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

jatins.gitlab.io

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

#251

Post by eldavido »

autotune wrote: post #236
davidjnelson wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean heroku because of the excessive cost of over-provisioning their db plans to support traffic spikes with new products?

Yes indeed. Have worked with several clients and chatted with several startups that ultimately decide to migrate off due to extremely high cost as they grow relative to other platforms.

I'm curious what language and data stack they're using? Asking because I've seen real scale (billions of devices running our software) and the real leverage is in how you architect your application (software and how the data is stored, retrieved, moves around) and things like choice of language. Not where it's hosted.

Languages like Python and Ruby are just grossly inefficient. Single-threaded, huge memory profiles, and fully synchronous I/O. Whereas in C#, Tasks and async/await probably provide no shit 10-100x the performance in both compute and concurrency. It would probably be the same deal with Go or Java.

The point is, we tend to hand-wave these kind of choices away on HN. "Just ship it, language doesn't matter". But increasingly, I think it does. You want to make a product with an aggressive free tier, where only like 1% of the user base pays, or some data-heavy analytics thing, these kinds of decisions can be make or break for a business.

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

#252

Post by eldavido »

CryoLogic wrote: post #4

The comp packages at big tech companies are becoming insane. In Seattle it's not unreasonable for a senior software engineer with some good connections to be making 200-250k. With that comes life insurance, health insurance for your whole family, disability insurance, etc. That's more in cash AND benefits than a doctor.

> That's more in cash AND benefits than a doctor.

No it isn't. You're comparing top-of-the-line tech comp to Joe Random Doctor. Surgeons make thousands of dollars per surgery. Busy surgeons do 5+ each day. That's 50-75K/week in a good week.

The thing you have to realize is you don't get to senior by coasting. You have to have a great education and then work at least 5-10 years. Doctor pay is higher because they have to go to medical school. So really I think the more relevant comparison is doctor vs. mid-career dev. It's still way lower, though.

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

#254

Post by ryankicks »

Justin Kan has a great post that is equally critical of startup compensation and management. He also makes positive points in favor of startups: as opportunities for non-FAANG candidates, for learning faster and (to some people) as a gateway to starting your own company.

https://www.atrium.co/blog/work-at-a-startup/

In line with Justin's post, learning has been a key motivating factor throughout my career. In particular, working at startups has given me better insight to the business that drives the company. I've sat on calls with sales people to understand customer asks vs. needs, and I've developed strategy alongside BD teams for driving adoption of technical platforms. For engineers who are interested in learning more about other functions/roles at a company (product, business development, sales), startups are sometimes flatter and can offer more exposure.

(That said, you can also get non-eng exposure/experience in larger companies. You may have to take a non-traditional eng role, such as sales engineering, partner engineering or developer advocacy. There are some perceived downsides of that path -- sometimes around compensation or building your core "engineering skill set" -- but it's a viable option.)

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

#255

Post by rpm33 »

jatins wrote: post #18
rubicon33 wrote: post #12

> That startup sold for 200 million dollars and, as the 10th engineer, I made ... 15000 dollars from that exit. Why so low?

I am the OP. I think it was because I was an overseas employee and the founders just didn't shell out equity to people who were not based out of US. I saw the equity distribution sheet that was disclosed after the acquisition as part of legal requirements and that was indeed true. IMO, equity represents ownership in the company and should not depend on purchase parity.

>I think it was because I was an overseas employee and the founders just didn't shell out equity to people who were not based out of US.

Isn't that illegal ?

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

#256

Post by autotune »

eldavido wrote: post #251
autotune wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes indeed. Have worked with several clients and chatted with several startups that ultimately decide to migrate off due to extremely high cost as they grow relative to other platforms.

I'm curious what language and data stack they're using? Asking because I've seen real scale (billions of devices running our software) and the real leverage is in how you architect your application (software and how the data is stored, retrieved, moves around) and things like choice of language. Not where it's hosted. Languages like Python and Ruby are just grossly inefficient. Single-threaded, huge memory profiles,…

This isn't just one startup, these are multiple startups I have talked to that all end up deciding to move off the platform due to cost. Solid containers orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are slowly reducing the need to have one specific cloud platform, but cost control is still extremely relevant with architecture design choices.

As far as language is concerned, Ruby and Ruby on Rails is the usual choice with Heroku and is marketed specifically towards RoR devs (https://www.heroku.com/ruby) and Postgres as db. Most startups who decide to go the RoR route are not going to decide to go with C# as far as the Microsoft ecosystem is concerned, which would be a different set of architecture design choices. If you wanted to market a more performant alternative Go would 100 percent be the way to do it.

I would still somewhat disagree with your conclusion that language choice is imperative though, so much as how well you architect your application and infrastructure. A simple RoR app that pulls in a bunch of static assets from an S3 bucket is going to scale at whatever load compared to an ETL tool like Airflow that might need to process terabytes of data on a daily basis and has to have more planning from the start.

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

#257

Post by ko-ko-ko »

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…

This is very true. I come from a non-tech (humanities/academia) background and was entirely self-taught when I decided to switch careers. I had only done very specific and quite unmarketable hobby projects on outdated technologies (win32 Assembly, Pascal, Fortran and some PHP/MySQL) and there was no way I would have had a shot at getting a job at any tech corp, let alone a FAANG.

Startups, on the other hand, were hungry for talent. The pay I got at my first job wasn't great, even by startup standards. But it got me working on a more up-to-date stack (JS, Go, Python, Scala, NoSQL DBs...), taught me how to better handle the tradeoffs between clean, robust code and fast shipping and got me a great network.

A few years later, I got no equity, my salary is only decent (nothing FAANG-level, but better than friends at some larger corps) but I like what I do, got a fancy title, manage people and am considered indispensable enough that I can make my own hours.

I've met a large number of people from similarly non-traditional backgrounds as mine (former nurse, geology PhD, classical musician...) in the startup scene and my guess is they would never had a shot at working in tech if it were not for startups.

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

#258

Post by misthop »

umeshunni wrote: post #105
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

Effectively, you're saying you'll take a 50% paycut (including RSUs) to avoid working at a FAANG? Most people wouldn't do that.

But it isn't a paycut - at best I am declining to look for a pay increase. And that is ok. I think plenty of people would do it - at a certain point we make more than enough to fund our interests and lifestyle.

I am always happy to make more, but I don't _need_ to, so my decision matrix on where to work extends beyond the question of dollars into consideration of people, mission, industry, possibility of making an individual impact, openess to remote work (I will not be going back to an office, at least while my kids are young) etc.

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

#259

Post by loriverkutya »

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…

And what about life-work balance?

Because not everything is about work.

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

#260

Post by icedchai »

BenMorganIO wrote: post #249
finnh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on what you're looking at for ETFs and mutual funds, but I think 8%, with a lot of work, CSVs, and tracking performance can be obtained. I know 12% is doable with a lot of work.

How's that? Over a decent period of time (5-10 years), 8% can be obtained with essentially no work just be investing in low cost index funds.
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