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Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#61

Post by rukenshia »

ryanSrich wrote: post #23

Pro (from my personal perspective, YMMV): You get to work on something that will actually see the light of day. For me, there's nothing worse than being this tiny little cog in the machine that comes into work from 9-5 and produces something so microscopic that you question your importance at all. Working at a startup means you have to pull your weight, wear many hats, and get shit done. This also means you can climb…

> Most of my friends that work at larger public tech companies — it just feels like they're constantly doing unimportant things, going to conferences just for the sake of it

Working at a BigCorp(tm) right now, this is somewhat of a false statement imo, at least for us. Being in such a standardised place, it is very hard a lot of times to find new inspiration for technologies to adopt and things like conferences or meetups are the perfect opportunity to network and hear about how people make use of new things. Usually, we don't really get much time to explore new technologies as capacity is always planned for our current workloads. That's why I love being able to go to a conference every few months (this year it'll be 4 for me) to be able to bring some things back into my team that might be interesting to us.

We get the time approved for conferences, but not to explore things "while at work".

This obviously differs from company to company but that's my experience at my current one so far.

Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#62

Post by ryandrake »

swimorsinka wrote: post #12
nieksand wrote: post #2

Just a few cons.... The big players have drastically pushed up developer comp. The "maybe" money that might come from a best-case startup exit isn't holding up well against the RSUs of the big players. I have friends pushing total comp north of 400K / year at the usual suspect companies. Over a five-year-span-till-liquidity your "maybe" money is competing against a near-guaranteed $2M in comp. Equity grants for early…

+1 to this. 10 years ago you couldn't make 400K at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Now you can. Startups made a lot more sense when your opportunity cost was 50-150K per year.

You can make that much. You can also win the lottery. Your opportunity cost should not be measured against your best case alternative, it should be measured against a most likely case.

Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#64

Post by mkirklions »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
nieksand wrote: post #2

Just a few cons.... The big players have drastically pushed up developer comp. The "maybe" money that might come from a best-case startup exit isn't holding up well against the RSUs of the big players. I have friends pushing total comp north of 400K / year at the usual suspect companies. Over a five-year-span-till-liquidity your "maybe" money is competing against a near-guaranteed $2M in comp. Equity grants for early…

Entirely accurate. At a startup, I expect to make ~$100k/year, have mediocre insurance and work life balance, and underwhelming equity ( Unless you’re a founder, I actively steer colleagues away from working at a startup. The sense of accomplishment, impact, or whatever the feel good term is, isn’t worth shorting yourself on significant comp for years (while founders and funds are getting almost all the upside). Edit…

I basically agree.

Unless you are a founder, go with the money.

Better Estimated Value.

Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#65

Post by nieksand »

polskibus wrote: post #20
nieksand wrote: post #2

Just a few cons.... The big players have drastically pushed up developer comp. The "maybe" money that might come from a best-case startup exit isn't holding up well against the RSUs of the big players. I have friends pushing total comp north of 400K / year at the usual suspect companies. Over a five-year-span-till-liquidity your "maybe" money is competing against a near-guaranteed $2M in comp. Equity grants for early…

Now the VCs that made lots of money selling their Google, etc., would now have to spend much more on giving a new startup runway. That's also a reason why many US startups and corporations hire dev teams in Eastern Europe and make it much harder to hire for local startups.

I think the core of a "fix" is here.

If I were building an engineering org today I'd either go remote-only or build it somewhere which is not SFO/SEA/NYC and friends. An underwhelming bay area compensation package puts you at absolute top-of-market in most European cities.

So Y-Combinator can help companies get out of dodge immediately after raising a seed round. For recruiting, warm up a pipeline of talented engineering managers outside the tiny handful of overheated areas in the US. Provide legal, hr, and accounting assistance with setting up shop elsewhere.

You can always still keep sales, account managers, and fully customer facing-roles in SFO.

Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#67

Post by mkirklions »

swimorsinka wrote: post #12
nieksand wrote: post #2

Just a few cons.... The big players have drastically pushed up developer comp. The "maybe" money that might come from a best-case startup exit isn't holding up well against the RSUs of the big players. I have friends pushing total comp north of 400K / year at the usual suspect companies. Over a five-year-span-till-liquidity your "maybe" money is competing against a near-guaranteed $2M in comp. Equity grants for early…

+1 to this. 10 years ago you couldn't make 400K at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Now you can. Startups made a lot more sense when your opportunity cost was 50-150K per year.

I wonder how sustainable this is.

Its 400k while their stock price is crazy high. But If we really are in a tech bubble, that money is back to the typically 80-120k of most tech jobs.

Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#68

Post by k5jhn »

Currently a dev at a pre-Series A startup.

Pros:

- both the freedom AND responsibility to build things that'll directly translate into increased growth/profits, or the opposite in the case of failure

- close-knit dev team, and in general everyone is chill, i.e company culture is great so far

Cons:

- my salary compensation is pretty average so I am hoping for an eventual big pay-out, but it's hard to gauge what the payout amount of my shares will be.. maybe this is just due to my ignorance/lack-of-experience (are there tools/calculations to figure this kind of stuff out?)

Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#69

Post by fjones12 »

aphextron wrote: post #6
nieksand wrote: post #2

Just a few cons.... The big players have drastically pushed up developer comp. The "maybe" money that might come from a best-case startup exit isn't holding up well against the RSUs of the big players. I have friends pushing total comp north of 400K / year at the usual suspect companies. Over a five-year-span-till-liquidity your "maybe" money is competing against a near-guaranteed $2M in comp. Equity grants for early…

>The big players have drastically pushed up developer comp. The "maybe" money that might come from a best-case startup exit isn't holding up well against the RSUs of the big players. I have friends pushing total comp north of 400K / year at the usual suspect companies. Over a five-year-span-till-liquidity your "maybe" money is competing against a near-guaranteed $2M in comp. I can second this. But it's not just the m…

Ditto - I prefer a flexible and generous actual paid time off policy over unlimited PTO. One big benefit to a defined policy is accruing time off you'll be paid out for if you leave. That can be a non-insignificant amount of money for some people.

Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?

#70

Post by HillaryBriss »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #22

Having not worked in the Valley or a startup, I can say the biggest con to me is a lack of stability. You can get a job at BigCo or even MediumSizedButBeenAroundTwoDecadesCo and be reasonably sure you'll still have a job... as long as you want to work there. But with a startup, either they run out of money and you lose your job, they pivot and don't need you and you lose your job, or they get acquired and you very li…

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but, I'll try to argue the other side for a moment:

BEGIN THEORY

Startups hire in-house devs because, basically, management does not know exactly:

A. what to build

B. what's possible to build

C. how the real world will react to the initial product/service offering and how the company will need to adjust

So, they bring devs in close, as high availability, high dedication employees, people who are in the center of the decision making. These intimately involved, trustworthy, motivated devs will then be more likely to come up with features and products that workaround management's deficits. And the company will benefit from that quickly and the company will own those features and products.

END THEORY

But, if this were contracted out to an outside stable of roaming rockstar developers, all highly talented but still less motivated and more in need of detailed direction from management -- how much insanely great startup flash-magic would really happen?

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