231–240 of 269 posts
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That's a great negotiation strategy for a company that doesn't want to pay more. That isn't top of market in Austin.
Okay, but to be fair I said "close to" and the person that told me that was not offering me a job.
If the OP liked startups so much I think they should have just tried to be a founder. It doesn't take a lot of math to realize non-founders usually get a pretty bad deal. Unless someone is particularly enamored with startups or can't get a job at a well-paying bigco (which there's no shame in, but let's call a spade a spade) it's pretty clear your 10% chance at realizing But since bigcos have so greatly outstripped s…
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My Vanguard account, which I've had since 2007, is showing 10.8% returns over the past 10 years.
I think the difference between 10 and 15 is pretty large since the recession started over 10 years ago, but under 15.
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 IPO…
Completely agree. For instance I don't think anyone who throws around the term "market rate salary" has updated their definition of it to include these dramatically higher numbers.
Not to mention, housing costs in the bay area have followed (or been driven by, depending on your perspective) these rising big co salaries. Meaning that startup salaries not only haven't kept up, they may have even gone down in terms of how much money you take home after paying for housing.
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…
Just adding to your point: in all of the start-ups I worked for, the main selling points were (a) more responsibility sooner and (b) chance to drive decision-making about tech stack and/or work with the best tools (new or old) without red tape. 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 translate…
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Even if they did whichever startups that end up using it would have to get a few more funding rounds :)
You mean heroku because of the excessive cost of over-provisioning their db plans to support traffic spikes with new products?
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> 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…
“If you put $50k in the stock market every year for 5 years @ avg. 8% return, your have ~$400k. Over 10 years it's ~$900k.” That’s not always the case. Stock market returns are not guaranteed. If you start in the wrong decade you may be losing money.
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…
Just adding to your point: in all of the start-ups I worked for, the main selling points were (a) more responsibility sooner and (b) chance to drive decision-making about tech stack and/or work with the best tools (new or old) without red tape. 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 translate…
I'd be interested to hear more details of what winds up going wrong with these practices in a startup environment?
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I see the 7% return figure trotted out as average equity returns; but I think that number reflects a lot of “easy money” from the asymmetry of global industrialization in the post-WW2 era. Europe and America spent the 1920s through 1940s building fossil fuel powered heavy industry through a couple of particularly destructive wars. Then we spent the next 50 years spreading it around the globe, with American and Europe…
Not sure I agree with your premise, but even if it was true, couldn't one simply balance their profile with more stocks from developing markets and be back to average?
And I’m not saying the US / Europe robbed any of those countries — just that there was a lot of easy growth in those countries in the 20th century, and western companies stepped in to facilitate and got paid a lot of money in the process. That growth is reflected in the stock prices of American and European companies.
My point is that those big, easy growth opportunities aren’t there anymore anywhere; and the growth opportunities in the future will be diminishingly small. We’re no longer bringing a country from the Iron Age mining with hand tools to the industrial era with mechanized mining and smelting; we’re largely just replacing one form of economic activity with another, slightly more efficient version.
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FWIW: I kind of feel the opposite. Or at least I think the experience is a real trade-off. The skills I gained as a first employee at a startup were more along the lines of business and marketing. The engineering skills required were pretty trivial: manage a small Heroku setup, write early backend and frontend app boilerplate, spin up an initial db schema, integrate CSS from a contract designer, work on email templat…
The more interesting skills someone learns when implementing Heroku is when they learn it doesn't scale and the challenges in migrating off of it.