How To Get A Job At A Startup If You’re Not Technical

I joined Mondo back in September last year. Up until that point, I’d never worked in the startup world before, hadn’t studied computer science and couldn’t really code or design. Since then I’ve reviewed hundreds of CVs and interviewed a variety of people, both for their first startup job and for more senior roles. Here are a few words of advice, especially for young, recently graduated people who are looking to get into the world of startups but aren’t technical. First, a word of warning — startup life might not be for you. I’m still not sure if it’s for me. Constant stress in an ongoing world of chaos with long hours and high pressure — sometimes it’s an incredible challenge and amazingly fulfilling while other times it really sucks. Gather Technical Context Not being able to code is not an excuse for not understanding technology. You will be 10x more effective if you can follow a technical discussion with an engineering team without asking 100 questions. The single best way to do this is by reading Hacker News every day. Hacker News is a community of startup people and engineers started by Y Combinator, one of the top tech accelerators in the world. Similar to Reddit, every day people post interesting links from around the tech world but the real gold is in the comment discussion threads. Half of the links will be obscure and uninteresting while the other half are pure startup inside baseball — post-mortems of businesses collapsing, cool side-projects and startup news articles. Download a Hacker News app and spend half an hour every day reading whatever takes your fancy — over time, this will passively build up into an understanding of the technical stack, the acronyms and naming conventions as well as a deep appreciation for the work that engineers and developers do. Start a side project This immediately makes you stand out from the crowd — very few CVs I see show any evidence of side projects. Especially if you’re still at university or have recently graduated, you probably have the luxury of a little more time than the average adult, so use this to your advantage. Have a think about what you could build — anything from a basic blog up to a fully interactive website is within your grasp with some time and energy put into it. I applied to Mondo with my side project at the time, Cairo Bus Routes (Citymapper for Cairo) playing a large role on my resume and in subsequent interviews. It was actually all built on WordPress and was pretty janky but it showed a) technical understanding (see 1), b) an entrepreneurial/makers mindset and c) an ability to get shit done. Apply for a variety of roles Chances are that if you are not technical and have little experience, you’re going to be starting at the bottom. The beauty of startups’ fast paced nature is that if you’re any good, you won’t be there for long. Focus on getting your foot in the door — from there, if you prove yourself, I guarantee you’ll be able to move around the business into whichever area you fit best. Roles like: Customer support Customer operations Community manager Junior operations are your best bet to keep an eye out for. The good news is that these entry-level roles also have the most regular supply — growing businesses are constantly in need of more customer support staff so you’ll have the luxury of choice among a variety of companies (we’re hiring for a Community Manager role right now with more customer support roles soon). Prove yourself Prove yourself in that role for 12 months, learning as much about the business as you possibly can and helping everyone. Talk to people from all across the company — they’ll be more than happy to talk about what they do and what opportunities might arise in the future. Once you’ve nailed the work you’re doing, when a suitable opening comes up you’ll be a better choice for the company than going through the distraction of the hiring process. From there, you can move all across the business and find your dream job. Bonus Go above and beyond Rather than rewriting it here, I’d highly recommend you check out Tristan Walker’s story of how he got hired at Foursquare. TL;DR: Go way above and beyond and provide value before you’ve even started so that a company has to hire you. This is undoubtedly correct advice all the way up the experience stack and all it costs is extra time. Learn some basic coding skills If you can hack together some basic HTML and CSS, you’ll be in a much better position when it comes to doing the job. You’ll be able to get shit done without having to wait for other people — I built many of the pages on the Mondo website like this because it was easier and faster than taking up someone else’s time. Luckily this comes pretty naturally if you have to learn a bit for your side project — even a WordPress blog often needs some code TLC! Fortunately none of this is rocket science. Doing the above will put you way ahead of the vast majority of the competition. Job hunting can be a really demotivating and demoralising experience, especially for the first time but you will get there and it does get better. If you’re still reading this, open Hacker News in a new tab, close this tab and start reading. If you hit the ❤️ button below, it helps lots more people see this article. If you enjoyed it, I’d really appreciate the love. Thank you!