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Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

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Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#361

Post by djhn »

loopbit wrote: post #45
djhn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3k€ per month + holiday extra or bonuses sounds pretty standard for most office work after any university degree (so by default MSc in Europe), I'd say 3.5 to 4 is reasonable with engineering, business, finance, etc. 4-5 in law, 5-7 in medicine.

Good luck finding a entry-level job, any entry level job in Spain that pays you more than 900€ per month in Spain, Italy, Portugal... even France and maybe, Germany (although I have less information there). From what I see, you might get 2-2.5K€ per month in the rest of Europe. Ireland and UK are, AFAIK, where the highest salaries in IT are and even there you are going to get 2-3K€ per month at most. Most lawyers I k…

Oh yes, I should have qualified that! I was talking Nordics, GermanySwitzerland/Austria, Benelux countries, UK and Ireland.. Maybe France as well. Definitely not the whole Europe, but a significant chunk of the tech scene.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#362

Post by Bahamut »

patio11 wrote: post #274
balls187 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What companies are paying 5 year senior enigneers $200k base salary in the Valley???

AppAmaGooFaceSoft and every company which is isomorphic to them. Tens of thousands of people have this pay package.

I don't think Amazon compensates that much - I interviewed with them this past summer, and they tried to lowball me. I gave a firm number that I would not go below after giving some numbers I have turned down in the past, and the process stalled indefinitely. I have also heard stories about Apple lowballing friends as well, to the point startups were giving higher compensation. The others, I have heard stories about or could believe.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#363

Post by gniv »

foobarqux wrote: post #322
gniv wrote: post #275

There is valid criticism to be made, but the negativity in this thread is out of proportion. As somebody who worked at Google for 5+ years, I'd like to emphasize a point: If you sustain good work [1] for a few years, you will be rewarded well beyond expectations [2]. Your compensation will depend on your performance, and not on your starting salary. I think this is unique to Google and maybe a few other tech giants.…

Since the thread is about making career decisions, can you explain why you left Google?

I didn't leave. I guess I used the wrong tense.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#365

Post by Avalaxy »

Rainymood wrote: post #364

As a European constantly reading about total compensations in the 200k+ seems like FUCKING crazy to me, holy shit. What the hell.

Same here. Threads like these completely alienate me, feels like a completely different world. I can't image a software developer getting more than a 100K per year (non-freelance), it's not rocket science or anything.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#366

Post by devonkim »

jtbigwoo wrote: post #209
devonkim wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

The more correct rule is that you should try to find companies that have closely aligned business and technology objectives (which I haven't found outside of finance and the usual SV companies in the F500), but I have my doubts even that is the case because I'm working for a large organization that meets this criteria and I'd never think of advising a young, ambitious recent graduate to even reply to a recruiter for this place given the horrifically bad budget situation. Just because business leaders want something and try in earnest to plan for it doesn't mean much if they don't have the resources and momentum to execute.

A good example of what I mean are large, innovation-less companies with "start-up in a large company" efforts to bring themselves some relevance that almost always become the worst of large company inertia / legacy with the fiscal and market position disadvantages of start-ups. I've been through at least 4 of these efforts with varying degrees of "success." And while they're a large part of my career and I want to believe it can happen, I have no evidence of this working out well and am convinced it's a rather high risk to take with disproportionate upside.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#367

Post by _m8fo »

So for me this begs the question, how do you get to this point? I've never cared too much about compensation, since though I went to a good school, I did the computer science major pretty quickly and after graduation am working at a start-up I think is great.

Should the goal be to spend time studying for interviews, or is this some other strategy? This article assumes you're at some level to command this level of compensation, but how do you get to that level to begin with? I know the classic advice: do good work, write excellent code, etc, but is there more specific advice?

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#368

Post by henrik_w »

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…

Strongly agree on point 3. On top of my list of requirements for places to work is "the product is software", just before "great colleagues".

http://henrikwarne.com/2013/03/26/what-do-programmers-want/

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#369

Post by fredkbloggs »

serge2k wrote: post #345
fredkbloggs wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, it matters very much what the market price of the stock is. Your grant will be for a certain number of shares on some vesting schedule, not for a certain cash value . Remember kids, stock prices don't always go up. Some stock prices go down, and sometimes all stock prices go down together. Those RSUs that, if fully vested, would have a market price of $400k at time of hire, may well be worth anything from…

When talking about companies as well established as these the risk is a lot lower. In some cases since the goal is to give you a set number in compensation they will factor in a poor stock performance and give you an adjustment to make up for it.

Do you mean companies as well established as Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, and Netscape? Or companies as well established as Woolworth, Kodak, MCI, and Sears? Or perhaps you had in mind the New York Central Railroad, LTV, and Pan American Airlines?

Yes, it is possible that you will be given additional grants or options repricing if your company's stock price declines. Usually not, unless you're a key employee or top performer, but maybe. But that doesn't mean the price won't just keep going down anyway. To say nothing of the bonuses and raises you won't get, or the mandatory across-the-board 10% pay cuts, or the elimination of all the miscellaneous perks. At least, unlike the employees of many of the companies I named above, you won't have a pension you can lose too.

I know it's hard to believe. Intellectually, you can look at history and accept, know very well, that most of these companies will fail someday, and many of them probably in the very near future. But viscerally, you can't get it, because they feel invincible right now. But they aren't. Believe it[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braniff_%281983%E2%80%931990%2...

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#370

Post by zematis »

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…

As a counterpoint, you can do an absolutely absurd amount of good with this kind of money. With a salary of 250k, you could donate 150k to charity, and still be quite well off.

I like to go by effectiveness estimates from www.givewell.org. One of the charities they approve of is GiveDirectly (www.givedirectly.org), which makes direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty. They feel confident in the claim that the average person receiving money from GiveDirectly lives on the equivalent of about $0.66 (U.S) per day[1]. GiveDirectly has an organizational overhead of about 15%.

Another charity they like, the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), distributes anti-malarial bednets. The nets cost something in the ballpark of $5-6 to make and distribute[2], including organizational overhead. They make a much more tentative estimate that each $2,800 sent to the AMF results in about one life saved[3] (of a child under 5).

So, by donating 150k, you could plausibly:

1) Double the yearly income of about 531 people

(66c * 365 = $240)

($150,000 * 0.85 (efficiency) / $240) = 531

2) More tentatively, save the lives of about 53 children.

($150,000 / $2,800) = 53.6

GiveDirectly Estimate Source:

[1] http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/give-dir...

AMF Estimate Sources:

[2] http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/amf#Cost...

[3] http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/amf#Cost...

*Edit: Formatting corrections

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