261–270 of 968 posts
And where there are cons, what would fix them? My understanding is insurance and benefits are a weak area. The internet ate my really long comment. Suffice it to say, if you haven't already, I will suggest you (YC) talk with an Aflac agent.
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…
This is an interesting idea. We've talked about ways that we could help create more job stability for people joining a YC company.
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Often I find a number of great engineers that the big 5 disqualify for two main reasons: Location or Education. The big 5 tend to not allow remote work and if you don't have a college degree it's often hella hard to get an interview.
Yeah, I doubt I'll even bother to apply to the big 5, maybe even the big 20. I'm coming out of a yearlong software intensive in October with a liberal art major from a marketing background. I know a few people at those companies but there is also the question of leetcode. I think my chances are much higher with other types of companies, startups included.
Early stage engineer at startups (including a unicorn):
pros: Fun work, you learn a ton, unlimited PTO (if you can actually use it), lavish benefits like free lunch, decent company culture, opportunities to try new things.
cons: Poor work life balance, low chance of a bonus, low equity if any, poor management/leadership, lots of hand wavey bs about being number 1, poor career progression, lots of over selling of what you'll be working on, Chicago isn't big on "cashing out" so most startup equity wont really net you much if anything.
compensation: Average for the market in Chicago, depending on where you land as far as talent and skills you can probably get 100k-200k base.
Big tech companies:
pros: great work life balance, annual bonus from 10-20%, decent career progression, more opportunities to specialize in something if that's your thing.
cons: Lack luster tech, no equity, lots of red tape, lots of mediocre/bad engineers, occasionally have to work with legacy code.
compensation: 100k - 250k base salary based on skills/talent/position.
From my experience in Chicago it really comes down to stability, work life balance, and trust. From what I've seen the big players are usually a lot more upfront about what you will actually be working on day to day and they provide a level of stability that others can not. On the other hand though you can grow a lot more as an engineer at a startup if you put in the effort.
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…
For what it is worth, I tried this business model, IE: consulting focused on startups. Problem was, startups by and large are grossly undercapitalized, have huge business swings, and often you are dealing with first-time entrepreneurs who have no idea what things cost or how long they will take, but also aren't willing to be educated (because they are scared and there is a lot of risk). Point being - it's hard to sel…
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…
However there's one other area where startups have failed to evolve, doing a worse job than big companies actually and that's accepting remote employees.
Big companies have been doing better because at the very least they are opening offices in multiple countries, whereas most of the startups I'm seeing are staying in the technological centers, a majority being in Silicon Valley and hiring locally. Which is nuts.
For somebody living outside of San Francisco's bubble or other expensive and overrated cities like New York or London, 150K is actually better than 400K. In many of Europe's cities, minus the expensive ones (e.g. Zurich, London, Paris), you can have a great life with 150K.
It doesn't happen though. And for the very few startups I've seen accepting remote employees, many times they are hired as contractors, without any perks or stock options and an extreme expectation for low hourly rates.
Well, you know what they say, most startups die and this is one reason why.
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I just started a job as a data scientist at a FAANG company. PhD + 2 years of experience for $200k total compensation (plus another $50k in one time bonuses/relo). It’s almost double what my previous (non-tech) employer paid. Although I’m starting to wonder if I should have gone the software engineering route instead. SWEs get double the RSUs as data scientists for the same experience level (so ~250k for my level) an…
I'm in a somewhat similar boat and have seen DS positions at FAANG not pay as well as SWE. Why is that?
I think this is changing though, and I think “data scientist” will soon be split into sub-roles. Some companies like Lyft have already changed their title scheme. Business analysts are now data scientists, and those who were data scientists are now research scientists.
The company I work for has an internal job role that isn’t public and an external title that is. So a “data scientist” may have an internal role of “business analyst” or an internal role of “applied scientist”, and there’s a big difference in pay despite the same outward-facing title.
I think the pay scale goes:
Data scientist (business analyst) I have a non-CS PhD so I think that’s why I don’t make as much as a software engineer or a core data scientist.
Base salary and bonus is generally the same for all roles for a given experience level; the difference in comp. comes from the RSUs granted.
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FAANG + Microsoft + Uber + Airbnb hire thousands and thousands of engineers in the Valley and Seattle every year. 400K is L5-L6 salary (senior engineer, first level manager). There are a TON of engineers making that money. They are not really outliers, and FAANGMUA is also not really outlier considering Google itself has 80K employees and Amazon and MSFT have over 200K employees.
400k is an outlier for sr engineer or 1st level manager. Most all of them fall into 200-300/yr in the valley or Seattle at those companies.
Base salary will be around 200K, and bonus would be another 200K. Can easily be 50-100K more than that on some years.
Outlier would be 750K or more, which means the engineer is one of the most valuable members of the team.
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This. I joined a moderately successful startup (good acquisition where founders made > $1 m) and the rewards were not worth the risks as an early employee. Also, the RSUs are low risk, high rewards at the "usual suspects". Unless you love working on a small team with more autonomy, but without comfortable resources and losing sleep over whether your company will be there next week, I just don't see the attraction of…
> I just don't see the attraction of joining a startup as an early employee. You can learn a whole lot from a "usual suspect", where the world's experts reside, and a whole team of competent and hard-working people are also. I’ve noticed people tend to specialize at larger places, and not everyone wants to go deep rather than wide. Startups are a super easy way to optimize for a wider skill base, albeit at a sharp co…
Generalization will limit career and compensation eventually. There will be a point where the market will have a glut for general skillset.
Specialization, on the other hand, usually leads to higher compensation and valuable skillset.
This does not mean that Specialist can't be Generalist. It could be that Specialist was once Generalist and get bored :).
By 2012-2014, the landscape of web development has not changed drastically so if a Generalist stops doing what he/she did and chose to be a Specialist from 2014-2018 (say, in Storage design, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, or AI), that doesn't mean he/she can't go down to the product/web layer and contribute: it's still MVC doing CRUD backed by MySQL/PostgreSQL and with a touch of some client-side stuff.
Summarizing the most popular startup con here: if I'm a relatively senior engineer, joining some late-stage startup for 180-250K cash comp and 50-100K options, then the payout in case of good M&A or IPO could be $20-100 per share (if I don't wait years, cash out at the end of the hold period and move on). So let's say in 4 years I can make $720K-1M cash and $1-10M in stock. Which is roughly comparable to the big guys…
When you say "the series-A guys are offering the same stock (roughly) as the series-D", what units are you comparing them in? Number of shares? Percentage of the company? Estimated $ value of the shares (and if so, how calculated)?