What To Look For In A First Job

Wage is not the ace of spades

It was the summer of 2002.

Tinkering with my formal white shirt, I sat hunched over in the carseat. After a last check I took off my ear ring and stepped out of the car.

It was my third job interview that week.
I had the fortune of being a member of the IT class that graduated in June 2002. The year that highlighted the rupture with the golden years before. The years in which students signed a contract before graduating fled. Company cars during internships became an utopian image.

The dot com bubble was at its height and the smoke screen of Y2K had evaporated.

No one needed IT people, let alone students without experience.
Companies struggled to find jobs for the IT crowd they already had. Most of them carried a burden with their ‘retrained’ accountants.

Yet here I was. Encouraging myself in the parking lot of what would become my first job a few weeks later.

My company of choice (Bivolino) worked in pure e-commerce. In hindsight it was a batshit crazy decision given the unfolding of the first real economic crisis in my career. They sold customised made to measure shirts.
I still think it is a great idea, yet timing wise in 2002 it had as much chance as VR goggles.

The main asset I recognised was what we would call a startup culture today. Yet being the last remainder of an apparel retailer is not an actual start up of course.

I collaborated with the founder/CEO as the ‘front-end do all guy’.

Within my span of two years there I worked on the website’s design, content and B2B prospect mini sites. We recreated parts of the business towards a software as a service solution. We shifted from asp to .net technology.

And with we I mean the full front end development team. Consisting of me, myself and I.

My tech partner in crime was Gaby, he spend his whole career as the ‘back-end’ wizard in the company. Working with technology I didn’t even know existed before joining. He thought me a lot of things including stakeholder management.

Gaby and I spend many hours in his car, with my stereo, a laptop and a projector in the trunk. The two techies on the road to give demos on technical garment production fairs in Germany.

I learned how to draft formal subsidy applications, do the interviews, edit the dossier and try again. We did manage to secure my employment by self-funding it through innovation subsidy.

After 2 super intense years I quit. My aim became a more mainstream career development path within bank-insurance.

Not because I got bored in my broad role, but because I had a better understanding of what I wanted to become.

Looking back, those 2 years were nothing short of a blessing.

I received more responsibility than I would have ever had within a corporation. A junior developer reworking the only sales channel. Allowed to put it in production without oversight — it is mind blowing still.

Those benefits are exactly what any startup will offer you today.

• Broad and undefined roles,
• Acceptance of failures and embrace of testing,
• Failed prospection and pivoting to other potential sources of income.
• Taking responsibility of the future of yourself as well as that of your colleagues. And them doing the same.

I would have never wanted any other start to my career. Unless starting my own company, which at that time in all honesty I was unfit to do.

So when looking for your first job, I would recommend you to do the following.

• Look for a job that has issues explaining exactly what you will need to do. Look for evidence that what you do has an immediate impact
• Search a team that seems to be welcome to take you in and make you one of them
• Set aside your initial wage and/or benefits expectations. Look into the potential for growth instead
• Value the responsibilities, the big scope and the fact that you will be doing senior exec stuff within your first years. I learned the value of positive cash flow in year one because it was one of the aspects within subsidy requests. Not a typical insight to get as a junior developer.
• Estimate what you will learn within such a company, role or adventure. And understand that these things work like compound interest for a career.

I am not stating that you only should jump on startups or pure e-commerce players. But I want you to look for broad roles, open atmospheres and a lack of hierarchy. These are the telltale signs of a startup environment.

In the last decade I have seen multinationals developing think tanks, innovation teams and crash forces. All to get the speed and impact of startups in their own ranks.

Joining one of those will be beneficial for fast learning and developing compound interest. They also give you certainty that your pay check will be collectible at the end of every month.