Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2019? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by badfrog » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 1:05 AM UTC

souprock wrote: post #79

badfrog wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For FB/Google: L3: ~$165k L4: ~$225k L5: ~$335k L6: ~$450k I think Amazon is a little less and Netflix is a little more.

Suppose you have a family. Moving the decimal point to account for the cost of housing, L6 is just ~$45k at FB/Google. That is not something to get excited about. Yes, it works out differently if you are happy to rent a garage with a roommate. In that case, the pay only needs to be adjusted by a factor of 2, making the L6 have ~$225k at FB/Google. Enjoy your shared garage.

What's your point? I don't think anybody was commenting on how far those numbers go.

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

#82

Post by casper345 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

I am the only software engineer at my company so here are my tl;dr;

1. Pro: I have ownership and gaining experience in multiple areas ranging from networking, QA, Testing, design architecture where at bigger companies I may only be in one of those foci.

2. Con: No Coding Reviews. I cannot bounce ideas of someone and trying my best to produce the best codes but I believe I need a Senior/Prinicpal above me to help me on this front.

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

#83

Post by jypepin » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #5

jypepin wrote: post #3

My view is only a data point, but what I've observed is that while comp at startups has not evolved much in the last 5 years (seeing roughly same salaries + stock packages), total comp at later stage startups or bigger companies has sky rocketed. The comments on the 2018 post you mention are all still true and relevant today. My experience has proven than as an employee, joining a post series B will usually be a bett…

It's sad and strange at the same time that the market isn't reacting. Early employees shouldn't accept the huge difference between preferred and normal stock options, they should exactly understand how much their stock will be diluted at the point when they can sell it. Anyways these kind of HN threads are awesome, I hope they can rationalize the market somewhat.

True but it's very hard to rationalise. I only know a lot of (great) engineers who either don't believe it when they are told the level of income in BigCo, or think that the comp is that high because people are much better at BigCo and they'd never be able to get a job there.

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

#84

Post by theshadowmonkey » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 6:01 AM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #6

theshadowmonkey wrote: post #4

I'd say in my experience, atleast in the Bay Area unless you are a co-founder, dont bother joining an early stage or that's not as late stage as Airbnb or Uber. The problem is the base salaries are good. But, startups try to be too stingy with your equity valuing themselves at a pretty high valuation. IMO putting in the hours for someone else and getting almost nothing in return is not worth the effort. Saying this h…

Why did you work there for 3 years? Was there any particular reason why you accepted bad terms?

Sorry for the late reply. - Was a little upset with my previous company over certain things and took the first offer that came my way. And I had to get some immigration stuff done and this company was willing to(Which is really good for me at that moment) and they did it really well. My base was decent. But, looking at equity and the company valuations, I realized I was paid peanuts. When moving out, another company offered to pay me a 10% lower salary and give me 30k options which would amount to 280k per year when they would be worth 500mn. They are currently post-seed, pre series A. Thats a laughable compensation. You can look at how some founders think they can give nothing and still get experienced engineers.