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Startup employees don't earn more

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Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#41

Post by bhickey »

bunkydoo wrote: post #31
jeremyt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sour grapes. You don't have any magical insight into the industry. You're just drawing conclusions from one data point. Here are two more data points for you: I've worked at two startups and so far both startups are solid successes.

Our country is just shy of $20 trillion in debt because investors spend their cash on startups like mine and expect the government to write it off on their taxes when it fails.

> because

While it's reasonable to bring up issues of moral hazard, blaming the national debt on startups has no relationship with reality.

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#42

Post by orangecat »

rlanday wrote: post #7
thoman23 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the lottery and working at a startup are rational bets if you believe the value of money is non linear.

No, many people believe the value of money in non-linear but most of those people believe that the marginal utility of each additional dollars diminishes as your wealth increases, rather than increasing. I.e. even if you might earn more money on average at a startup (which the article claims isn’t the case), it still wouldn’t be worth it because it’s better to earn a decent salary from a big company with high probabi…

Who seriously believes that the marginal value of money increases as you have more?

There are plausible arguments that money can often have increasing marginal utility for poor people. Google "bee sting theory of poverty".

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#43

Post by mtviewdave »

bunkydoo wrote: post #24

I'm gonna be straight with y'all, I earn more as a post office mail carrier than I ever did as a programmer for a silicon valley startup with $1 million dollars seed funding. I also surprisingly have more freedom even though I work basically like a slave. Nobody wants to admit it but we are in a tech bubble. Sure, if you are in the right startup things might be different. I had a great valley experience - but it was…

Nobody wants to admit it but we are in a tech bubble.

On the contrary, people love to claim Silicon Valley is in a tech bubble and have been doing so continuously since 2011.

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#45

Post by ojbyrne »

orangecat wrote: post #42
rlanday wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, many people believe the value of money in non-linear but most of those people believe that the marginal utility of each additional dollars diminishes as your wealth increases, rather than increasing. I.e. even if you might earn more money on average at a startup (which the article claims isn’t the case), it still wouldn’t be worth it because it’s better to earn a decent salary from a big company with high probabi…

Who seriously believes that the marginal value of money increases as you have more? There are plausible arguments that money can often have increasing marginal utility for poor people. Google "bee sting theory of poverty".

That's not really the relevant range for this discussion.

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#46

Post by taytus »

exstudent2 wrote: post #29
bunkydoo wrote: post #24

I'm gonna be straight with y'all, I earn more as a post office mail carrier than I ever did as a programmer for a silicon valley startup with $1 million dollars seed funding. I also surprisingly have more freedom even though I work basically like a slave. Nobody wants to admit it but we are in a tech bubble. Sure, if you are in the right startup things might be different. I had a great valley experience - but it was…

$1 million is practically nothing as far as startup funding goes. Especially in the Bay Area. That's basically a year to find product market fit and raise another round. No offense but you don't sound like you have enough experience to be commenting on our industry as a whole.

In USA and in the rest of the world, $1 million dollars is a shit ton of money. Full stop. Please, let's go back to reality.

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#47

Post by tostitos1979 »

devonkim wrote: post #21
philsnow wrote: post #17

As others have posted, people don't go to small startups to earn more on average. They're not looking at the average or median, they're looking at the 99%ile numbers, because they think the startup they picked has an angle or advantage, giving it a shot at a 99%ile exit. 80000hours' audience is clever enough to understand cumulative distribution functions or even just correlated sets of [25%ile, median, 75%ile, 90%il…

I've always thought that historically engineers cared more about working on things they had more emotional investment in rather than working on things they had no passion for that makes money as an established business like ad tech or dog dating social networks.

Your comment made me think of the episode of the show Silicon Valley (in the current season), where the engineers want to build a scalable platform rather than a box (appliance). The negotiate with mgmt to let them work on the platform after they have worked on the box :)

As an aside, I thought this episode was very well done. The engineers believe their algorithm will get better over time as it ingests more data (hence, a scalable platform is the way to go). A box won't learn, and benefit from these improvements. However, large companies want boxes (servers/appliances in their data center) and aren't in a position to have their data leak out (for statutory or competitive reasons in many cases).

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#48

Post by fsaneq2 »

susan_hall wrote: post #4
danielrm26 wrote: post #2

This will surprise nobody on Hacker News. The allure of startups isn't a guaranteed 20% more than a regular company's salary; it's the possibility of 1000% more.

"not 20% more but possibly 1000% more" -- you are implying that the median startup employee makes less but it is worth it because of the big payoff for the lucky ones. That is, you imply that the median might be lower, but the average pay is higher. But that is not what the article is saying. The article is saying that average payoff is lower. In other words, being a startup employee is irrational the same way the lo…

This entirely depends on what utility you assign to a given amount of money.

For many people who are well-enough off to consider having a good risk floor, the utility of a non-life-changing amount of extra money is nearly zero. It is only once you get into the high jackpots that it gets interesting.

Depending on your situation it can be completely rational to play the lottery or be a startup employee.

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#49

Post by bbcbasic »

bunkydoo wrote: post #24

I'm gonna be straight with y'all, I earn more as a post office mail carrier than I ever did as a programmer for a silicon valley startup with $1 million dollars seed funding. I also surprisingly have more freedom even though I work basically like a slave. Nobody wants to admit it but we are in a tech bubble. Sure, if you are in the right startup things might be different. I had a great valley experience - but it was…

Is there any chance of a systemic failure that would affect the entire economy caused by Silicon Valley? I am not talking about some shares losing value but with the Credit Crunch, we had thousands of average Joes in above their head in debt which couldn't be refinanced while the value of their home crashed.

Re: Startup employees don't earn more

#50

Post by bbcbasic »

mtviewdave wrote: post #43
bunkydoo wrote: post #24

I'm gonna be straight with y'all, I earn more as a post office mail carrier than I ever did as a programmer for a silicon valley startup with $1 million dollars seed funding. I also surprisingly have more freedom even though I work basically like a slave. Nobody wants to admit it but we are in a tech bubble. Sure, if you are in the right startup things might be different. I had a great valley experience - but it was…

Nobody wants to admit it but we are in a tech bubble. On the contrary, people love to claim Silicon Valley is in a tech bubble and have been doing so continuously since 2011.

If it isn't a bubble the rest of the world is in an 'anti-bubble', which will hopefully anti-pop any time soon resulting in more money for tech workers :-)
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