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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?

#871

Post by blasdel »

lgregg wrote: post #621
blasdel wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely focus on the problems you've solved, and also the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them. They know that you'll have to learn their proprietary technology stacks, which are always both ahead and behind the public stacks they inspired. At some companies they won't ask anything about your resume keywords after the phone screens. Most Big 5 companies use what's called "Behavioral I…

I'm good at "S.T.A.R.", most of my effort in the past is using CAR and PAR but it's not a hard shift. I'm glad to hear they don't limit it to just technology problems. >"the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them". I have done it before in interviews when asked about weaknesses or failures; I've never done it on a resume though. How would you go about representing that on a resume?

You don't put the failures on the resume as failures :)

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

#872

Post by megamindbrian2 »

jklein11 wrote: post #828
amyjess wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one time I worked at a startup, the lack of healthcare made me borderline suicidal. I was beginning my gender transition when I worked there, and my doctor bills were bankrupting me. Never again. Never ever ever ever again. I'm not touching a company with fewer than 500 employees again.

This may come across as ignorant and I apologize in advance but are health care costs associated to gender transitions typically covered by health insurance?

Healthcare is only required for companies with >10 employees.

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

#873

Post by megamindbrian2 »

snowmaker wrote: post #209
megamindbrian2 wrote: post #99

No healthcare at a startup.

That sounds really bad - offering health insurance for employees is a must. At least in the US - I'm not sure about other countries.

Not sure why this is down-voted. Healthcare is only required for companies with >10 employees.

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

#874

Post by rgossiaux »

s2g wrote: post #867
rgossiaux wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand. On the one hand you're saying that early employees should "demand market comp" and on the other you're saying that equity basically doesn't matter (and if you feel this way, it doesn't really make any sense to be joining a startup anyway). Are you conflating "compensation" with "salary"? "Market comp" for a good engineer with several years of experience in the Bay Area is something like 250k…

> in expectation earn at least the same as they would at a public company No, it should be multiples. Otherwise why is the employee taking on that risk?

I don't see why this follows. I said "in expectation". So some % of the time it's going to be 0 or thereabouts and some % of the time will be much higher. The best case scenario needs to be multiples in order to make the average work out, but I don't see any reason the average case needs to be.

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

#875

Post by rgossiaux »

munchbunny wrote: post #779
rgossiaux wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I mostly agree. There's one nuance that I've been thinking about lately that I haven't seen anyone ever point out before, which is that high volatility will make options worth more than they are on paper. Here's a thought experiment: imagine that there are two employers on the market. One will always pay 200k/yr guaranteed and you can choose to work for them at any time for this wage. The other pays 100k/yr plus…

I think that's a good point, but it's just unlikely to actually happen with startup options because of the typical 90-day exercise clause and limited information. The 90-day exercise clause and options instead of shares effectively forces you to buy the coconut, meaning that instead of a 50/50 chance of 0/200, if you plan on leaving before the event that resolves 0/200, then if your strike price on a coconut is $50,…

Both of these are good points. 90 day exercise windows are both unnecessary and terrible for employees and we should move to eliminate them as quickly as possible. I think the trend is slowly in that direction, but it really should just be a deal breaker for engineers.

The limited information is also a good point. Some level of saviness and understanding of your company and market can help with some parts of this but certainly not all.

If anything this may be a good argument for working at late stage private or smaller more volatile public companies. Then if you get lucky and get, say, Square from two years ago, whose stock has gone up 7x, you capture this upside (and if they do poorly, roll the dice again after a year, perhaps). This is quite mercenary and might not be the route that makes one happiest, though.

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

#876

Post by icedchai »

acconrad wrote: post #820
alfredallan1 wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you came in super early, wouldn’t you have (negotiated at the start) more equity anyways? A super early employee with decent equity ought to be treated as a late stage founder - so if the founders don’t take 50% raises, neither should the super early employee with decent equity. It would of course be silly for someone super early to not negotiate significantly more equity than the usual couple of basis poi…

> If the founders don’t take 50% raises, neither should the super early employee with decent equity. You're missing the point of my original post. If a founder owns x100 the equity, why should an early employee be bound to the same salary restrictions? If anything, since I have 1/100th the equity, that means I should be able to get a multiple of some raise when series A comes through. Remember, equity is a lottery ti…

If founder has x100 the equity of employee #1, employee #1 screwed up.

