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?
Stop looking for “Sales Manager” and keep your eyes open for stuff like “Customer retention power ranger”, “Office management karate kid”, “Java Sorcerer” and any title that could have easily been invented while playing Dungeons and Dragons after smoking crack. ‘Cause nerdz.
Startups want the job to sound so cool that it’s impossible not to want it. ‘Cause honestly, I’m quite happy with my own job, but if I ever read an ad for a “fluffer of moral erections” I’ll leave everything behind and go, even if it means I’ll teach old ladies how to dance salsa in a holiday resort like Johnny in Dirty Dancing.
The one exception to this rule are usually internships. Companies don’t even try to make the job title cool, especially ’cause the word “intern” is at times already an euphemism for “slave”.
Centuries ago, before the invention of coconut M&Ms or, like, minimum wage, I was doing an internship. Money was so tight that I felt entitled to rewrite the Wikipedia page of the term so that it’d reflect my true real feelings about the matter.
Unfortunately a Wikipedia editor told me I wasn’t being -air quote – objective about the facts.
Fine, Mr. Logic. Whatever.
Anyway, you really need to open those job postings and read the required skills one by one, even if that’s boring. And once you do, try to be honest with yourself about your real capabilities. I once thought my brain had no boundaries, then it turned out things like the Norwegian language or “Ruby on Rails” (I still think that’s the name of a synthetic drug) cannot be learned overnight.
Bummer.
Once you’ve found a position that seems perfect for you, don’t just start shooting applications like crazy. You need to pick the right startup before even letting them pick you. Of course you wanna be employed by a winner and there’s one basic criteria to discern whether an internet company is gonna take over the world. Mark my words: It’s all in the name.
Look around: the “General Motors” days are over. Don’t look for class, meaning or authority in a name. The startup world is now calling for “Goojdi”, “Faamp”, “Leerk” and “Huora” (which was gonna be the name of my own startup until someone told me it literally means “whore” in Finnish). In other words, you need to look for a name that sounds like something between the first word of a baby and what your cat may have written while walking on the keyboard.
The only acceptable alternative to this are latin words. A lot of startup founders pick latin words, probably by listening to Harry Potter spells and noting down stuff that sounds nice. Sometimes it works, other times your web agency ends up being called “ferocity” in Italian.
Roar.
In the next episode I’ll teach you how to actually apply for the startup job of your dreams.
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