Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation • Hacker News Board

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#51

Post by bigcothrowa » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

wahsd wrote: post #33

matwood wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the number is total comp, salary + stock. So maybe $150k/year salary and $100k in stock that vests over X years with more possibly added. At that point, ~%10 raise/year would get someone close to $250k. I assume someone would have to bust their butt for a 10%, but it is not an unheard of number.

10% salary increases through internal pay increases? That sounds quite unheard of. Maybe if you constantly gun for internal promotions that everyone else is gunning for, but that still leaves everyone else behind that is going to get marginal increases at best.

Yeah, that has not been my experience. I've worked for a big company for 4-ish years. Started 40% below article's suggested "middling" salary because I didn't negotiate (and starting salaries were 30% lower 4 years ago, apparently).

Negotiated a 40%(!) raise after 1.5 years because I was kicking ass and had +40% offers in hand(!) from other BigCo's that I interviewed at.

Since then I've been getting 2-3% cost-of-living raises annually. I would say my performance is above average, but that's my opinion.

Definitely not seeing 10% or $30k annual raises and my total pay is significantly below $250k still. Maybe I need to do another round of external interviewing again.

That being said, I like my work and have good benefits and really good compensation compared to non-tech work.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#52

Post by bigcothrowa » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #49

exstudent2 wrote: post #2

I don't think you can go into a company as large as Google and expect your salary to double in five years. HR will have set limits to how much of a raise you can get in any given year and even with promotions you would be very unlikely to see that kind of bump. I also don't think the middling programmers he mentions would hit the 250k year mark. Orthogonal to the point of the article, but the only time you can really…

The idea of starting fresh out of school at a company for $130K, doubling up to $250K seems to me ludicrous, besides for a rare few outlier roles at a rare few companies. I can say I've got close to 20 years of experience and I don't make anywhere close to that. Not saying there are no roles like this--just saying this probably several standard deviations from the mean, and not useful as a "back of the envelope estim…

Yeah, this is not the median or low-end compensation package profile OP thinks it is.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#53

Post by code4tee » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

Article makes some good points. The cash-out value of "equity" one gets in a startup can, if you are lucky, result in some nice lump sum at some point down the line. However, many often miss the point that this big lump sum is quite often still much less that the cash given up in the meantime by agreeing to accept lower cash comp in exchange for said equity.

No different than when people talk about how they bought a house for X and then sold it for Y at some point down the line, giving the impression that they made a nice return on investment. Off course such casual math forgets that it costs a ton of money in interest, taxes and maintenance costs to hold such an asset for this length of time and these need to be subtracted from what appears to be a nice lump sum payment down the line. In reality, net net many people never make a $1 owning their nice fancy house even though when they sell it results in a nice lump sum.

With jobs and houses there are lots of other factors at play, but when it comes to $ it's important to understand the difference between perceived "windfalls" and actual net return. The true results are often not what people expected.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#54

Post by aantix » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

devonkim wrote: post #40

herge wrote: post #7

I'd recommend anyone looking for their first job out of university to consider strongly a job at a startup. Consider it a 'finishing school', where you'll have the highest chance to touch as many different technologies and tasks as possible (from system administration, to backend to frontend work), as opposed to the 'Big Company' where (especially for a first job) you'll be focused on one task. The important thing is…

It's kind of difficult to have start-ups hire juniors because they desperately need people to be productive and so I'd caution that start-ups that accept junior coders straight out of school may not be the kind of start-ups that give the kind of experience that's desirable even for a year. Instead of recommending what people should go after college for their first job, I'll recommend what people should not do: 1. Wor…

If you take a startup job out of school, make sure that they embrace pair programming. Work for a Pivotal Labs. Work for an Andres Camacho. Work for a Chad Fowler. Or an Ernie Miller.

Find the leaders that understand all programmers need training (especially around process and coding standards). Sell that on your passion and that you want to become good _quickly_.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#55

Post by stanleydrew » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

I don't want to criticize too harshly, because I do think this analysis is generally good (if slightly unoriginal).

