Why I Lasted Only 9 Months at My First Startup Job

I sometimes recall those struggling days when I was desperately looking for a job as a fresher in Bengaluru. Luckily, I cracked an interview at a startup for the role of Backend Engineer.

I was little disappointed with the salary as it was extremely low. But I decided to join as a backend engineer, assuming the job role was decent. There were only 3 employees apart from the 2 founders and these founders were employed to some other MNCs.

The initial 3 months of training were literally very difficult. Every day, we were given an assignment. For the first month, those assignments were so logical and challenging that every night I used to get a feeling that I might not survive my job the next day. The assignments were mostly around HTML, JavaScript, and JSON.

Somehow, I cleared the training period and was assigned to a project to build it from scratch.

There was another web application whose delivery was due within the next 6 months. Those 3 senior employeed were taking care of it. Around 80% of the development work had already been completed.

I still remember that project. Everything in the UI was built using some kind of framework. I never wrote a single line of HTML, yet I created quite a few web pages. All the magic was happening through JavaScript and JSON.

The backend was built using plain Servlets with Google Guice for dependency injection. It was genuinely tough for a fresher. Maybe not for an experienced developer, but definitely for someone with just 3-4 months of experience.

The struggle continued.

Office timing was around 10 AM, but logout time depended on the work. Most of the time, the founders would visit the office around 7 PM and stay until 8 or 9 PM. Naturally, all the team members would stay until then.

Altogether, I completed 7 months, and my in-hand salary at that point was just ₹9,000 per month.

Then came the appraisal cycle.

The 3 senior developers demanded a certain percentage of salary hike, but their requests were denied. I don't exactly remember the figures, but I do remember that they were not satisfied.

Their struggle was real too. By that time, we had almost become friends.

Finally, 2 of the senior developers resigned and left the company. Now, the entire project delivery responsibility came to the one senior developer who was also looking to get out of the company.

Later, the company hired another guy. He was basically from the testing domain but joined as a developer at a low package. I don't know how much he was getting paid.

These 2 guys somehow managed the project and delivered it to the client.

Now comes the interesting part.

The web application had a lot of bugs in almost every flow. Apart from login, there were issues almost everywhere. It was basically a Document Management System with complex role-based access controls (RBAC).

The client gave us one month to fix the issues and deliver the project again. The founders themselves were Full Stack Developers, so they also started working on the bug fixes.

By this time, I had completed 9 months in the company, and my struggle was still going on. I was handling another project for the same client. We had just started building it, and honestly, I was getting some really good exposure.

Then came salary day.

One of the founders made a statement that I still cannot forget. "Nobody will get their salary until we deliver a bug-free project to the client."

I was like, WHY? WHAT? NO!

For a salary of just ₹9,000, I was working day and night for the entire month. And now, at the end of the month, no salary?

How was I supposed to pay my bills? How was I supposed to manage my expenses?

I was already struggling financially, and now even that ₹9,000 was uncertain.

On the very same day, I updated my profile on Naukri.

I was tensed and desperately wanted to get out. I even attended 1–2 interviews, but unfortunately, I got rejected in the first round itself.

Later, I finally received my salary on the 15th of that month after a small confrontation.

But by then, I was mentally prepared to get out of that workplace harassment.

In the same vary month I cracked an interview and resigned from the startup. Served 1 month of notice period and took exit but the struggle continued. Read my next story here after this - I Asked for My Salary - and Lost My Next Job

What bothers me even today is how some founders expect employees to work day and night but make them pay the price for the company's failures. Whether it's ego or a lack of empathy, such behaviour doesn't just hurt employees financially. It destroys trust and creates a negative impression of the entire startup ecosystem.

Not every founder is like this, but experiences like these make people think twice before joining another startup.

A startup may fail, a project may fail, but that doesn't give a founder the right to make employees pay the price.