Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

I’m Jared, one of the partners at YC. When I joined YC, one of the things that I most wanted to do was to help make hiring and getting hired suck less. I have a business reason and a personal reason for this. The business reason is that YC's job is to help the startups we fund, and helping with hiring is one of the biggest things we can do. The personal reason is that before I joined YC, I did a lot of hiring for my startup, Scribd, and for me it was the most rewarding part of starting a company. Some of the people who joined us had life-changing experiences - they moved across the world, jump-started a new career, grew with the company and became leaders, or used their experience to start their own successful companies. I wanted to help more people have those experiences and not feel stuck in jobs where they don't have much impact.

So, a few of us at YC have been building Work at a Startup (https://www.workatastartup.com/), with the goal of making it easier for startups to hire, and engineers to get hired, at a YC company. We started with the same insight that everyone else has: the hiring process is broken and inefficient, and decided to look for ways we could make it better for everyone, at least within the YC ecosystem. For example, we could get rid of the burden for applicants of having to send a resume and cover letter to every company by creating a simple way to apply to all YC companies at once.

While working on this, though, and talking to engineers and HN users about it, I realized that there's a more fundamental question: why should people want to work (or not!) at a startup in the first place? This question has a history and has gone through several phases. In the early heyday of YC and HN and pg essays there was a ton of enthusiasm about startups, the freedom and creativity and opportunity they offer. In more recent years, when I read HN threads (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15916350, to pick one close to home), it's common to see people arguing that, for early employees, joining a startup isn't such a good idea. And frankly, some of their points are good ones. There are issues that need to be fixed. One of the big things that YC did in the early days was move the needle in favor of founders. That was an adjustment that badly needed to happen, and it did happen. I think the next phase is to move the needle in favor of early employees. Just how to do this is one question I'm hoping we can discuss in this thread.

So, HN: what are the pros and cons of joining a startup in 2018, particularly as an early employee? And where there are cons, what would fix them? If there are concrete ways we can find to shift the balance, YC is interested in doing that.

Pro: You get to build things from scratch, I like this one most.

Con: You find yourself at the end of the work-life balance, which might not be comfortable for everyone.

It's a great initiative, today itself I was thinking if there can a common test to get a job, but then I realized companies do not just test the engineering or field knowledge.

PS: I thought refreshing the page will show an early day picture of dropbox/reddit/stripe/instacart and so on.

Con: with most startups (mostly the vc funded ones) it feels less like a startup and more like a corporate. The hacking ethos and mission driven teams have been replaced by overly nice offices, steve-jobs-wannabe-kid-ceos and mediocre team mates. I’ve lives both worlds and it seems there are few places left that are like the old days.

Agree. Paysa is off their rocker for ranking the comp from a private company like Uber vs the comp from a public company like Google. (https://www.paysa.com/company-rank)

RSU grants from big public companies are the new/old way to get ahead in tech.

I echo the comp aspect. I pretty much had a best case non-unicorn startup exit; wonderful benefits pre-acquisition, actual unlimited PTO, and normal ~40hr/workweek, acquired almost immediately after receiving my shares, golden handcuffs after. My total comp was more or less equivalent to my peers doing the big 4 grind over the same time period. They had zero risk and I had to win the start up lotto.

But if I had to do it all over again, I still might do the startup route. It's just more fun. There's more to life than money.