David Street, who left Compaq for a start-up in 1999, concurs. "You get to implement the technology you want -- the latest hardware, your choice of software standards. You pick all of your own tools without having to worrying about a bunch of data being locked up in an incompatible legacy database," says Street, who was chief operating officer and head of IT at now-defunct network computer maker The NIC Company (which -- full disclosure -- was co-founded by this reporter).
Launching IT from scratch "isn't really very hard if you have enough money to hire a company to do the work," says Street, who now runs the online store Protrumpets.com . "We set the specs, picked the equipment and software, and they set it up as we directed."
It's not always that easy, he acknowledges. "At a big corporation, there are often a lot of resources available for IT, particularly for primary initiatives," Street says. "At a start-up, usually not."
It'll all be up to you
"At a start-up, the huge plus is that you are responsible for what you are developing. The minus is that you are responsible for what you are developing," quips Thomas Cramer, a senior software engineer at BeliefNetworks , a company that helps companies predict and analyze risk. "Everything that is developed or doesn't get developed is squarely on the developers' shoulders."
Though Cramer says he occasionally finds himself missing the days when his work was largely scheduled in advance -- he previously worked in the IT department at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) -- he likes the do-it-now atmosphere of a start-up.
"It is great to have a brilliant idea in the morning and have it implemented that evening without having to have it run up a flagpole and take a week before approval or finances or personnel can be allocated," Cramer says.
He's been most surprised, he says, by how few people it takes to develop a system. Looking back, he now wonders "how the larger software-development companies get anything developed without being totally incapacitated by everyone stepping on one another."
Appealing as they are, brilliant ideas and fast-paced programming often take a backseat to more mundane concerns at a start-up. "The day-to-day maintenance can be problematic," warns Street. "At first you won't be able to justify a full-time support tech, so every time you need to set up a new account or reset a password, someone has to take time from their real job to handle it."
Wegis says he is all too familiar with that scenario. At Ziff Davis Media and at Sun, employees with a tech problem "had to file a ticket and wait for someone to come to their desk. There were big processes in place," he recalls. "But the way it is now is, someone says, 'Hey, John, I have a problem.'"