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

* Technical skills sink or swim very quickly - you'll learn vastly more in the same period of time at a startup than you will at a big company. Or you'll fail.

* You learn to accept that failure isn't as bad as high school / college would have you believe - as long as you learn from it.

* Invaluable leadership experience very early on.

* A lot more responsibility early on - if you like to take charge and see things through it's a wonderful experience.

* Startups are usually founded by intelligent, successful, driven people - based on head count you usually work closely with them and have the opportunity to soak in that knowledge and experience.

* Connections. When you're young / early in your career a startup puts you in situations to meet people you wouldn't normally be in the same room with at a large company.

Cons:

* Equity is a joke. Liquidation preferences are always against the employee no matter how early. I'm at my second startup and anytime I hear a coworker talk about taking a pay cut because they got equity I cringe.

* The pay CAN suck, it doesn't have to. It took two tries but at my second startup (current job) I'm paid fairly. Maybe slightly less than I would be making in the same role at a large company but coming here included a promotion I was 6-12 months away from at the previous large company.

Neutral:

* Transparency. Some startups keep everyone in the dark about cash on hand, burn rates, fundrasiing, etc. Do not work for one of those startups.

I don't see why this makes any part of it idealistic or how it is connected.

I view it as pragmatic.

Consider an employer who feels so entitled to workers that just take whatever unproductive office space they give that they would just say, "no thanks" to a qualified candidate and move on. Never mind the fact that in many domains, it's extremely hard to find good engineers, and 'just moving on to the next candidate' is not really a thing. Beyond that, this employer would be telling me how entitled they believe they are, and inflexible about a top-down mandated open floor plan design.

It's not idealism to want to avoid that sort of employer, it's just pragmatism. Like I mentioned, unless you're in dire straits and you have to compromise to take a job right away, then just say no. In other situations, you can by definition afford to just search longer and longer until an employer meets these standards.

I agree it would require patience for a very long job search, but I don't agree that it is optimistic or idealistic. Rather, it's pragmatic and being patient to reject all the bad employers who won't care about your ergonomic health is important and worthwhile, even at the cost of a slow job search where you turn people down for failing to provide private offices.

You can give them a signing bonus to cover the tax, but at this point it's easier and actually better for the employee to give them the cash separately and say "you can use it to exercise if you like".

Really the difference between options and Restricted Stock is measurable in dollars, so might as well just give people the dollars.

(Note that Restricted Stock is not quite the same thing as Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)... RSUs are for later stage companies. But the principles are similar.)

Stratups cant compete on compensation to big-co but can compete on equity compensation and its just not competitive.