> You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them.

Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup.

Many of these comments make me wonder how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role. You learn a lot about what's maintainable and scalable, what breaks and what doesn't, in the process rapidly iterating on a product to find your market.

Valuable in what metric? I'm very much in the brownfield-has-the-lessons camp, but one of the lessons is that this experience has a very low market value. In fact it's so impossible to downgrade from "senior in $outdated" to "junior in $whateverisconsideredhotrightnow" that any brownfield experience could easily be considered to have negative market value.

I don't think they're mutually exclusive. You could just as easily describe someone with bootstrapping experience as being like an FAA crash investigator who investigates take offs. You get to know exactly what works when moving fast and looking for quick results, and what dooms a short timeline to failure.

I was just thinking yesterday that knowing all the ways something breaks and behaves is the key to understanding systems.

Yep. I have loved fixing problems in systems and the processes that the people working on them use for years.

“What kind of role are you looking for?”

“Technologist flavor of NTSB investigator.”