I originally wrote this for the awesome Uberlin
My mother used to put stuff in boxes. Professionally. She did it for 30 years at the same small-sized suburban Italian company and while the boxes were sent everywhere in the world, she and her career weren’t exactly going places.
My dad, the only male among four siblings, had to drop out of middle school to help his father in the fields. Like many of his peers, he learned to think of work as something related to suffering, sacrifice and blind obedience.
Whenever I tell my parents about company breakfasts, team building events and gamification, they share a very specific look that I’ve come to interpret as “He’s lying to us. He’s squatting an abandoned building and SMUGGLES drugs across countries in order to pay for his groceries”.
But I get that look. I do. Growing up with a blue-collar upbringing made me both conscious of my current luck and weirdly aware of the seemingly absurd sides of the startup life.
This series of posts is the natural consequence of that.
CHAPTER 1: JOB POSTINGS
This is going to sound obvious, but in order to work at a startup you need to either found one or be hired by one. I’m going to focus on the latter ’cause I’m a slacker and I’ve made it my life goal to achieve less and less every day.
If you’re smart you’ve probably created alerts that result in receiving an email every time a desirable position is available, either through Google Alerts or through more specific job oriented platforms like Indeed.de or BerlinStartupJobs.com. What you might not know, though, is that when it comes to job titles startups can be as quirky as the side charatcer of an indie tv series.
The chances your alert will be triggered by the keyword “customer relationship manager” are thinner, for example, than the ones for the keyword “Customer Happiness Ninja”. You know what I mean? Read More