Member-only story
The 5 Superpowers (and Struggles) of Great Startup Software Engineers
The engineering (and human) genius that brings ideas to life
Building software at a small startup is crazy challenging. There’s lots of work and little structure. You play many roles. You’re on tight deadlines.
Startups demand a very different work style than larger companies do. An established company builds and maintains a product. A young startup runs experiments to explore what product to make — and if a product should even exist at all.
Through it all, startups push us to confront our deepest held instincts — both as engineers and humans.
So what does a great engineer do to thrive in an early-stage startup? And, more importantly, how does she do it?
1. She Takes Initiative
With big, established projects, you want to give your manager great quality code. This often means a lot of discussions and careful feedback — sometimes weeks of it.
At a startup, by contrast, you want to give users a finished feature, and burden your teammates with your code as little as possible.
There are two parts to doing this:
