Depends on your age, here is why:
I've been in startup most of my 20s and early 30s.
The amount of learning, growth, potential and responsibility is amazing. you simply will not have it elsewhere. you will have tons of impact.
when i got married and had kids i couldn't take these risks anymore, i needed a stable working place with good WLB. now i'm making more money, using the experience i had in startups working for a FAANG company.
Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
551–560 of 968 posts
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Entirely accurate. At a startup, I expect to make ~$100k/year, have mediocre insurance and work life balance, and underwhelming equity ( Unless you’re a founder, I actively steer colleagues away from working at a startup. The sense of accomplishment, impact, or whatever the feel good term is, isn’t worth shorting yourself on significant comp for years (while founders and funds are getting almost all the upside). Edit…
US healthcare is clearly a huge barrier to older employees joining startups. At my company we have a great selection of healthcare that's fairly affordable both for employees and the company. I think it's as good or better than any packages I've seen from big brand-name enterprises. However, as a European founder, I was shocked by the complexity and effort that went into the comparison shopping necessary to get anyth…
> US healthcare is clearly a huge barrier to older employees joining startups.
It's a barrier to anyone with nearly any disability, chronic illness, or precondition (or with family members who may have them).
A friend's wife has to take medication that is classed as Tier 4 in California (least coverage). He has had to turn down many offers as he would then have to put the family on their own insurance, potentially costing upwards of $1200/mo. just for the one set of medications. As is, the meds are US Healthcare is a giant hurdle for small businesses. We need UHC in the US.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
What also comes into the picture here is the extremely high cost of living in the Bay Area. Even startups have to offer $200k in non-"maybe" compensation to make sure people can afford living here. Even a relatively small size startup with 50 people now already has $10 million in salary costs per year (not even counting taxes, benefits, etc.). So overall the balance is tilted very much in favor of the big companies t…
Which raises the ancient Quan - why are startups so reluctant, as a species, to establish remote teams? How come VCs are even allowing their investees to pay bubbly rents and wages?
Follow the money?
Who owns the apartments? The VCs?
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at Google, used to work at Amazon, and had an offer from Microsoft. From my experience, Google/FB pay much more than Amazon and Microsoft if we're talking about total compensation so I think it's a little more rare than what you're saying. I don't think it's that easy to hit L5 either. My teammate is amazing and had like 8+ years at Microsoft before joining Google but was hired as an L4. For most SWEs, L5 woul…
I keep hearing about the FAANG companies and I have to wonder what can I do to make my proactiveness pay off in getting into the running for job interviews? I feel like it's easier to get their attention as a CS student seeking internships than as a self-taught mid-level developer (which I am). I have interviewed on two separate occasions by Amazon, and only contacted by Microsoft (submitted some forms, but they neve…
Unless you make a name for yourself somehow, the best way to get recruited to FAANG's is to get hired for a summer internship, perform well, and then get hired. Another way is to attend the job fairs at your Uni and see if you can score an interview.
I wouldn't worry too much about getting into them though. SE's are in high demand across the Valley; expand your horizons and interview with some of the late stage startups and other SE companies as well (e.g. Atlassian). They will provide amazing compensation as well as being a smaller company where you can have a bigger impact. Once you build a few years of experience delivering products, your problem will be rejecting 99% of the recruiters that reach out to you lol.
Seriously as a CS student, you really just have to get a job where you can learn and write actual code and watch your career soar.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#555Just a quick aside: I'm in biotech/medtech and hardware engineering. A lot of the comments here are about software engineering in SV. Here in biotech-land the average salary, even in the Bay, is about $80k.
Granted, we don't have as many start-ups as the FDA puts a hell of a damper on things.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
True in some regards, but it’s also incredibly easy to learn how to do things the wrong way, if you have no one to learn from.
>but it’s also incredibly easy to learn how to do things the wrong way, if you have no one to learn from Yep, say hello to startups who go cheap by outsourcing to developers who are not as good in their craft or don't care about learning more.
These startups also don't stay in business for very long ;)
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Founders don't work many more hours per day than early employees at x100 less than early employees. They work many more months/years before earning an income at all. By the time the employees start to get hired, a large part of the risk and work that a founder does to earn their hopeful future fat stacks has already been done. Now, are startup compensation packages a little low and relying on the money making reputat…
> Founders don't work many more hours per day than early employees at x100 less than early employees. They work many more months/years before earning an income at all. > > By the time the employees start to get hired, a large part of the risk and work that a founder does to earn their hopeful future fat stacks has already been done. What you describe isn't the case for most tech startups I know. These startups need a…
If good means experienced/senior, which is what the people pulling those numbers in are, then yeah I certainly don't think startups are anywhere near competitive with big companies for talent. I don't think they really need to be, or should try to be.
