321–330 of 968 posts
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I think you guys are agreeing with each other, right? L5-L6 isn't "average", is it? Most FAANGMUA employees are not managers/senior engineers.
I think 20-30% of Googlers are L5. If you're able to be hired at Google, you're able to make L5 within 2-4 years.
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…
In fact, to call it unlimited and not have a minimum is probably always a scam - its so easy to post a minimum, to not do so must be deliberate.
I echo the comp aspect. I pretty much had a best case non-unicorn startup exit; wonderful benefits pre-acquisition, actual unlimited PTO, and normal ~40hr/workweek, acquired almost immediately after receiving my shares, golden handcuffs after. My total comp was more or less equivalent to my peers doing the big 4 grind over the same time period. They had zero risk and I had to win the start up lotto. But if I had to d…
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> Why do founders get over 10x early employees? Because founders take at least 100x the risk of an early employee, and 100x the personal risk and commitment. Founders generally aren't getting paid (at least until revenue or significant funding comes through) and they have 100x the impact that an early employee does on the success of the company. If an early employee doesn't work out, the founders just replace that pe…
"Because founders take at least 100x the risk of an early employee, and 100x the personal risk and commitment." The risk part of this isn't remotely true in many cases,or rather it's offset by so many other benefits accruing to them. Founders generally are drawing at least a small salary and, in this context (YC/VC funded) they are not necessarily risking much if any of their own capital. Moreover they are benefittin…
It usually takes 2-3 years before a typical founder can get seed funding and even think about hiring employees. During that time period, they are funding the company themselves, and doing all the work themselves. Yes, they usually draw a small salary once the company is VC-funded. By that point, ~95% of founders have been flushed out of the market and failed.
There are a small minority of people who can raise VC on just an idea because they're white, wealthy, and went to Stanford or because they're roommates with a VC's daughter or because they're an unusually slick salesman who can swindle lots of people. I would highly recommend not working for these people - or really, any founding team who did not build and sell the initial version of the product themself - because they generally do not know what they're doing, and these startups become a miserable experience for the employees. But they are, I'll reiterate, a very small minority of founders. They are a somewhat larger minority of the founders who can hire employees, because getting VC investment automatically puts you in the pool of startups that is looking to hire. That's an information distortion between the viewpoint of employees (who only see the startups who have gotten at least to the first funding round) and founders (who see all startups, including the ones that struggle for years to get their first revenue).
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…
I think this policy really depends on the culture where you work.
I think many startups have their expectations set too high for the work requirements & compensation they're offering.
Many startups want Senior Engineers with several years of experience, and they want people who live in SF.
This makes it difficult for new-grads and those who don't live in the Bay Area to get into the startup scene. Many people want to work remotely or live in other startup hubs (eg. Seattle) where the cost-of-living is less expensive.
New-grads, you could argue, are the most willing, flexible, and risk-taking to work at startups since the lure is more about experience than $ compensation. However, most startups ignore new-grads because they don't have the processes/ability to mentor them (even if the candidate could already be qualified for the position).
There is room here for:
1. A company which offers services for helping startups foster remote teams
2. A company which offers services for helping startups mentor new-grads
3. A YC apprenticeship program that takes new-grads and places them in a YC startup w/ a mentor (who may or may not be at that company) for a few months to see if there's a match and hopefully transitions that person into a full-time role there
4. YC satellites in other cities or encouragement for some YC companies to relocate out of the Bay Area
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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…
> Why do founders get over 10x early employees? Because founders take at least 100x the risk of an early employee, and 100x the personal risk and commitment. Founders generally aren't getting paid (at least until revenue or significant funding comes through) and they have 100x the impact that an early employee does on the success of the company. If an early employee doesn't work out, the founders just replace that pe…
Absolute rubbish. Considering the opportunity cost, lost benefits and so on compared to a BigCo an early stage employee is easily going to be 6-figures in, and probably working 80+ hours a week. All so the founders can toss them a few scraps from the feast.
Meaningful equity participation or big-company pay and benefits. Anything else is pure exploitation and the founders and VCs know it.
I was employee 18 at a startup recently acquired by Google. Maybe not super early, but I was able to make big contributions that had a large impact on our eventual acquisition. It was a fun ride but I won't be doing it again for one main reason: startup equity distribution makes zero sense for early employees. Founders get 20+ times the equity. Yes they take more risk and work harder, but they're not taking 20 times…
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I agree about offering early employees as much equity upside as you can (and, just as importantly, a great work environment and team culture). But I disagree that the kind of people I described are rare, or that they are "basically retired." That's just not my experience. Many of the most valuable, hard-working engineers I know at startups have a few years of big company experience in their recent past, and are choos…
> Many of the most valuable, hard-working engineers I know at startups have a few years of big company experience in their recent past, and are choosing to do the startup thing all in. I completely agree with this, except for the "all in" part. If you re-read my GP reply, that's what I was disagreeing with. Not that they're not valuable - on the contrary. An engineer who did well at Google for 5-6 years is going to b…
Many, many people are committed to jobs for reasons other than money, across all walks of life. This is often true for engineers, too.
Few experienced engineers in SF (who are also US citizens or have green cards) are locked into any job. If you're making $750k/year at Google, the Apple or LinkedIn or Salesforce or Facebook will pay you $750k/year and make up the value of the RSUs that you're leaving on the table. The exception to this is if you're at a growth-stage company and have a lot of vested stock with a current valuation much higher than the strike price but no liquidity. Leaving that situation means paying a big purchase+tax bill now, without any guarantee of when you will have an asset you can sell. That's a tough decision.
It's a good thing to have employees who aren't locked into the job by a sense of financial need. I'm not saying that it's not also great to have young or otherwise early-career employees who, just situationally, aren't as financially lucky. But lots of terrible dynamics come from power imbalances between companies and employees. You only need to spend a little bit of time at a company that employs a lot of people with restrictive work visas to see this play out in soul-crushing ways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do founders get over 10x early employees? Because founders take at least 100x the risk of an early employee, and 100x the personal risk and commitment. Founders generally aren't getting paid (at least until revenue or significant funding comes through) and they have 100x the impact that an early employee does on the success of the company. If an early employee doesn't work out, the founders just replace that pe…
> Because founders take at least 100x the risk of an early employee, and 100x the personal risk and commitment. Simply untrue. Many early startup employees work intense 12-14 hour days. Are you saying founders work 1,200-1,400 hour days? Early startup employees also risk about the same as founders. Maybe a little less, financially. > Founders generally aren't getting paid (at least until revenue or significant fundin…
It's a job. Early employees working 12-14 hour days are not doing themselves or the startup any favors.
If the market were rational, compensation would be more in cash and less in kool-aid, the importance of work-life balance would be understood even at the early stages, and the idea that a startup has some special kind of magic--where people sleep under their desks and believe in the dream--would be replaced by professionalism and the sober assessment of probable outcomes.
The reasons that startups have yet to learn lessons that other industries learned decades and centuries ago are easy to see in the startup culture if you look for them.