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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?

#301

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

Financially I don't think it makes sense to join a startup after the first two dozen employees or so ... unless you get a very special compensation package. The risk-adjusted rate of return on your labor can't compare to the compensation packages at places like Google and Facebook.

Having said that ... your chance at working on an interesting project is higher at a startup if you are the kind of person that can land a spot at Google/Facebook. What I mean is, you'll be a big fish in a small pond. The kind of person that gets buried in some obscure ad-tech team at Google, for example, can pick and choose the projects he works on if he shops around at a lot of startups. Want to work on an open source database? I bet you can find a place that will pay you 100K to do that ... but your stock might be worth nothing in four years ... and if you worked at Google your compensation would be around 160 and your stock would be worth around 750K.

So you really genuinely have to love what you do. And if you want a family you have to be prepared to move out of the Bay Area when you fail ... because you won't have enough money to buy a house the way your peers at Google and Facebook will.

So being at a startup you need to make peace with a lot of very probable outcomes ... moving away from California, possibly starting a family later, etc.

On the positive side, you can choose the area of technology you want to work on. And if you chose well, there's a chance you can parlay that for future returns.

I haven't even touched on the role of purpose and lifestyle ... mainly because I think its simplistic to assume a startup will give you purpose and a big company won't. I think purpose is something you'll have to shop for ... just like you shop for the right project.

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

#302

Post by omot »

Con: Aggressive copy+pasting of giant tech companies. I get the sense that start ups are now just market-fit validators who assume all the risk without the ability to reap all of the benefits.

Snapchat + Spotify comes to mind. Unless your company has to make heavy investments in operations infrastructure (think Airbnb/Uber) go in with the mindset that you will definitely be competing against FAA(N)G (not so much Netflix), as soon as your product gets some market-fit.

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

#303

Post by neutrino7 »

nunez wrote: post #290
neutrino7 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the Big5 have tons of locations Name one Big5 job in the entire U.S. south. Or at least one that pays as well as them. There aren’t any.

Facebook is in Austin; Amazon is in Dallas

Ok, so Texas is technically in the South... you got me.

I suppose I should have clarified: major southeastern cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, D.C., Nashville, Miami)

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

#304

Post by inimino »

s2g wrote: post #256
kolbe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"do something meaningful" I don't see what about the problems YC18 are tackling are any more meaningful than FANG. Can you enlighten us?

Yeah okay. You see, after the part your put in quotation marks I added on "at least to the company". This was meant to mean that the work you are doing is meaningful, but perhaps only to the company. Rather than working on a small part of a small part of a small part of the massive machine, you get to work on the entire thing because no one else is around to do it. I really don't understand why I got downvoted for th…

> Not sure what part of the HN hivemind I upset with that

Intentionally or not, you implied that people working at big companies (which is a lot of the people here) are not doing anything meaningful.

Second, there's an immune response to this idea because it is part of the startup mythology that leads to a lot of people making economically suboptimal decisions about where to work, which is basically the whole topic we are discussing here.

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

#305

Post by ocdtrekkie »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #177
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…

Competing with Wipro and other body shops? Good luck with that.

Presumably the difference between this and a "body shop" is that YC, having significant investment in the success of a business, would be less interested in "supplying bodies" than ensuring the business' success.

Whereas a outsourcing company would benefit by providing as many staff members as possible, if YC or the like were to do it, they'd likely want to zero out the "profit" on supplying employees: To keep it affordable for a startup, and to not break the incentive for YC: To push companies to success via whatever resources they can offer.

Particularly if YC's "cut" was solely in the form of share of the business, they'd have no benefit to over-pushing poor quality labor on their own companies: It'd just doom them.

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

#306

Post by jonmb »

dunpeal wrote: post #287
jonmb wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question since I'm not familiar with the area - who is making 400k at Microsoft or Facebook? Not the typical mid-level software engineer, I'd assume. Are these product leads or head engineers making the 400k?

These numbers are realistic for any senior engineer working there for over 3-4 years.

Are these engineers at Facebook/Google/etc. working the typical 40 hour work week or more like 60-80?

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

#307

Post by eloisant »

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…

Currently it's not hard for a software developer to find a job, especially those that YC startups would want to hire.

So I don't think stability is much of an issue in the current economy, developers are not afraid to lose their job because they know they'll have dozen of opportunities just by activating their network.

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

#308

Post by kwindla »

ryanobjc wrote: post #198
kwindla wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a startup founder and will happily say that if you are an engineer, in Silicon Valley, in 2018, and you are maximizing for income, then you should not work at an early-stage startup. I did some hand-wavy math, here: https://medium.com/@kwindla/what-kind-of-silicon-valley-comp... Dan Luu did some, too, here: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

I’m sorry but I don’t buy it. Startups employees are squeezed out by vc dilution and lack of big exits. Those $1m total equity cash out from startups I fear are fairly rare. Whereas working for faang type companies, a l5 is more or less guaranteed to make $300k a year. $500-750k is doable without being a “brand name”. Timing and luck, but the spread is much smaller. Startup founders have made a devils deal with vcs t…

Maybe a devil's deal, but not with the goal of under-paying employees.

I know very few founders who have the highest salary at their own company, which is as it should be. Founders of VC-backed companies are making an explicity equity-vs-salary trade-off.

And every founder I know would love to pay employees more.

The challenge is that taking VC money is a commitment to try to figure out how to grow relatively quickly. There are never enough resources to try all the things you wish you could, on the way to product-market fit.

It's perfectly reasonable to criticize this model, but it's not a model that is intended to negatively impact early stage employees. Hence the discussion in this thread, much of which is about how the economic context in the SF Bay Area employee market has changed, and how to adapt.

Look at this another way: employees at early stage boot-strapping tech startups generally make less money than employees of early stage VC-backed startups.

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

#309

Post by cableshaft »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #168
jaegerpicker wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the Big5 have tons of locations. Amazon in particular has tech centers in places like Phoenix and Detroit, while Google is in Chicago. Microsoft is even in Fargo! Unless you want to be a digital nomad I guess. Then it’s probably not ideal, but I do know some fully remote positions exist at the L6 level at Amazon.

Google has an office in Chicago, but from what I hear it's almost entirely sales jobs.

I live in Chicago and periodically have Google recruiters contacting me, and it's never been for a position in Chicago, it's only ever been for Mountain View.

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

#310

Post by sidlls »

hello_moto wrote: post #297
sidlls wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, leave those FAANG "outliers" out. Startup comp is still wildly below market.

There's a group (Dropbox, Airbnb, LinkedIN, Splunk, etc) between FAANG and Startups and this group pay really well too. I heard Oracle OCI also pays in the 300-400k range (even for Seattle).

Yep, and that's my point: startup compensation is below market even for average, not well known companies.
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