Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 968 posts

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

#351

Post by merpnderp »

rb808 wrote: post #40
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…

> they're constantly doing unimportant things, going to conferences just for the sake of it, getting into work late and leaving early. etc. uuuh, do you have any links I can follow to apply for a job like that?

Keep looking, most jobs at BigCorp are designed to make sure everyone is easily replaceable, which means positions can't have too much responsibility, else the person couldn't be easily replaced. It's like the very definition of ITIL.

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

#353

Post by shamino »

inimino wrote: post #345
shamino wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, when your company gets sold, and your founder worked on the company for 1-2 years before you did, but they walk away with millions and you walk away with the equivalent of a Camry - I question whether equity is not the solution. In terms of market rate salary, the startup will never match FAANG. Seriously. I'm talking about Sign-on bonus, annual bonus, re-ups, benefits (like a heart-transplant…

> "In terms of market rate salary, the startup will never match FAANG." > "if enough people were educated on how much a bad deal being an early employee was, we could tip the scale a bit." Yes. The reason why startup compensation is much lower are because of perception (people aren't rational) and only a shift in perception will shift the balance. The reason why equity is not the solution is that the default outcome…

Thanks for the interesting discussion. The only reason why I'm still advocating more equity for early employees is because founders get so much of it. So if an exit were to happen, which could make the founders very rich, the early employee gets nothing. In your case of the default outcome, both get nothing, and that is OK. But if something were to happen, the early employee still gets nothing.

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

#354

Post by GordonS »

dunpeal wrote: post #170
dmode wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people who think of 400K (or even 200K in some previous discussions) as "outlier pay" are probably just not familiar with big tech pay and how much revenue they earn per engineer.

> how much revenue they earn per engineer

That does not necessarily correlate with salary. At least it doesn't outside of SV.

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

#355

Post by wtvanhest »

snowmaker wrote: post #192
wtvanhest wrote: post #149

Hi Jared, I'd advise you and your team to take a hard look at GIPS (global investment performance standards) and create a similar model for startup equity packages. Call it whatever, but the standards would have employee friendly terms so that people joining early stage companies would actually get something if the company liquidates. Little stuff like recruiters need to not say stuff like "we are already valued at X…

Thanks for the pointer to global investment performance standards - that's a good analogue. We already agree about 10 year exercise windows ( https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity ) but we need to do more to make it a standard.

The brilliance of the GIPS is that firms cannot be partially compliant and it is 100% optional.

The reason a 10 year excersize window is meaningless on its own is that you cannnot control or know how your share class will be treated after you leave.

You need a set of standards which clearly allows employees to capture value. Otherwise it is all marketing. Smart people will see through that. As they already are.

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

#356

Post by musawirali »

I advise fresh grads or new entrants in the tech job market to avoid startups as their first gig. Instead, starting at a mature company with a strong team team is much more suitable. Learn from the industry experts in your field in a real world setting, develop your chops, and establish yourself as a professional. After that go do whatever feels exciting, which startups certainly are.

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

#357

Post by trjordan »

Comp is a big one, discussed elsewhere.

The other professional problem that well-run startups have is that it's easy for early employees to feel like they're held to a different set of standards than the founders for professional growth. Essentially, founders are given chances to succeed in roles they never could otherwise, and early employees miss all the coaching and context that might help them succeed in similar roles.

Let's imagine I was a 26-year-old developer interested in startups. I have two paths:

- I found a company. I have the chops to hack something together with my cofounder, and maybe we make something of it raise a seed. We hire another couple engineers, and with a couple big logos in a good market, we raise an A. At this point, I've learned a ton about what makes a business work from other founders and I see (far too clearly) the gaps in my own knowledge. I hire some marketers / salespeople to work for me, and we keep making things work. At some point, maybe I choose to hire a professional CEO, and I stay on as CTO. I still have a lot of leverage in the company. I still go to board meetings.

- I join a company as the first employee, after they've raised a seed. I have good conversations with the other 26-year old founders over beer after work. I jump on the occasional phone call with customers and crank out features that they like based on that insight. We raise our A, though I'm still a software engineer since we only have 10 employees that all report to one of the founders. I quit seeing customers, because we hired a sales rep. We decide to hire management, and I'm considered for a line manager job, but we ended up hiring somebody externally. (She was awesome, glad we hired her, but I'm bummed I'm not reporting to the CEO anymore.) By the time we're 40 people, I don't talk to the founders much anymore, and I don't really understand what our bigger customers want. I don't have the influence I once did, and the codebase is too big for me to brute force that leverage through productivity. I start to look for another job.

There's nothing wrong with either story, but in the founder case, I was given a ton of chances and support. As an employee, I was given, at best, the support of a single manager while the company grew around me. This is fair, in some sense, but compared to the opportunities offered to the founders, it's far behind.

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

#358

Post by vonmoltke »

dmode wrote: post #114
ryandrake wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

"Thousands and thousands" is an exaggeration, particularly considering the portion that is churn between them. There are over 3.87 million software developers in the US[1]. I would be shocked if even 10% of them are employed by the companies you mention Nationwide, let alone just in SV and Seattle. Of that, a minority pull down the massive TC you cite. I think that certainly qualifies as an outlier.

Furthermore, the headcounts of the really big companies, particularly Amazon and Microsoft, are inflated by non-engineers. Citing them doesn't really say much.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demogra...

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

#359

Post by billdybas »

spenczar5 wrote: post #342
billdybas wrote: post #326

I just went through the startup job hunting process as a new-grad. 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 t…

I agree with all you've said here, first of all. > Many startups want Senior Engineers with several years of experience This is often advertised. It's sometimes listed as a requirement. Those requirements are more flexible than new grads ever realize. I think, coming from school, it's easy to take those lists of requirements literally. It's quite common, though, to hire people who don't match the requirements exactly…

I agree.

FWIW, my university had a required co-op program, so I already had some internship experience under my belt, and even so, I was getting rejected from entry-level "Software Engineer" startup positions simply on the basis that the companies wanted a minimum # of years of experience.

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

#360

Post by biztos »

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 really like this idea, and I think something similar is done with high-level managers in the private equity world. You build your career across the portfolio of companies, and your interests are aligned to the portfolio itself, not the specific company.

That obviously creates a risk of perverse incentives, but from the PE folks' perspective it seems to work.

IIRC that's also how Berkshire Hathaway does it: builds managers for Berkshire Hathaway companies, and whether they're managing at GEICO[0] or Fruit of the Loom[1] depends on where they're needed and not whom they work for.

I don't know anything about how technical employees benefit (or not) from that setup but I suspect there is some amount of informal sharing of tech talent across portfolios.

It'd be really great to see something like that for tech people. Maybe YC can start and everyone else will follow. :-)

[0]: https://www.geico.com/about/corporate/at-a-glance/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_Loom

Post reply on HN