The last line is pretty important -
"You should figure out what the relevant tradeoffs are for you."
The author is just summing up his experience. Individual mileage definitely varies!
Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
201–210 of 418 posts
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can come up with a few on top of my head: Netflix, Apple, Google
Do you have sources for this information? Is 200k median salary, or an outlier for the top senior engineer there?
It's not median - it's maybe median if you select only for senior-level engineers, most of our industry leans quite young.
The "outlier for top engineers" at the above companies are in the $500k+ range. I'm being entirely serious.
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#203I didn't do more than browse the article because I didn't need to hear the arguments to accept the conclusion. I think the only place perhaps in the world where working in a startup could be seen as any way superior to working at an established business is in Silicon Valley, where enormous amounts of VC money come together to create a modern Rome. Certainly we need Rome, the modern world wouldn't have existed without…
Actually, as an European (as in, in a completely different environment than SV), I'd recommend the opposite with a small tweak, add "small company" to the startup meaning. Most big companies I've worked with in Europe have horrible new employee training package or no training at all. I haven't worked in a single one that took fresh out of college types and allowed them to work in different departments. The most commo…
We're on the same page here.
I don't work at a big company, I work at an established one. The key factor is that they're not still trying to validate their business plan, not the size. I want one that's been around for at least ten years. Less than that and I have to ascertain for myself whether the company's going to be around long enough for me to get what I went in there for.
The goal here is mitigating existential risk to your employment situation. There's outside risk, the chances of your company going under, and internal risk, the chances of getting fired or laid off before you've accomplished your goals.
Working at an established company mitigates external risk, working at a small one helps mitigate internal risk because you can get to know your company very well and keep alive to shifts in politics. For me, the small, established company is ideal. I work at such a company now and will only jump to a similar company for a significantly higher salary. Small bumps aren't worth the switching costs.
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#204250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Also, you better be someone who is excellent at communication and charismatic if you want to get invited to the table of interesting work. There are a lot of brilliant hyper-competitive people who work at these big c…
I'm a senior programmer at a smallish company (30 programmers around 150 people total) where I've been for 5 years and I make 60k. Funny part is I bill out at 140 per hour and am 95% billable.
Why are you still there?
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my understanding, they don't really recalibrate pay scales at the bigcos based on location.. but this is purely anecdotal evidence.
Well, there's really no corresponding data for many other markets . Facebook and Google don't really do Work From Home and don't have a lot of remote locations for development depending on where you are. (Amazon is another example). I don't know what they offer datacenter staff, but in many areas, recruiters are pretty adamant about people moving. From my experience, say, the North Carolina scene, you're lucky if you…
> Facebook and Google don't really do Work From Home and don't have a lot of remote locations for development depending on where they are. I don't know what they offer datacenter staff, but in many areas, that's all they have for "not CA".
This is just untrue. I haven't looked closely at Facebook recently (beyond watching the [office in Seattle](http://www.geekwire.com/2015/sneak-peek-facebook-plans-epic-...) grow quickly) but traditionally Google has had ~50% eng in MTV and the rest spread out. NY is the second largest office but Seattle and Bangalore are pretty big. Seattle (and Kirkland) are now at ~2000 people (https://twitter.com/juberti/status/675022362438316032).
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#206Getting a job at Google as an engineer is ridiculously hard. The guy that wrote Homebrew couldn't even get hired even though 90% of their engineers use his software. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 If you can get a job at Google, it's very different than getting a job "at a big company" and has historically actually increased your odds of success later on (via the propensity of investors to fund Xo…
Attempting to get a job at 1 of the Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft quintet of big companies that pay well, though, is quite doable, in spite of the noisiness of the process. mxcl got a job at Apple (working on Swift's package manager, no less[0]) a short while later.
[0]: https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/graphs/contri...
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#207250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Also, you better be someone who is excellent at communication and charismatic if you want to get invited to the table of interesting work. There are a lot of brilliant hyper-competitive people who work at these big c…
I'm a senior programmer at a smallish company (30 programmers around 150 people total) where I've been for 5 years and I make 60k. Funny part is I bill out at 140 per hour and am 95% billable.
I think this community is frankly out of touch on compensation expectations for the bulk of the population, but you are definitely underpaid and should find another job elsewhere.
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phrase for your mentality is "early majority". You share that taste with ~35% of the population.
I'm hardly Rome-free. America is the Rome of the world, technology is the Rome of America's economy. Programming is the Rome of technology. Ruby is the Rome of programming. (that last one is debatable)
The two most famous rails sites, twitter and groupon, currently use scala and node respectively. I guess that last part is quite debatable.
Python, golang, and Java(+jvm languagages such as scala/clojure) all have a TON of users at very large and interesting firms. I was just reading today about the new york times open sourcing their golang microservice framework.
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#209I'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…
>> Work in a non-software company. A company whose business doesn't take its software seriously invariably treats its software and IT resources as cost centers meant to get maximum cost savings for as little money as possible via opex reduction and will, ironically, likely fail to make bigger expenditures required to keep costs (and really, wasting time) lower.
To expand on this, there are some companies that seem like non-software companies, yet still treat software as a competitive advantage rather than a cost center. I worked for a big bank that did their best to stay six months to a year ahead of other banks on technology. The marketing folks were constantly coming to us and saying, "Give us cool features that we can sell." It was a fun place to work.
I also worked for an insurance company that viewed technology as a necessary evil that should be as cheap as possible. The marketing folks there were constantly complaining about how much time and money the company was wasting on technology. (Curiously, they also complained that the company's technology offerings were hopelessly far behind its competitors.) It was a miserable experience.
If you're looking for a job, ask questions about management support and budget priorities. If they're evasive or they say things like, "we're proud of how far we stretch our investment," it's not a good place to work. You can also ask how the company compares technically to its competitors. If they're evasive or talk about how they're trying to catch up, that's a bad sign, too.
Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people are actually really out of touch with bigco pay scales. 250k is pretty easily achievable in a bigco. At Facebook you'll hit 250k+ in total comp at level 5, at LinkedIn you'll hit 250k+ in total comp at Staff level. If you also factor in stacking allotments of RSUs, your pay can easily exceed 300k at these levels given a few years of tenure.
Is this only in Silicon Valley? Or are these pay scales appropriate for satellite offices as well? For example: could you hit $250k working for Google in Pittsburgh?
You wouldn't be far off the GBP equivalent working for an investment bank in London as a VP developer.