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Ask YC: "Staging" for startups?

16 points by dhyasama ↗ HN
I was reading about the practice of young chefs routinely taking time off from work to "stage" or work at other restaurants and it occurred to me that would be a wonderful experience as a developer. It would be similar to an internship, except for working developers. It doesn't take long to come up with a list of companies I would gladly volunteer at for a month or two just for the experience.

Does anyone know of such a practice? If not, would it work? Would you do it?

17 comments

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epi0Bauqu
If people are really interested in doing this, I'm sure there are some companies on this board that would love volunteers. I know mine would :)
gibsonf1
We are definitely interested too if you want to dive into Lisp. (No prior Lisp knowledge needed)
len
This might work for a developer but definitely not for 'aspiring executives.'
skmurphy
Knowledge work looks a lot like volunteer work, assisting a non-profit in organizing volunteer labor is a reasonable proxy for organizing work in a startup.
jk4930
I'm self-employed since 1996 and did and do this from time to time. And I learned a lot of useful things about both the topic and the different business cultures. And got valueable contacts. I do this especially when I enter a (more or less) new discipline for my next big project. Often I feel my knowledge from lifelong ongoing university education (distant teaching) is not enough and I need a kind of an "internship" to know "how they do it".

So my advice is: Be well prepared (know at least the basics so you can get the advanced stuff out of it) and do it only between projects of any kind (development, education, ...) so you're not distracted by parallel duties.

mkull
If you want to dive into a budding rails ecommerce startup drop me a line (see my past posts for some hints about who we are / what we do!)

You would gain a wealth of experience in every aspect of business / being a startup... at this point everyone wears a bit of every hat (which is fun!)

nazgulnarsil
sure, you want to sort corn in my basement for a month? free is better than the 12 cents i'm paying these chinese orphans.
maxklein
I assume you feed them the left-over corn?
nazgulnarsil
at ethanol subsidized prices? they get milled flax cut with sawdust and praise god everyday they aren't in china.
jrockway
It's called "open source".
babul
True, but you don't get the experience of being in the working environment of another company. Things like...

* Exposure to thier culture

* Viewing and understanding thier office setup and why

* Hardware/software setup

* Working practices they use

* The fun of coding with others in person

* Social interaction

* Social interaction (x2 as I think it is very important)

...are important and really beneficial to appreciate first hand.

swombat
Then it's called:

Consulting.

You should get paid for that, too. Please don't do it for free and destroy the market for the rest of us who have to make a living at it.

Daniel

dhyasama
Consulting is sharing your own expertise with someone else. I'm looking for someone else to share their expertise with me.

That aside, short-term stages would not destroy the market. Chefs have been doing it for years. They come out of it as better chefs and then have more earning power.

jrockway
You get better social interaction when working on open source projects. The people you're interacting with actually want to spend their free time working on software. So instead of "interacting" with some dude off the street that needs some money, you interact with people who you can learn from.

And yes, you can work on open source in 'real life'.

rms
My team has a pretty cool new data project... if anyone is curious about staging with us, just send an email. We would pay you of course, I've never heard of a technical employee doing an unpaid internship at a for-profit company.