They don’t teach you this at school.
Should I work for a startup or a corporate?
What industry should I work in?
How can I avoid screwing up my first technical job?
I spoke to Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, a computer scientist and co-founder of Coviu telehealth platform, about all the big questions on Programmable Episode #1. Keep reading for the highlights, or find the full podcast on Spotify, Apple or YouTube.
Are you just a bug fixer? Startup vs corporate jobs.
Working in a large corporate can be demoralizing as a developer. Often you are just fixing bugs, not building new features. Working in a startup “you’re creating technology from scratch and you’re part of it and you learn a lot from the people in the business.”
If you’re early in your career, joining a scrappy startup team is interesting because you get to see every part of building a new platform from scratch.
The hidden downsides of startup life
It’s clear that there is excitement and interest working in a startup. But there’s a downside too.
Startups can’t afford the time or money to train you from the ground up. Often, you’re thrown into fixing or building something, and you need to figure out how to make it work.
For Coviu, they made some early hires where engineers just weren’t able to keep up with the challenges of startup work.
How to fail at a startup job: be inflexible
One easy way to screw up your first job in a startup is to be rigid about your job role.
Front-end developers might need to do a backend task, or a devops engineer might need to jump on a sales call.
“If you’re working in a startup, you need to self educate, you need to work on things you’ve never done before, and you need to be self-motivated…if you’re that kind of person, you’re really singularly suited to startups.”
How students and graduates can succeed at startup jobs
One of Coviu’s most successful technical hires was a graduate straight out of university. He spent a lot of dedicated time with the CTO and became familiar with all of the code-base, which makes him a highly valued engineer.
Silvia’s tips for success?
“Students or people that join a startup need to be almost behaving like a founder. So somebody that joins a startup needs to have the same kind of drive that the founders have in making these technologies successful, making the business successful.”
DDOSed by growth: scaling video infrastructure for 50x users in two weeks
Silvia and her team took Coviu from 400 to 20000 consults a day in two weeks, during shock COVID-19 lockdowns in March 2020.
Coviu had to hire 20 people in two weeks, and the core technical team had many late nights pushing releases at 2AM to fix issues caused by their massive user growth.
“The backend was effectively DDOSed by our explosion of frontend users.”
For Silvia, her technical background in video protocols was key in building Coviu’s resilient infrastructure.
Before founding Coviu, she worked as a computer scientist and software engineer building out HTML5, WebVTT & WebRTC standards with the W3C, working with Mozilla, Google, the CSIRO and her first startup, VQuence.
How to find a developer job that you care about
You don’t have to study medicine to have a huge impact on the healthcare system. Silvia believes the opportunity for developers to have impact is endless.
“Your skills are useful in every aspect of our lives these days, in every industry, everywhere.”
That means, as a developer, you should pursue opportunities to work on technology that’s personally meaningful to you. That could be working on environmental or climate tech, developing tools for the future of food, building space and satellite technology, or building software that helps health.
“If your passion is in changing the way that we eat …the environment…exploring space or satellites, there’s so many areas where you can make a difference. Think about where your passion is and where you see the biggest problems of the future of humanity. Pick one of those areas, find a company or create a company, create a technology and support that transition.”
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You can follow Silvia Pfeiffer on LinkedIn and read more here about Coviu.