As an iOS developer you are not trendy in the startup world

Once you have set your foot in the start-up world and got inspired by bold ideas of convinced entrepreneurs, it may be difficult to continue your career in a medium or bigger size company despite any kind of their claims to provide entrepreneurial spirit. Startup experience makes you addicted to the need to participate in whole product production from the beginning until the end, what brings you a feeling of belonging to a big project. This desire often affects the steps you take after a failed project or departure from a bigger company — you find yourself aspiring to create a new startup project by yourself or becoming a member of an early-stage startup project.
This is exactly the case I am living now. Through my many attempts, I have realised that a person is not enough to create a project. You can initiate a buzz and get people inspired, but it’s not enough without a big amount of luck. A good team is a fundamental part needed to bring your project on a track to success, in addition to other factors of course. Also, many entrepreneurs or business people agree with the fact that a team is the most important success factor of a project, far more crucial than budget or idea itself sometimes.
For a new project, I neither have an idea nor a cofounder or wider team. That made me yet another hunter for a limited number of positions in early stage startups with quality teams. I approach the mission by updating my already existing profiles on angel.co and f6s.com, making sure that they reflect the best of my experiences and acquired skills participating in various projects so far, I have developed certain expertise in mobile development, backend skills, .NET based windows form application, web services with Php or C#, etc., but I preferred to profile myself as an iOS developer. It is the objective-c programming language that I like the most and that I am the most experienced in. It is simply my dream to work in iOS environment and advance my skills further.
So I set my searching options for an iOS developer in startups projects. The result was quite shocking: there was no position for an iOS developer. Why? For a native iOS developer as me, it was a difficult fact to accept that my profile is not among the most desired in the startup world. Trying to figure out the reason, I searched for start-ups jobs without any applying any king of filter like iOS developer. What did I see? Startups are looking for backend developers, frontend developers, react developers, people who are skilled in ionic, xamarin, big data, javascript, python, etc. Nobody needs a native Android or iOS developer and there are no objective-c or Java programmers needed. The main reason is that these developers cost far more than a decent start-up in an early stage can easily afford. On the other side, they are also easily replaced by cheaper alternatives. A well designed mobile application can be with some additional effort as well created by new hybrid technologies and frameworks.
Learning from my experience, I would highly recommend any native mobile app developer to learn new frameworks and languages for new technologies since it seems that start-ups and many young companies do not need and do not have spare positions for native iOS developers. This is not likely to change since more and more cost efficient technologies emerge every day and startups are the ones that are concerned by cost-efficiency the most. If not earlier, certainly in a few years from now people will be surprised by the fact that I am ‘only’ an objective-c developer — isn’t the objective-c language too difficult and what program do you actually develop with this programming language?
What I’m going to do now? I will work on developing a simple application in React Native. The lesson learnt seems clear. If I want to have a chance to become a member of a start-up any time, I have to learn new technologies about programming
I hope you enjoy the article.
