Working in a meaningless corporate cubicle job for 3 years was the best experience of my life.
It seems to be in vogue today to argue that rather than working for a big company straight out of college, smart, ambitious graduates (or dropouts) are better off striking out on their own and starting their own company.
They may or may not be right -- I've never started a company so I don't have the authority to talk about that. What I will say is that I followed a traditional path out of university and went to work in a classic, corporate job (insurance company with 4000 employees and >£1bn revenue). I did it for a few years, learned some skills, and then made the jump to becoming employee #1 at a startup. And I wouldn't have been able to do it, nor would I be nearly as valuable to my new company, if I hadn't spent all that time working in a corporate job.
Here's what I learned:
You might have a great value proposition that and a great marketing plan that means customers are beating your door down. That's great. Now you need to scale it up. And that means building a clear, repeatable process with checklists and clear action items, so it's clear who needs to do what and when. And you need to write all that down and properly codify it, otherwise you'll spend your whole life so busy training new hires that you won't be able to run the company. Or worse, you'll be so busy DOING the process that you won't have time to codify it and teach it to new people - so you will never scale. You need to be working on the business, not in the business.
Don't assume that everyone reads Tim Ferriss's blog, knows what "lean startup methodology" means and is ultimately aiming to found a company, scale it, sell out and become an angel investor. You need to know how to deal with people that aren't like you. I've worked with senior managers who have been doing their job longer than I've been alive, young people who just aren't that bright or ambitious, middle-aged women who are already working towards retirement, and everything in between. To get shit done, you need to know how to work with all of these -- because if you scale, at some point you'll either hire them or sell something to them. Learning how to connect with people is one of the most valuable skills you can have.
Yes, meetings are usually a waste of time -- but the good ones have a clear agenda, a lead, and when the meeting ends, there is a clear list of action items with owners and deadlines. I remember the first time I heard someone say in a meeting "let's assign that action to Jamie, with a deadline of two weeks from now." I thought, "Huh, that's smart. I never would have thought of that." Admittedly, I'm pretty slow.
My company had a generous training budget. So they paid over £15k for me to learn accounting, which I never would have had the time or discipline to sit down and learn on my own. Turns out, having a great understanding of things like cash flow, margins, forecasting, income statements and balance sheets is useful in any company.
We had a whole department, led by an expert who used to work at McKinsey, dedicated to rolling out continuous improvement across the company. The guy was a genius, and was happy to talk to a young buck like me about it all the time, lend me books, and all that. Then Eric Ries took lean methodology and applied it to startups. Instantly I have a great background in that, and I know how to build great processes from the ground up.
Like I said, we had a generous training budget, so my company paid £1k for me to have a day's training from a professional actor and speaking trainer (he had trained multiple politicians and a Prime Minister). It was fantastic. Now I love speaking in public.
And finally, I learned:
The highest paid people in our company were all guys who had learned what they needed to know in a corporate role and then struck out and become one-man band freelancers, or started their own companies. I saw guys doing exactly what I was doing and earning twice the money. They had more autonomy, more freedom, more money and enjoyed their work more.
So I left. I took all the skills and experience I'd gained at a shitty job, and found one that was much more exciting and fulfilling where I can actually have an impact on real projects. But I never could have done so if I hadn't worked a shitty job first.