111–120 of 269 posts
I think this mostly goes to illustrate how important it is to understand the ownership structure of the company (common vs. preferred stock) and understanding what your grant actually means. Most people just accept whatever they're given without really understanding it. It can be a costly mistake.
As someone who was a 1st engineer of a startup that successfully exited I had what would be considered a good payout. When looking over the course of my career, however, it simply made up for the reduced salary I took for the years I worked there. It was a net-neutral outcome to be the 1st engineer at a startup that actually exited for a substantial (8-figure deal) outcome which already puts me in the minority. So no…
> I had what would be considered a good payout. When looking over the course of my career, however, it simply made up for the reduced salary I took for the years I worked there. This is such an important point for people to know when they're joining startups. You're basically investing in the startup. If you're going to be an investor it's good to know what your alternative investments are. If you put $50k in the sto…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is still a financial aspect though: that rapid increase in responsibility and experience most probably translated to higher income at your next jobs. And there is a compounding effect each time you change jobs, so the earlier you were in your career when you worked at a startup, the more you gain from it financially over the course of your career. I think we have selection bias on Hacker News because many of th…
Assuming he is from India, there might not be a translation to a high income job. Salaries in India frequently follow a %age increase in the last role, regardless of the position they are hiring for. There are some exceptions, like the global cos which would pay according to job, and some startups which would have salary bands, but mostly, its about how much can we increase from the last role.
That's kind of a weird assumption to make.
One thing that gets glossed over a lot with startups is that often times the technical skill level is really low. If you are a young engineer and you are hoping to learn technical skills, be very very careful about which startup you join because you might end up at one where nobody actually has any idea what they are doing. And if you yourself are in the learning phase of your career, you might not have the experienc…
Also bit of unsolicited advice, never think you are out of the learning phase of your career. There are few things more frustrating than an engineer who has been working for 5 years, think they no longer have to learn, and refuse the entire team's attempts to move them from a bad idea.
I'm not sure I understand what the real dilemma is here of working for a startup. Being employee #15 is not the same as being in the first 5 hired. You don't take the same risks (or even do the same type of work), so there is obviously less reward when it's time to exit. If you want to get rich, the best way to do it is to start a company yourself - but it sounds like the author didn't want to go that route after try…
Most people, when they hear "work at a startup", they're talking about being employee #10-30. Not 1-3. There are, clearly, 1/10th as many of the latter, and they're almost all looking for much more skilled people than employees #10-30. I figure this advice is for people who are newer in their careers. People with 10+ years experience probably already know what the article says, and they're likely the only ones who might get hired as employee #1-3.
One thing that gets glossed over a lot with startups is that often times the technical skill level is really low. If you are a young engineer and you are hoping to learn technical skills, be very very careful about which startup you join because you might end up at one where nobody actually has any idea what they are doing. And if you yourself are in the learning phase of your career, you might not have the experienc…
> At least one very important benefit of joining a big, reputable company is that the technical skill level will be good I don't believe this is a universal truth, especially since your experience at a large company is largely dictated by the specific team you work on. I've definitely worked for small startups that were far more talented than some of the technical teams I've worked on at big companies.
At larger companies, they can attract skilled talent with bigger salaries and they will most likely employ more people on teams. While you might not necessarily work directly with someone who can mentor you, there is more likely to be someone in adjacent teams or in other departments who you could reach out to and learn from.
This is knitpicky, because OP's point may still stand, but as a founder, this is what comes to mind after reading this: When I hear "work for a startup", I don't assume that means "be the 10th engineer at a company". You might make some money at that point, but you're not going to get financial independence unless there's a billion dollar IPO. By BigCo standards, 10 engineers is a tiny startup. By venture/founder sta…
Joining any startup is risky. Most startups fail for reasons beyond the employees control. If employee #10's compensation is less than an established company, and requires an exit event that is unlikely to happen, then it's just not worth it.
You just can't say "real risk" to gloss over the fact that startup compensation doesn't justify the risk.
> In my experience, the deadline-driven culture crushes any scope for creativity and experimentation. This is very well compressed criticism of our modern breed of capitalism. Creativity is very rarely given a true chance.
> “Hey, I think we should experiment with Kotlin. It has lots of traction, Google officially supports it on Android and seems might help us write better code. Here is a PR showing how it’ll fit into our project.”
> “Umm, engineers will need to learn a new language. We have other priorities right now. Let’s consider it later.”
Without knowing too much of details, this looks like it can be a very valid point against introducing new language or technology when you truly have higher priorities and current choice of languages is good enough.
I have another friend who has been at 3 startups during this time and deeply regrets leaving his FANG job because he also missed out on millions.
I think the way things are structured, you have to negotiate hard with startups otherwise it's better to stay in FANG. It didn't used to pay this well to be at a big company but the industry has changed. Not sure if things will work its way back, but having a TC of 400k+ as a senior engineer at a tech company is easily achievable these days, so the startups need to give bigger comp packages.
I've worked everywhere from small startups, to big FAANG companies and big enterprise companies. I am in the very same opinion as op. 1. Financially the exits weren't worth it. The amount you actually learn is incredibly questionable. 2. Working at bigger companies I learned a hell of a lot more, from the mere fact that there are a bigger pool of resources with a lot of experience to go get help from. This is just no…
I’ve never seen (or heard of) any start-up actually fulfill these selling points any better than medium-to-large companies.
More responsibility sooner typically just translates into the usual crap about “wearing many hats” — which is to say your “responsibility” means doing whatever whimsical thing that other people say you have to do, with no regard for your career goals.
In start-ups, I’ve only ever witnessed people getting less autonomy and much less freedom to learn. At the same time, the earliest engineers might have made very poor commitments to certain extreme philosophies about programming and engineers who come later have to clean up these messes while experiencing a lot of dogma from the early stage people.
I’ve personally seen this happen several times with ex-Google employees who join as the earliest engineers and insist on setting up copies of what they recall from Google, mostly insisting on a monorepo regardless of any use case details, insisting on using Bazel or a similar homebrewed build file system, insisting on the same style of canary deployments.
You have to be really careful to avoid these places unless you’re perfectly happy to be a cog implementing these patterns based on someone else’s authority-from-big-company-X. You might even have a super senior job title, yet still just be shuffling code according to someone else’s dogma, while being told the company doesn’t want “dogmatic” engineers.
All this is just to say: be careful. Taking a start-up job because you think you’ll get more responsibility or be given autonomy or discretion in project architecture or tooling decisions is often a big mistake.
By this point, I believe candidates simply need to reject start-up jobs categorically.
Unless the job is paying full market total compensation (excluding non-liquid equity), top of the line benefits, and provides full transparency, just say no. Investors looking to back start-ups simply have to accept that the up-front costs from day one include ensuring employees earn fair market compensation exclusive of the risks associated with start-up equity. That’s just table stakes of hiring a team, period. It does not matter what optimistic outcomes you’d like for candidates to believe about you in exchange for dramatically less compensation.