It’s start up boom and everyone is reading and talking about this a lot. And of course everybody is comparing his company to this mysterious and romantic start up definition that is formed by fancy articles. Decided to compare my current “corporation” with my start up that i had several years ago (which of course failed)
Our “corporation”
- Working in small teams using Scrum, Kanban or whatever approach you like. You only need to meet quality requirements and not to fuck up the whole production environment
- If you suggest certain tools to use you can use them
- You can organize team building activities whenever you want and your expenses will be covered
- You can apply new development practices you want
- Fun and friendly environment
- You can organize or participate in knowledge sharing sessions with other teams
- There are innovation days where you can do whatever you want and will be heard by others
- No one is measuring your time and you have all the freedom. A lot of people if to be honest are working less than 8 hours per day as it is stated in your contract. But no one cares because only result matters
- Only Product Owner and Team are managing scope/priorities and responsible for setting sprint goals (if work according Scrum) and release dates
- Paid trainings and conferences
- You have great people in management in development whom you can ask questions and discuss things, seek for advise if you want to
Start up
- Working with small team using approach you like
- Using the only tool you know, because you don’t have time to much of experiment
- Money shortage, because you do everything from your own pocket
- Working minimum 12-14 hours a day, because you want to make it faster and earn some money for your team building
- No one is measuring your time and you have all the freedom.
- No possibility to share knowledge with other teams nearby, you need to seek knowledge somewhere else like internet or friends of friends
- Team (we had no PO) was managing scope and setting targets by themselves
- Special team buildings: long debugging evenings with BigMac and Cola 🙂
If you don’t like to work, don’t show initiative, have no passion and your goal is only money either place will be good for you.