If you're 15 years in at Google then yeah, no shit you shouldnt take a job at some hinky dink no name company. You're severely demoting yourself. You wouldn't go wait tables at a restaurant and expect the compensation to be competitive with your software engineer salary. Your skills aren't that useful to the restaurant, they wouldn't make anywhere near enough money from you for it to make sense.
Senior level big software company employee vs startup employee is like that but on a less extreme scale. You're more useful to them than you are to a restaurant, but you still have a lot of skills and experience that it doesn't make sense for them to pay for that it does for a big company.
Its on me for not specifying and making assumptions, but imo when talking startup competitiveness it should be focused on fresh grads or those with a couple years experience in industry but not necessarily at big tech. That's where startups are going to find their cost effective generalists, and its where I think the compensation is "a little low and relying on past reputation".
Also, with good devs making $400-500k/year at bigco, I think it needs to be kept in mind that those numbers are with a lot of their compensation being in stock and big tech stock having risen a lot in the last decade. Someone whose compensation at Facebook happened to turn out to be $400k/year would have been getting signed each year for far less.
Using those numbers would be like evaluating startup packages as if theyre guaranteed a large ipo.
As for startups getting funding right from the start, that means they're being funded based on founder credentials rather than the qualities of the business. If you have those kind of credentials and use them to start a company then your opportunity cost is likely huge. That's the founders additional risk there.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep hearing about the FAANG companies and I have to wonder what can I do to make my proactiveness pay off in getting into the running for job interviews? I feel like it's easier to get their attention as a CS student seeking internships than as a self-taught mid-level developer (which I am). I have interviewed on two separate occasions by Amazon, and only contacted by Microsoft (submitted some forms, but they neve…
The signal to noise ratio in the hiring process is horrible. I work at one of the FAANG companies and do a lot in the hiring process. I can tell you that getting a phone screen off of a resume that you submit is a crap-shoot. There are people applying to positions they aren’t qualified for, people applying to positions they have no idea what the role is (blast a bunch of resumes out and see what sticks), and genuinel…
I can only speak from my experience with Amazon. I sent a resume in for a job at Lab126 since I'm an embedded guy with an EE background, no CS except 21 years doing embedded software. I never heard from Lab126, but the AWS team got back to me. After failing to pass all the test vectors of the coding test, they gave me a phone interview. I did OK at best. They flew me up for an interview and proceeded to ask me CS algorithm questions on a whiteboard for 6 hours. I didn't get the job(and probably would have turned it down otherwise, since it involved being on-call), but it surprised me that their screening process was so bad. Nowhere on my resume did I indicate having any knowledge of CS algorithms, yet it was seemingly vital for the role. Strangely enough, I did study up on virtualization implementations(KVM/Xen), but no one asked me a single question about that(despite it being listed as vital on the job description).
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#559Pros:
- some startups have a really high concentration of awesome and smart people to work with
- it’s exciting to work on something new with a big vision
- you can quickly get experience building a feature (or a whole product) from concept to launch. As an engineer building a feature you can feel more ownership over more aspects of it including the business/marketing/pricing etc.
- I’ve found at early stage startups it’s easier to make friends with your coworkers than a larger company. You tend to do more together, from dinners to socials, and you become a tight group. It’s especially nice for people who are from out of the area or recently graduated etc.
- you can work on really cutting edge and innovative things. You might get that at a larger company on a team like Google X but it’s not guaranteed
- potential for big upside if your startup does well
Negatives: - you are subject to the whims of the founders. There is much less oversight over firing, demoting, and general behavior of a founder than the oversight a manager would get in a larger company. - If you’re a woman, you are likely one of the few in the engineering team. There’s often bad behavior and it’s very difficult to speak up about it without retaliation. I know multiple women who have been fired by YC founders and it’s been a tough environment for them to succeed in for multiple reasons. It’s also easy for women to end up doing a lot of office housework in addition to engineering in a startup where roles are not as well defined. I think it has gotten easier to at least have some recourse now in the era of me too - Lower compensation once you factor in public company stock, bonuses, 401ks etc. Base salary might not be too different but larger companies offer a much fuller package of compensation
I could do a deeper dive on the additional factors that deter female engineers out of early stage startups but that would be a topic of its own!
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you should found a remote friendly startup! Plenty of money floating around. Find another remote friendly guy and go to town! Seems how most remote friendly places have started...
I found a loophole to all this madness. I joined a company that was not remote-friendly, moved a couple hours away after about a year, and told them I'd be happy to continue working for them remotely. They obliged :)
Having been on both sides of this, this is usually career suicide.
Not to say you get fired, but you miss too much. You miss watercooler talk. You miss the invite to a new project. You get sent maintenance and bug work.
If you want to work a 9-3 and coast, sure. If you want to do cool stuff and move up the chain? Being remote in a local company is totally suicide.