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Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

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Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#141

Post by luminati »

Honest question: Why does every blog post that talks about working with a startup, always pick Facebook and Google for the comparison?

Both these companies are extreme outliers (probably in the history of business!). Their outsized pay comes from their outsized profits, which comes from selling your data. I find it very ironic, that these very same people who diss startups love dissing Google and FB as being evil, but somehow when it comes salary packages they're viewed as holy institutions.

Google and FB hire very selectively, and even if you're truly qualified they may not actually have a position open for you. And most critically 99+% of engineers (including the ones in HN) probably won't make the cut for whatever reason.

Why not compare with traditional megacorps (of which there are literally (fortune) 500s of them (every company is a tech company now ;) ) like IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc? This group is far more representative of where most engineers would actually end up and hence a better comparison against startups.

Then you'd realize that startup packages don't seem that bad - or rather you're making a tradeoff between not having to deal with corporate bullshit or an extra 30K in stock grants.

Also on another note - startups are a wide spectrum (more so than megacorps). You have 3-5 person starting up startups to series D unicorn startups. Broad sweeping blanket statements comparing startups as if they're a single entity don't help too much.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#142

Post by alealeale »

The 'actual conversations' section bugs me, he wrote about having his request to use Kotlin rejected, and even though I'm a coder that loves trying new tech, I think it is usually both a very bad decision and investment to either mix languages just for cool points or rewrite your codebase because there's a new hype language.

The queue problem sounds more sensible, but it could also be a case of over engineering.

Overall I get the impression that the author was thinking on a purely technical level, and that's not something you can afford to do in a startup where budget and time are limited.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#143

Post by jaredklewis »

finnh wrote: post #133
everdev wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

8% return on average is abnormally high. But, on the other hand - the chance of retaining even 1% of a startup that exits for >50M is very small. By the time of an exit, almost no engineers will have anywhere near that equity.

After accounting for inflation and dividends, 7% is average (historically) for annual returns. So only a little high.

If the parent was not accounting for inflation, 8% is low.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#145

Post by jaredklewis »

zapita wrote: post #42
acconrad wrote: post #21

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…

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…

But most startups fail before they achieve any sort of name recognition. In those cases, how much does being the CTO of a company no one has heard of and no longer exist boost one's resume?

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#146

Post by krschultz »

docker_up wrote: post #119

I was employee 40, and approximately 15th engineer of a YC startup where the founders made roughly $50M each, and I made just under $80,000. During this time, had I gone to work at a FANG, I would have probably made a few million dollars just from being a senior software engineer. 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 mi…

This is 100% accurate and not how things were even 10 years ago. The market today is basically bi-modal. When I first started out in startups (2008) that didn't seem to be the case. The result is obviously worse for you financially if you join the startup, but it has also weakened the teams at startups. Many top engineers are just staying at the big public tech companies. Meanwhile large startups that would have IPOed years ago stay private in the current funding environment, dragging out the lockdown period for engineers. It just doesn't make sense to work at a startup like it used to.

I truly don't think most people that argue to work for a startup have internalized the compensation at the big tech companies. $400k+ really is total comp for senior engineers. Not $200k + some lottery tickets for later, it's $400k on your W2 each year, with some of that fluctuating based on stock price and delivered in quarterly increments.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#147

Post by yitianjian »

dahfizz wrote: post #113
ankit219 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Assuming he is from India, That's kind of a weird assumption to make.

The article talks specifically about Indian startups, so I think it's a fair assumption

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#148

Post by sergiosgc »

birken wrote: post #53

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…

This views education as something you get from your peers and/or from your employer. It's true, but incomplete. You also get education from challenges you face. In a startup, you'll be often challenged out of your comfort zone. This will force you to learn. If not from your peers, of which there may be none able to teach you, then from other sources. On the other side, in a big company, you'll be much more limited in your scope of action. You'll get very very good at tightening that specific model of screw.

It is a balance between models of learning, the best position is, as ever, in the middle.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#150

Post by kelnos »

misthop wrote: post #48

I look at it another way - there are plenty of startups (series A, B) that pay fair industry wages along with equity. If the exit is worth nothing - no huge loss, I made what I should have. If there is a good/great exit - awesome, I pocket 1-10 years worth of salary on top of a fair salary. Could I make more with salary+rsu at a FAANG? possibly, maybe even probably - but then I would have to work at a FAANG

I would never work at a FAANG, but there are plenty of post-IPO tech companies out there that pay near-comparable levels when you look at salary and equity comp combined. And in many cases the mix will be more like 30-40% salary, 60-70% RSUs, which reliably show up ready to sell every quarter.

At a startup, even if you're making a market-rate salary, you're giving up the equity, or, at best, hoping that the equity will be liquid and worth something in 5-10 years. If it's not, you're looking at a huge pay cut (over 50%, often), and even if it is, equity payouts post-IPO or post-acquisition are often less than what you'd get at a non-startup, when you average it out over the years you had to wait to sell it.

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