Who Y Combinator Companies Want
I can tell you why there is discrimination against Enterprise programmers.  Two reasons:  Most people who have worked in an enterprise have had at least one bad experience with an incompetent programmer who was just a seat filler.  That means that the enterprise isn&#x27;t a good filter, and even worse, it means that even if you are good, you&#x27;re willing to suffer working with incompetence.<p>The other factor is that enterprise programmers tend to prefer places with a lot of process in place.  They want to see a well defined pipeline with tests and approvals and gates and so on.  Pushing untested code to production isn&#x27;t even in their mental space, but sometimes you just gotta do it at a startup when you got a press hit and your traffic just doubled.  Basically, they tend to slow things down by demanding doing things right.<p>Now, for the first problem, that&#x27;s just wrong -- just because you were in an enterprise doesn&#x27;t mean you are bad or you are willing to deal with bad people.  It&#x27;s just a cognitive bias.<p>For the second problem, those people are right, there should be good process and it will be better in the long term.  But in the short term it <i>feels</i> like they are slowing things down, because startups generally don&#x27;t have the luxury of investing more time now for a bigger payoff later, or at least they don&#x27;t think they do.