid prototypes? Projects that are meant to be a proof of concept and then discarded
swatcoder
Outside of just mining your existing network, the first places I'd look would be AngelList and local tech networking events. Upwork could yield fruit too, but it can be a noisy place.

You'll generally be looking for people who are new to the industry and are just putting a toe in. More experienced entrepreneurs often have people in their network that can already help them through this phase.

Pursue smaller contracts than your ideal and expect them to grow into the relationships/opportunities you have in mind.

jonathanmv
That's a very wise advice swatcoder. Thank you very much
zerr
I'm interested in similar but in BigCo's, aka internships or mini-sabbaticals for experienced/mid-career devs.
arandr0x
There should be a way for mid-career devs to do job trades -- like I do your job and you mine (with help from the other person to ramp up kind of like a buddy) for a month or two. It would give companies access to senior talent they could evaluate like internships, and all they would have to do is keep paying the original employee. Even doing this within a big co as an inter-team thing (getting a team rotation or a new team assignment past your first few years) is pretty difficult since your original team is presumably relying on your acquired knowledge.
bitmuncher
From the perspective of a startup you would cause too much expense. They have to pay your onboarding and until you produce real value 1-2 months will pass. In this time they already have to pay you. If you leave the company after 2 further months their expense for you will be higher than your earnings if you are not highly specialized and more a consultant than an employee.

However: In Germany most companies have a time of probation for 3-6 months. In this time you can leave the company whenever you want. So you could simply join the company and leave it after 4 months.

segmondy
Sure, if you wish to work and will work 4 months for free remotely, ping me.
jonathanmv
What kind of tasks do you offer?
segmondy
Backend golang & Frontend development angular
jonathanmv
I don't have experience in either. More like aws (lambdas, sqs, dynamodb, ecs, emr, kinesis, etc...) and reactjs or vuejs
dpeck
You may want to look into consulting, specifically around rapid prototyping for non-technical founders if you’re looking to work with early stage startups but want short term engagements. There is a market for it.
jonathanmv
That sounds like a right approach. Do you know about a place/website where I could find something like that?
amorphous
What do you want to gain from this? How important is compensation?

If you want a full-time job to see how life at a startup compares to a more traditional work environment, four months are not enough. You'd need to stay at least a year or two because only then will you have acquired sufficient responsibility to be in a position where everyone else on your team depends on you and your output and what it means to deal with the pressure of deadlines and so on.

If compensation is not that important or your objective is to work with lots of new technology or build stuff from scratch, offer non-technical entrepreneurs to build their MVP. Depending on your experience level and feature scope you may be able to implement a prototype in four months.