Ask HN: How do I choose between a job offer from Google and a promising startup?

Here's my personal experience:

In 2012 I graduated from college and was deciding pretty much exactly this. I interviewed at Google and got an offer, and had to decide between that and the startup life. I ended up going with Google. My immediate thought process centered around money because I had substantial debts from university, so while I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, startups were kind of out of the question.

In the end, I'm glad I made the choice I did. Here are some observations about Google in particular, but I expect they extend to some degree to other organizations:

* Google places a lot of focus on development. The job ladder explicitly stresses growth, which places expectations on engineers to grow their abilities throughout their early careers. Equally important, it places pressure on managers to grow those same engineers: directors treat teams full of people whose performance evaluations aren't rising and who aren't getting promoted as a major red flag when evaluating the team's manager. I was consistently pushed to do more and bigger projects, and my work and abilities have flourished as a result.

* There's more than one way to "do things right" in engineering, but in my opinion Google's particular style nails it. Code reviews are mandatory. Rigorous testing is compulsory. Regular refactoring is held in high regard. Production environments are sacrosanct. SLAs and SLOs are explicitly made clear. SREs rule over the engineers, not vice versa. Detailed design documents are (at least in my org) mandatory. Postmortems are also mandatory. You literally can't even go to the bathroom without seeing a pro-tip about how to improve your project. Working in this environment for years teaches you to produce high quality work at a fast pace.

* As a result of all this, recruiters looove Google engineers. During the few times over the years when I considered letting myself get poached, I was being offered either extremely high-paying senior engineer positions at established companies, or high-ranking technical leadership roles at younger companies. Six years of developing my technical and leadership skills have paid off, and I'm convinced I'm more valuable now than I would have been if I had gone to a startup.

* This is my personal view on early-stage startups, and you don't mention your experience level, so it might not apply to you, but: keep out of reach out children. When you're staring down the barrel of a three month runway, you don't have time to learn, from scratch, how to solve technical problems and somehow foster an engineering culture that's going to pay dividends down the line as the company grows. Better to learn your trade in a safe and stable environment and then apply it to building a new organization once you're confident in it.

Finally, an anecdote about money. Graduating from an Ivy, I naturally had many trust funder friends who weren't aware of how broke I was and asked, to my face, "why would someone as sharp as you go to such a boring company." They went off and joined startups, took piles of equity in exchange for smaller salaries, and went off confident in their fortunes. Then, one by one, over the course of the next five years or so, they all requested referrals to join Google when they companies failed. I happy obliged, but I don't think a single one made it through the interview process. Meanwhile all this time I've been sitting pretty on a nontrivial-but-not-life-changing pile of cash, taking on ever more interesting projects, with a resume that companies salivate over.

As always, take my experience with a grain of salt, but that's just my view on things.

Plug the difference in pay (less taxes) into an investment calculator. Give it a nice return - after all, you need to beat what you'd make earning the same and investing it yourself. Look at where you'd be when you vest, and calculate the exit needed to essentially make that return. First of all, what's the likelihood of that exit happening? Secondly, would you take the risk if you can't at least beat a moderately performing mutual fund? (Not even getting into idea that with Google, that same wealth could be invested in different ways, rather than all tied up in one company)

The number I came up with: 25% for return (doubles historical return of S&P 500; most decent funds are in 15% territory over last 10 years), worth about $750,000 in four years. So you'd need about a $13M exit at that point. (Obviously whether your pay returns to market, or you continue to be paid the startup rate, affects this, as does an exit before you are fully vested)

1. 6% of zero is zero.

2. 4 years is a lot of time to spend at a company for a high probability of making 6% of zero.

3. If you're an employee at a startup, you're in the wrong job. You're much better off being a founder.

4. Equity is a way to be paid less and to be fired in the first year if you haven't vested anything.

5. Who are you going to sell your equity shares to? It's not necessarily a free market in the startup world.

6. Big companies aren't just the only type of company to be soulless. Wait till you see a small company try to screw it's employees out of equity.

> you will be working with very talented people

Do you think they are more talented than other companies, like, say, Amazon?