the joy of a startup
in may of 2020, I started an 8 month long quant internship at the largest bank in canada. the bank had over 100,000 employees. it took me five weeks to completely set up my laptop with the right tools. I had to basically beg IT for access to some basic tools like python, S3, and github.
it took me over 2 months from the start of my internship to get my first PR into our codebase. I hated the onboarding process so much that my end of year hackathon project was to speed up onboarding flows for new hires, and I ended up winning.
I spent over 100 hours of my life sitting in meetings with way too many people in them [1]. I think naval put it best: "nothing is getting done in a meeting with eight people around a conference table. you are literally dying one hour at a time"
the most valuable part of my experience there was to show me exactly what I didn't want to do for work. from that point onward, I kept searching for smaller and smaller companies.
I went through a couple startups, learned a ton, and eventually landed at a tiny bank of 12 employees. I interviewed on a thursday morning, got the offer that same afternoon, and started the following monday.
on my first day, I had a quick chat with the CTO, and he explained a database issue that none of the other engineers had time to fix. I had my environment set up, and got my first PR in by the end of the day. over the course of the next few months, I had completed & taken ownership of many projects from start to finish and touched on every part of our business. the beauty of the work that I did was, I was able to directly impact the trajectory of the company, and I was able to play a key role in decisions being made.
"startups generally make 100x more decisions in a day than big corporations do" [2]. we made decisions over lunch, in the elevator, just all the time. it was really fun. being a single degree of separation away from the real decision makers is powerful - you effectively get to build an entrepreneurial mindset without the complete downside risk.
once you're in, you're going to have to work really hard. but in my opinion, it's an asymmetric game that's worth playing at least once in your life. startups are about optimizing for upside, whereas larger companies are for protecting downside.
[1] I actually remember a time where one of the top quants fell asleep on a zoom call with his video on. it was really funny, but that was the moment I knew that large corp's were generally unserious.
[2] tweet by arjun kehmani