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

381–390 of 968 posts

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

#381

Post by ironjunkie »

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.

The other thing that people seem to forget is that a lot of people calculate their FAANG Total Comp with the value of the stock today, not on the day they were given to them. This simply because you could have yourself bought those stocks at the same price back in the days. You cannot include the increase as part of your total comp

This in some case makes a huge difference, especially now, where all the tech stocks have gone to the moon.

I believe that a lot of 400k$ packages would actually be no more than 250k$ if calculated correctly

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

#382

Post by roguecoder »

swyx wrote: post #212
joshe wrote: post #138

This is such a great area to work on. The equity side is pretty rough. Founders are very sensitive about disclosing important information about company performance. They are sensitive about disclosing the cap table. Some will share info with investors that they don't share with employees. And they are sometimes trying to pitch optimistically and leaving out items that don't fit the narrative. So you end up with a ver…

> $800 million dollar startups die all the time is this the case? i actually don't know that it is.

No matter how far along the funnel you go a significant portion just fail to raise further funds: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/venture-capital-funnel-2...

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

#383

Post by throwawaymath »

kenhwang wrote: post #105
sidlls wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some of my most mediocre acquaintances have jobs at FAANG/Big N. You don't have to be exceptional to land a high comp job there, you just have to be exceptionally tolerant to BS and mindnumbingly boring work and be willing to grind interview prep. If anything, landing a job at an unicorn is much harder cause they care about things like culture fit, enthusiasm, esoteric FotM frameworks, and entrepreneurial spirit.

Trading one anecdote for another: I've met plenty of mediocre engineers at unicorns. Every company has its own flavor of BS and "mindnumbingly boring work."

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

#384

Post by makeramen »

While I absolutely agree with the comp aspect and think that's probably the biggest point, I want to add that management skill is also a huge factor. I've seen a lot of startups (YC and otherwise) fail to grow the team well because the founders are good hackers but not good managers. In a large company your manager has a manager who will help guide and review them, and you can switch teams without risking your current compensation and benefits or your vesting table.

At a startup there simply isn't room to move around without taking on more significant risks and at least waiting for your first equity cliff, and honestly many startup founders I've met don't have great managements skills, or the drive to learn them. There's also simply a matter of personalities, sometimes people just don't get along with their managers and/or teammates, but the fact that you have to switch companies and re-interview again vs being able to apply to your skip-level to switch teams is a significant difference.

Some ideas of concrete options to fix these:

* Shorter cliffs, even Google has a 2 month rsu cliff now, and I think Facebook is similar

* Maybe a hiring pool, again, similar to Facebook or Google where you pick your team after you "pass" your interviews, allow you to really work with different startups and feel out what it's like. I could see YC setting up a similar program where companies can choose to share an interview pipeline and let candidates talk to different startups after passing an agreed-upon bar for the pool. This is similar to https://www.workatastartup.com/, but to not have to formally do a technical interview for every single startup would be a huge help.

* Some way to try out/transfer between startups who allow it would be awesome. Similar to Facebook's bootcamp, if there was a way to still get paid, maybe a simplified consulting agreement that YC can help broker among a few startups for a month or so while a candidate explores what it's really like to work with each startup would be really helpful.

* Management training for founders, and a standardized way to review founder's management skills. If founder's were held accountable for their management skills and rated across one of these shared pools where their ratings were available to prospective employees, they would be much more incentive to improve their skills.

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

#385

Post by seem_2211 »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #84
davidw wrote: post #29

Here's what I consider the 'sweet spot': A small company, say 20-50 people or thereabouts, that has a profitable niche and does not require much in the way of investments. Here's why: * Small is more fun for me - I like knowing everyone I work with, and the chance to see what other people are working on, and maybe move around some in what I'm doing, rather than 'the same thing day in and day out at BigCo'. Your work…

> You need to avoid things like winner take all markets. i love this idea. yet, it seems like the whole point of startups nowadays is to become the winner in the winner-take-all market. and VCs seem to be looking for that kind of play mainly. and markets become winner-take-all with alarming frequency. so, it's like, how do we get to the kind of market with room for multiple long-term, profitable players?

