Startup, what do you think when you hear the word “Startup” is it a small company, is it a company that valued over a certain valuation? or is it a newly formed company? Wikipedia defines a startup as a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model and others such as TechTarget define a startup as a newly formed business with a particular momentum behind it based on perceived demand for its product or service.

Last year, I had the opportunity to join as an Intern for a startup company in Yogyakarta city. I wanted to find out what it’s really like to work at a fast-growing company, so I decided to take the 6-month contract. Here’s what I experienced.

Agile but not agile

During the first week at that company, I was told that the working environment would use agile methodologies for every ongoing project and yes, we had a daily scrum, then a sprint review, using backlogs for declaring tasks and using a roadmap to ensure that the project finished on time but somehow, we gradually stop using agile.

We just work fast, we work based on target and on-the-spot review, If the product manager decides that something needs to change, it’ll change instantly, and when there’s some task that appears it will not go to the backlog but you need to just work that task.

Weekend, vacation?

Yup, that’s one of the things that surprised me. Usually at a 9–5 job, you work from Monday til Friday and the weekend is reserved for resting, charging up your energy. But in a start-up environment, it’s different, my PM often said on Friday evening “Finish this by Monday morning”.

YES, MONDAY MORNING.

And the resolution is? I gotta finish all of my tasks during the weekends. For the first couple of times, I was fine with that. But it went on over and over until every weekend it’s become a regular thing for me.

Different Workloads

During the intern period as a UI/UX Designer Intern, I managed 3 design projects. 2 of them were solo projects and the last one was a collaboration project and

YES, THE WORKLOAD IS IMMENSE

I’m having difficulty managing time bouncing between projects. 8 hours a day wasn’t enough to manage these projects, I had to take overtime until 10 pm almost every day including working on the weekends. I complained once to my mentor because my workload is so immense but the response was not what I expected.

My mentor was no help, so I talked to other designers and what I found was shocking. The two of them each managed 1 solo project and yet I managed 2 solos and 1 collab project. It wasn’t fair but I endured until my contract was off.

Great Environment

But one thing I could appreciate from a start-up environment other than becoming excellent at time management is the environment was great, other interns were cheerful and helpful to everyone including me. It was a fun time but I didn’t get to enjoy it much because I got tasks that needed to be done.

Conclusion?

Being part of a start-up environment could cost you a lot of time and because start-ups don’t usually have many people everyone might need to do more than their usual task. But this kind of environment teaches you a lot of things like multitasking and time management. With the two of those, you could do things at once and make good use of your time. But in this story, I’m not blaming the company, I’m blaming the management team for poor control and unfair workload between staff.

Would I want to do it again?

Absolutely not, during my contract I had to sacrifice a lot of my time for myself and communication with my partner. While I gained and improved many of my skills, I lost other things that meant so much for me.