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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?
#72A silicon-valley YC startup is mostly cons:
- cult-like obsession with working "hard" that amounts to pressuring people into burning themselves out
- have to be around people who act like everything is great and they're killing it all the time even though in reality running or working for a startup is super stressful and you're usually teetering on the verge of failure
- being compensated in the non-fungible scam that is options instead of equity or shares
- don't know whether you'll still have a job tomorrow
- make less money than you would at a bigger company
Some of those things appeal to some people, and the SV hypetrain tries really hard to act like they're great but mostly they're objectively bad.
I believe that 3/5 of these are avoidable though:
- People who work 60 hrs/week aren't much more productive than people who work 30 hrs/week most of the time. Productivity per hour drops off considerably for jobs that are cognitively intensive. Plus it's unsustainable except for a tiny sliver of the population.
- Unfortunately, my experience in raising money is that it's largely theater, and you have to pretend like everything is great all the time. That act ended up seeping into the rest of my interactions with people because there's a tendency to turn into whatever you pretend to be. I've had to make an effort, but I believe it's possible to stay true to myself and not become a caricature. I'll report back on how that works out for me after a few more years.
- The whole private equity system is fucked for employees and I hope crypto fixes the fungibility issue. In the meantime, anyone who pays their early employees in options should be ashamed of themselves.
Obviously, a startup simply can't compete with a big company on salary or stability, but being honest about the reality of the situation and offering real equity can help.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#73Just 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…
Take that view with a huge grain of salt. Nobody is denying that someone, somewhere is making $400k as a software engineer, but we are talking outlier employees at outlier companies. You’re not getting this as a medium level rank and file engineer, or at a non-FAANG company. This whole “software engineers make $400k” trope seems to have taken on a life of its own. Every time salary comes up here, these guys come out…
Fine, leave those FAANG "outliers" out. Startup comp is still wildly below market.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#74How does this differ from triplebyte?
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#75Pros:
1) You almost always will own a larger chunk of the core product, and it's easy to point your finger to details that you played a big role in figuring out.
2) At good (small) startups, the transparency is enough so that you have trust in your leadership and understand how big decisions are made. At big companies, it's generally far more convoluted.
3) You gain a skillset outside of proprietary internal tools. This is often overlooked, but if you get used to the internal tools at your company, it means your skills are not nearly as transferrable if you used other industry standards. This makes you more valuable for other jobs.
4) Startups can be a great way to broaden your horizons and jump into a new industry.
5) There are things you will learn building a startup that you really probably won't learn much of at a big tech company. The decision to go to a startup isn't just a compensation risk tradeoff. Examples: you are typically exposed to vastly different parts of the company much more, and you more often learn how to build things from scratch.
Cons:
1) Salary expectations honestly need to be lower, and you need to be excited about the job despite this. There are lots of comments here about this.
2) Benefits and perks are less, but I typically don't consider this as big of a deal as most people. But, it's pretty objectively better at the bigger well-known companies.
3) Company culture can vary tremendously, and there isn't a great way to know much about this without actually working there. OTOH, you can learn a lot more about the culture of the big companies because there's a better chance you know people there =).
4) The stress levels are generally higher at startups. Similarly, achieving a good work/life balance is definitely harder.
I've honestly always felt that human connections play a decent role in helping a person figure out what they want to do. If their social and/or professional bubble isn't into startups, then you already have quite a mountain to climb, even if you think they would love it (and even if they seem to be genuinely considering it).
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#76Having 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…
This is exactly how overseas outsourcing works. The vast majority of the foreign people I work with are under arrangements just like you describe.
This is also similar to how a lot of small software development firms work; they develop web sites and mobile apps for companies on contract.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#77Pro (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 me…
Yeah, and I didn't mean to slam conferences. I enjoy going to conferences and find the well regarded ones beneficial (especially ones offering workshops and certifications).
My point was more about the token conference goer.
I have an acquaintance that has given the same talk at 13 different conferences over the last 12 months. I don't know how that benefits him or the company. He's also on twitter literally all day. I just don't get it (as I hypocritically type this out on HN).
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#78Pro: Remote friendly (sometimes). Startups can't pay the big $$ for good talent, so they're more open to remote employees. I've worked for a few startups where I never met anyone else on the team face-to-face, worked from our corners of the world, and we built cool shit.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#79Some pros: More ownership/authority/responsibility over the tech stack means more flexibility and opportunity to shift rapidly when necessary (lots of tech debt potential, though). Smaller teams make communication more efficient. Cons: Compensation is generally terrible. We might expect lower base/cash compensation, but total comp (cash, equity, benefits) is also much lower. The equity portion of compensation is extr…
> Early employees are taking almost as much risk as founders. Why do you say almost ? I'd say most of them are taking more, as most of them won't have a seat at the board, IOW they have less control over the direction of the company.
Good points! Most of the time, though, employees draw a (slightly) bigger salary than the founders, at least until real funding (Series A or B) is obtained. Then unless the company changes its compensation model the balance definitely and clearly shifts: employees are taking bigger risks.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#80Hard to contribute any more to this. Most of the pros and cons have been given, and are well known anyway.
The problem space should probably be constrained to, pros and cons of joining a startup in 2018, in SV, now vs 3-5 years ago. Otherwise this isn't going anywhere interesting.
My take on it is, founders should be encouraged to only take 3x equity of early employees, not 10x or 20x. This risk is the same, and the founder's contribution is generally small relative to their equity. Ideas are plentiful. Execution is hard and matters the most. A founder cannot get it done by themselves, the entire early team really, really, really matters. And the typical founder is so inexperienced as to really lack what it takes to execute. The point of only taking 3x is not to penalize founders, it's to recognize the early people. It will help equalize the financial problem of joining a startup.
The second major problem is that there are too many startups. I'd suggest YC should halve (at least) the size of each class. Y'all (incubators, angel funds, etc in general) are throwing too many darts for your own benefit, to the detriment of the actual employees. By over-stretching the talent pool for startup employees, it discourages top talent from joining because they know it's that much harder to recruit the best.
I'd suggest also that YC fund/subsidize shared housing situation.
I hope that my comments address specifically problems of SV and problems of 2018.