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Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

danluu.com

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Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#221

Post by ju-st »

nkurz wrote: post #88
georgefrick wrote: post #50

So I've been at this 9 years and I'm not making six figures. Fuck. I don't even understand where I went wrong. Part of me can't believe the article at all. His comment about cost of living was kind of an outright dismissal, very odd? I don't think Google will let me work from Milwaukee. Where is the information on travel, quality of life (owning a house?), etc?

I don't think Google will let me work from Milwaukee. Depending on your skills, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But you might be surprised to learn that the author worked for Google an hour-and-a-half away in Madison? https://github.com/danluu/tex-resume/blob/master/resume.pdf

That's certainly an impressive resume...

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#222

Post by s3nnyy »

lhorie wrote: post #89
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…

I recommend getting into a small company (i.e. 80-200 employees and profitable), if possible. At this size, you have opportunities to wear different hats and moving sideways, but you also get opportunities to see and participate in workforce scaling (helping form new processes, seeing new departments emerge, etc). The important thing is to be vocal about what you want to do. If you came in as a frontend dev want to d…

I totally agree. This is the path I have taken and I do not look back.

I rebuilt the recruiting process at my first IT-company after college.

Now I started my own IT-recruiting agency in Zurich. If you look for a tech-job in the most liveable city in the world, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on http://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to... or send me a mail to the mail-address in my HN-profile.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#223

Post by 6chars »

nostrademons wrote: post #75

I've done both - 3 years as an employee across two different startups, 18 months as a founder, 5.5 years at Google, and now 18 months as a founder. I guess I'm quoted in the article too. :-) All I can say is that the market is actually a lot more efficient than most people give it credit for. I remember coming out of school and thinking "Why would anyone work for a big company when the payouts for startups are so muc…

"oftentimes they're contractually forbidden from disclosing it"

Is that true? That sounds illegal.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#224

Post by humanrebar »

vonmoltke wrote: post #178
dsacco wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't undermine the author's point. As another commenter said, people are really underestimating the likelihood of earning a $250k salary at a large company. It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area. The author's core point is that you are much more likely to become a senior engineer at a large company (and thus earn ~$250k in salary)…

> It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area. So Dallas doesn't count as a metropolitan area? I can almost guarantee nobody here is making that kind of money after only five years. In fact, I'm willing to bet that this kind of compensation is extremely rare outside SV, NYC, and possibly Seattle. In fact, based on what I remember of the salary b…

Some cost of living calculators make $150k in Dallas equal about $250 in NYC. It's worth noting that $150k is high for Dallas, but not impossible for people with Principal, Fellow, or Chief in their job titles.

It's worth noting that using a flat cost-of-living adjustment both overestimates and underestimates things.

The kind of place you'd likely rent in Plano or Addison would cost ridiculous amounts in NYC, given comparable neighborhood qualities and commutes. You can easily afford to have three, four, or more kids. In NYC, one kid is doable, two is a challenge, three is crazy. From that metric, $150k in DFW sounds awesome.

Though if your goal is retirement, maxing out your 401k in NYC is much easier. If you plan on moving to a lower cost-of-living area to retire, or are otherwise looking to hit a certain dollar-figure for some reason (paying for kids to go to college), NYC probably has the edge. That is, people usually adjust their total salaries for cost of living but ignore that annual contributions to medium-term and long-term savings generally shouldn't be adjusted.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#228

Post by vinceguidry »

SEJeff wrote: post #208
vinceguidry wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The essential elements of a Rome-like ecosystem are willingness to innovate, the ecosystem exerting a pulling force on the surroundings drawing resources inexorably towards it due to ideas built structurally into the empire, and the aforementioned myopia and self-obsession stemming from pride. Power and innovation.

I think that programming can be further subdivided into web development and everything else, and then Rails as a platform compared to other frameworks.

Rome had its own evolution, and so each individual Rome is also in a different part of its evolution. When Rome fell, it did so not because of any real weakness on the part of the Romans, but because they'd succeeded in exporting what made them powerful to the surrounding lands. Rome couldn't maintain dominance faced with its provinces each wanting self-rule.

So I consider Rails in the last throes of empire. Its legions will still fuck you up, but it can't fight the whole world anymore. Still the best web dev framework out there, every other framework ends up reimplementing Rails, but it can't be all things to all people anymore.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#230

Post by eecks »

sbilstein wrote: post #134
logical42 wrote: post #117

Earlier 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.

I can corroborate this. 250k is very, very attainable.

Just in the states? What about in Europe? FB, Google and others have headquarters in Dublin. I don't think they pay anything like that, do they?
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