The problem is that these analyses always focus on how you, as a prospective employee, can extract the most value from the world. Optimizing cash vs equity or arbitraging location or whatever.

You can see it seep through all over the place in the language used. Sometimes it's subtle:

> I’ve told that anecdote to multiple people who didn’t think they could get a job at some trendy large company, who then ended up applying and getting in.

Waiting and hoping to "get in" is pretty weak. It implies that we're all just meat-sacks working away until some of us get lucky and manage to convince a fancy company to overpay us and let us extract a lot of value from them.

If you have value to contribute to the world (and you definitely do), then go figure out someplace where you can best contribute it. Stop worrying about the best way to take things from the world and figure out the best way put stuff in. The rest will take care of itself.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#56

Post by limelight » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

I was nodding along throughout this and pretty much agreeing that overall a big company makes sense for most people.

Then I got to the final footnote. That kind of Kafka-esque bullshit is what keeps me working in startups. I could not stand working in a culture where policies which are widely seen as unhelpful and ridiculous are still routinely inflicted upon employees.

Yes, startup "bullshit" also exists, but the difference is that it's totally possible to avoid that bullshit by picking a good startup to work at. I've never had anything like the experiences described in [1], despite working at 3 different startups. On the other hand, big company problems seem to be universal: it's not possible to find a big company without at least some arcane and employee-hostile policies. (For example, Google's blind hiring keeps me from ever considering working there.)

[1] http://totalgarb.tumblr.com/tagged/startupbullshit

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#57

Post by silverlake » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

arbitrage314 wrote: post #42

I've made this point before, but since it's a bit relevant here, I'll make it again (sorry to repeat): If you're primarily interested in making money, or if you love the startup but not the compensation, you should NOT work at that startup. If you're a good developer, you can get a better deal by working at an established company and simply investing. This has been true for every startup offer I've ever seen. Ever. I…

AFAIK, working at Google et. al. pays well, but for most people your career will cap out at senior engineer. At other big companies (banks, telecom, oil, etc) a good Google dev can climb the tech career ladder quickly and make more money, get more responsibility (if that's your thing).

Do you want to be a small fish at Google, or a big fish at Goldman Sachs?

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#58

Post by ljk » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

stanleydrew wrote: post #55

I don't want to criticize too harshly, because I do think this analysis is generally good (if slightly unoriginal). The problem is that these analyses always focus on how you, as a prospective employee, can extract the most value from the world. Optimizing cash vs equity or arbitraging location or whatever. You can see it seep through all over the place in the language used. Sometimes it's subtle: > I’ve told that an…

aka "ask not what your world can do for you, ask what you can do for your world"!

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#59

Post by bigcothrowa » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

Bahamut wrote: post #41

thesimon wrote: post #18

Tangential to this article, but >pay outside of the US is often much lower for reasons that don’t really make sense to me). Can someone explain why salaries in for example Europe are so much less? Out of uni salary for example seems to be around 38k in Europe, whereas in US everything under 90k seems very low. Just the difference in purchase power and costs?

I always wondered that too - Europe isn't necessarily cheaper either, and electronics are much more expensive in general. But $90k is not the norm for starting in the US. I started at $50k in DC for example post-grad school. $90k is perhaps only the Bay Area.

$90k isn't unheard of in Seattle, either (that was my starting salary, in Seattle, 4 years ago). My alma mater published self-reported salary data and $80k was probably the median at the time. Granted, it was one of the best CS schools in the area.

Much of the east coast probably has >=$80k starting salaries as well. (Or at least, you'd expect the high salaries to be on the coasts.) Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#60

Post by bigcothrowa » Fri, Dec 18, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

At my BigCorp employer, Senior Engineer starts at like, maybe $140k total compensation, on the low end. I don't know where the author is drawing these $250-350k minimum figures from, but it feels like "thin air."

That being said, a startup in my area would pay 50-70% as much.