That's basically the thesis of Zero To One, and yet it's responsible for burning how much Venture Capital?

One of the interesting things is how companies like CB Insights seem to have built quite successful mid-sized startups with very little funding (CB Insights are at $11.7m in funding), or Atlassian who didn't raise until they were pretty close to IPO. Compared to Uber at the opposite end - how much capital has been squandered on making very marginal gains in the name of growing market share?

It'd be an interesting research project to compare outcomes against funding raised, over say a 10-15 year period.

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

#386

Post by anyfoo »

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…

> Most of my friends that work at larger public tech companies — it just feels like they're constantly doing unimportant things

Obviously that is not universally true: All the things that do see the light of day, some small, some big, are done by actual employees of a big corporation. Maybe you will not be working on them all the time, but chances are good that you will at least get the opportunity to have a public, meaningful impact.

Just as an anecdote, when I interned at Google long ago, I got to work on a public feature in Google Maps. It was a great feeling to directly work on something that anyone could potentially use, and see even just a few public reactions.

That experience probably set my path on favoring working at big corporations, because I knew I could do meaningful things there if I position myself correctly, whereas startups seemed much more like a big gamble (which by itself is probably an exaggeration also).

Just yesterday I spoke to someone at another big corporation who proudly proclaimed that people clapped at the mentioning of their own feature, when it was unveiled as part of a bigger announcement. YMMV.

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

#387

Post by dmode »

ironjunkie wrote: post #381
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.

The other thing that people seem to forget is that a lot of people calculate their FAANG Total Comp with the value of the stock today, not on the day they were given to them. This simply because you could have yourself bought those stocks at the same price back in the days. You cannot include the increase as part of your total comp This in some case makes a huge difference, especially now, where all the tech stocks h…

FAANGS give you RSUs, which are cash equivalent. When I am referring to 400K, I am referring to "total cash in hand" at the end of the year. Generally the comp you get quoted when you get hired is $200K base + $200K in RSUs based on hire date's stock price. So in today's frothy stock market, you would at least earn $400K and possibly more.

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

#388

Post by k5jhn »

snowmaker wrote: post #85
k5jhn wrote: post #68

Currently a dev at a pre-Series A startup. Pros: - both the freedom AND responsibility to build things that'll directly translate into increased growth/profits, or the opposite in the case of failure - close-knit dev team, and in general everyone is chill, i.e company culture is great so far Cons: - my salary compensation is pretty average so I am hoping for an eventual big pay-out, but it's hard to gauge what the pa…

Here are a couple of articles that might help with regards to calculating your equity payout: https://codingvc.com/valuing-employee-options https://medium.com/@jamesseely/eshares-option-value-calculat... I'd also really encourage you to talk to the founders of the company about this and ask them to walk you through their model for how much you should value your equity. Our advice to founders is to walk every employee…

Really appreciate the links and feedback, thank you.

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

#389

Post by BadassFractal »

faang_emp_1 wrote: post #374
jonmb wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Obviously a throwaway account, but I work at Facebook, on an infrastructure team. I average ~45 hours/week, except for the week I'm oncall, which is about every three months. I probably work 60 hours that week. I get in early (7:30am) and leave early (3 or 3:30), and sometimes I'll review diffs at night, but normally my laptop stays in my trunk when I'm at home. I work hard when I'm at work, and really focus. I don't…

Would you mind sharing how long you've been working there and your level of seniority? Would be super interesting to know for at least my reference.

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

#390

Post by manigandham »

aphextron wrote: post #6
nieksand wrote: post #2

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…

Those issues are because of leadership and culture. Unlimited PTO is perfectly fine. It's much more flexible for both sides, and limiting time off is definitely not the goal.

Plenty of companies do a great job with it and have no questions asked up to a certain amount or minimum time off to encourage usage.

Post reply on HN