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

#877

Post by icedchai »

s2g wrote: post #866
alfredallan1 wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you came in super early, wouldn’t you have (negotiated at the start) more equity anyways? A super early employee with decent equity ought to be treated as a late stage founder - so if the founders don’t take 50% raises, neither should the super early employee with decent equity. It would of course be silly for someone super early to not negotiate significantly more equity than the usual couple of basis poi…

They aren't treated as founders of any sort. They get paltry equity and then don't get raises.

They do get raises. They just have to be persistent. Most engineers don't speak up and are bad negotiators.

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

#878

Post by nwsm »

dzimine wrote: post #829

If the comp, stocks, big $ is your primary motivation, look somewhere else. We go to the startup for a thrill. For doing something you strongly believe. For creating something that didn't exist before. If you think you can do it in a big org, too, you are right, now go and try, get a job at Cisco or AT&T. Innovating there is like driving Kia Rio vs Porsche: it's a car, too. It goes thought the motion. But the thrill…

Second paragraph is great. I haven't worked at a startup, but my experience in a big company is that you can definitely innovate, change things, and make things better.

But I wouldn't call it thrilling, I'd be interested to see how many startup employees found it thrilling.

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

#879

Post by amyjess »

jklein11 wrote: post #828
amyjess wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one time I worked at a startup, the lack of healthcare made me borderline suicidal. I was beginning my gender transition when I worked there, and my doctor bills were bankrupting me. Never again. Never ever ever ever again. I'm not touching a company with fewer than 500 employees again.

This may come across as ignorant and I apologize in advance but are health care costs associated to gender transitions typically covered by health insurance?

Depends on the kind of treatments. What was killing me then was the cost of doctor's appointments to get on hormones, which are generally covered (whereas it's a pain in the ass to get surgeries covered even with good insurance). Doctors are expensive if you don't have insurance.

When I first started out, in order to avoid the doctor costs, I ended up reading the clinical guidelines myself, finding a place for me to order my own blood tests, and looking up a reputable overseas online pharmacy I could order the medications from. The blood tests cost me $60 a pop, and the hormones cost around $80/month from the online pharmacy I used. Now, I'm also going to mention that I was also spectacularly underpaid at the startup I was working at then. That $140/month hurt. Badly. And I was constantly worried customs would confiscate the meds. Now, estradiol and spironolactone aren't controlled substances, so I couldn't be arrested for ordering them online, but theoretically customs could confiscate them anyway because they're Rx-only medications and then I'd be out $80 for nothing (yes, there is legally a level between OTC and controlled, where it's illegal to sell but not illegal to buy). In practice, they only do this one week a year (look up Operation Pangea) because they don't have the resources to do it but there was still a chance.

After a few months, I grew uncomfortable doing this without a doctor's supervision, so I eventually decided to suck up the costs and find an endocrinologist. The doctor's bill was in the neighborhood of $200 per visit, and because I was still early in my transition, I was seeing my doctor monthly at first. Oh, and I was still paying $60 to Private MD Labs for each blood test, because it turned out to be far cheaper to get my blood tests through them than through the provider my doctor worked with. The one consolation is that the medications themselves were cheaper; estradiol and spironolactone are both on the $4 generics list at Walmart, so my actual cost of meds went down from $80/month around $30/month (my doses were such that I was taking multiple pills per day). But those endo visits ruined my finances...

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

#880

Post by hobofan »

s2g wrote: post #864
hobofan wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me and my previous co-founder founded a startup with both of us having no experience. It was a very bad decision for the company, but extremely valuable for our personal growth. It also allowed us to skip the biggest parts of the usual career ladder. It's certainly not the best route for everyone, but definitely one worth considering.

Con of startups, these are the people you might end up working for. What's good for your personal growth was other people trying to make a living at a company being run by people who don't know what they are doing. Maybe it's fine, but that level of uncertainty is definitely a con.

I very much agree with you (as someone who has since worked for such people too).

Luckily we mostly had temporary interns as employees, and I can confidently say that they had a good experience, as we are still in touch.

The biggest problems of the inexperience were that we had to ramp up our skills on the job (for me programming), including the mistakes you make there, which killed a lot of the runway, and the lack of business knowledge which ultimately lead to us running out of money.

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