Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2019?

Financially speaking, the odds are incredibly against you as far as equity goes. One advantage. of working in startup is what Paul Buchheit calls working above your correct level, a kind of Peter principle in reverse (https://triplebyte.com/blog/interview-with-gmail-creator-and...). E.g. if you are one of the few seniors in a team, you can fairly quickly become head of eng, that kind of things, and that definitely helps your career in general.

If you want to stay an individual contributor, and can get into one of the famous companies, then I would say there is not much advantage working for a startup today.

You need your default case :)

Maybe I'm just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but I feel like the golden years of startups are behind us. But I'll do my best anyway.

Pros:

1) Startups are still more willing to hire people with "nontraditional" backgrounds into technical roles. English major who bootcamp'd or self-taught yourself coding? Never attended college? Most startups aren't going to turn their nose up at you.

2) Assuming the company has product-market fit (or is nearing it): A great way to gain a holistic understanding of how software is made, delivered, consumed, and ultimately changed based on market response. This is both a technical and business learning experience.

3) You won't be pigeon-holed, as everyone has to wear more than one hat in startup land.

4) Doesn't apply to everyone, but if there's a particular niche you're into, it's much easier to get hired by one of those niche's startup's than to join a bigger tech firm and then hope you get assigned to one of those groups (which are probably highly competitive and extremely sought after... so good luck with that.)

Cons:

1) They fail, sometimes spectacularly

2) They often operate at such a small scale that you'll never encounter entire classes of interesting technical challenges

3) If it's early stage: You will ship crap code. Constantly. Can be frustrating if you're a perfectionist or even just looking to push your craft forward

4) Equity offers are stingy, but even if they weren't, it can take 7-10 years for a big exit. Will you stick around long enough?

5) Because these companies are small, any toxic people in the org will feel omnipresent

6) There are now some fairly active "problematic" investors (Saudi Arabia). You may not like the idea of taking so-called "Blood Money"

It’s not that start-ups don’t pay as well as Google, it’s that they don’t pay as well as mid-range companies, like insurance companies, payroll tech companies, auto manufacturers, newspapers, etc.

Start-ups are just other businesses. The relevant pool of peer companies to consider for salary benchmarking is all other companies your desired candidate might work for. Nobody cares about the funding situation, age, cool new tech, meaningless options, or meaningless job titles. You just have to pay competitive market salaries and benefits, period.

I'm the head of engineering for a startup, was 3rd engineer at Eventbrite, built my own startup valued >$1M, turned down 2 offers at Google. Been doing startups 10+ years.

I do startups because I have a problem communicating my ideas in a way to influence larger organizations to do the things that interest me. Simple as that.

If I have a theory to move the needle, in a startup, I can do it, analyze it, and launch it with very little buy-in, although my impact to an industry may be less. In a BigCo, my impact on the industry may be more but the battle isn't about product-market fit, it's about corporate alignment and buy-in before I can even test product-market fit, which I just don't enjoy.