Downsides to working at a tech giant • Hacker News Board

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#201

Post by stoicShell » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:23 PM UTC

andreilys wrote: post #197

stoicShell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> statistically unlikely to pay off > probabilities involved with your decision While this is a good general approach to life IMHO as well — if you mean "be rational, not just emotional" and "work on your cognitive biases, seek objectivity" — it might also prove terribly counterproductive in this context. It would take a book or five but briefly: - you just can't use statistics when they say "95% fail", otherwise you…

- another stat for you: most entrepreneurs fail "about twice" before making it, i.e. you'll probably fail 1-3 times for sure before entering the 5% of those who create a profitable business. Trick #1, thus: you can roll the dice several times (consider 2-5 years per "real try"). I've never heard of this stat. Seems like a case of survivorship bias more than anything else. For every entrepreneur that "made it" on thei…

So the exact statistic is indeed about "entrepreneurs who make it", those who eventually create a successful business, how many time did they have to try?

Average is ~3 times, and your typical successful business (across sectors) takes ~2 years in "survival mode" (most don't make it past that mark), then 3 more (~5Y total) before things may feel "sustainable", cruising.

So indeed, we are not all considering those who don't make it in this picture. Creating a business is hard, very hard.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#202

Post by oliverx0 » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:25 PM UTC

BooneJS wrote: post #167

Joining a startup and missing out on entry-level wages seems like an appropriate trade-off. It's the same reason most people go to college after high school - the opportunity cost is quite low and you can learn a lot of things quickly.

This is a very good point. On a more general note, the younger you are, generally the more risk you can take. And in this case specifically, entry-level wages can be only slightly lower than Big Co (not always), but what you learn and the risk you take can make it worth it. If it doesn’t work out, you can always join a bigger company that will value what you learned.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#203

Post by ojbyrne » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

Another upside to working at a tech giant: you make enough to be an accredited investor. Which means you can do angel investments, which is an arguably better way (Than being an early employee) to get those “outsize” returns from startups.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#204

Post by justapassenger » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

> The two things I really like about working for smaller places or starting a company is you get very direct access to users and customers and their problems, which means you can actually have empathy for what's actually going on with them, and then you can directly solve it. That cycle is so powerful, the sooner you learn how to make that cycle happen in your career, the better off you'll be.

I think that author is confusing ability to get access vs being forced to do it.

At big company, there's so many other things and layers, that you can easily spend your whole career without touching anything related to users. But, you can also just work on directly customer facing parts - that gives you direct access to customer problems. Just be careful - there's more problems that you can imagine, the bigger the company and customer base.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#205

Post by adamt » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #175

malisper wrote: post #157

If you want a good reason to not join Google in particular, Google does not train their managers. When I was interviewing with Google, I interviewed around 8 friends of mine that worked or previously worked at Google. Lack of management training was a something that every one of them brought up. Two of them had even been managers at Google and basically said "yeah, we weren't trained". The way it's been described to…

Nobody in tech trains managers. The only difference AFAICT, is that google spreads those underprepared managers across more people. The only place I hear stories of managers with 50 directs is from Google.

That is extremely rare at google these days. The average tech manager has more like 6-8 directs.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#206

Post by patrickxrivera » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

sbilstein wrote: post #188

The safest risk reward ratio in terms of career development, networking, and financial gain is to work at a startup that is in their explosive growth stage. You will likely get shares valued at some multiple of 100k. Make sure you understand the business and feel confident they will IPO or exit. The scaling needs, technically or culturally, of a company at this stage are unlikely to be available at a risky early star…

Agreed. I think this type of company (high-growth and 2-3 years away from IPO) is a much better first job out of school than working at a big tech company. Sure, your cash comp will be 10 - 25% lower, but if you want to start a company someday, this type of experience is on average much more valuable than big tech co.

I've been working at a high-growth company for the past year and as OP mentioned, have learned from early engineers, experienced engineers from big tech co's, and started leading medium sized projects six months in. I'm on the growth engineering team so I've also been able to learn about best practices in growth from people who led teams at big tech co's.

From this experience, I now feel ready to be an early engineer at a startup or build my own thing. I was able to get the benefit of working with the best people from big tech co's but in a high-growth environment where there are more problems to be solved than people to solve them.

For this reason, working at a high-growth unicorn is seen as just as valuable as a big tech co. If not more, for product/growth eng roles.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#207

Post by novok » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

sdrinf wrote: post #185

novok wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why is the math changed. The gap between startup and tech giant is much larger now than it was in 2010. Also, unless you have insider access and join a very risky angel stage company, the likelihood of getting a good package that makes sense is low, very low. Also public companies have shown to get +3x gains, which can make the math even worse. Example from personal experience that is very lucky in startup…

I agree with all of the points raised, and share the same experiences. But this one: > I might as well become a founder and start my own at that point Great! So, how would you recruit your first 10 employees?

That is a big reason why I don't start my own company, because I couldn't really live with doing that.

My current armchair strategies:

* Compete in a way that big tech are not willing to do, which means distributed remote companies. A lot of people don't want to live in $3.5k/month rent SF or other tech centers for various reasons.

* What a lot of startups do, but RDF (reality distortion field) over with 'we only hire the best'. Don't hire the best. Either because they couldn't hack the big tech co interview, have visa issues, are very jr or have personality problems that make them unhirable in big tech cos.

* Go bootstrap, so no VC style business timelines.

* Give offers that basically make them pseudo-founders and match the expected value of bigco with the risk premium of startups. A hard pill to swallow when investors give a lot of money offer similar or smaller dilution terms effectively.

I've never gone out to get investment, so I don't know how much of the above is also blocked by investors in general.

Also crypto style 'startups' (ICO or just a completely new coin) have shown to deliver compared to normal SV startups, but most crypto companies do not deliver actual lasting value and are more pure speculation plays. A big crucial difference is they give crypto coins instead of stock, and those coins are liquid immediately. They are also not restricted to start in the USA.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#208

Post by gonehome » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:29 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #21

This is such a weird post. Big fan of Garry, but I don't agree with most of this. 1. Just because it turned out that you would have made $200mm doesn't make it a mistake. If anything, that outsized return proves just how rare this kind of outcome is. If you look at the YC startups graduating every year, maybe 1 will ever generate $20mm for an early employee, let alone $200mm. Joining a new startup for that kind of ou…

I understand the general skepticism, but if Peter Thiel writes you a check for your current annual salary as a signing bonus and asks you to join his new company - you’d be stupid to turn that down now.

Worst case you can just go back to Microsoft on failure without too much lost.

Today the salaries are higher, but they’re often pretty high at VC funded startups too.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#209

Post by wrigby » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:29 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #28

wrigby wrote: post #7

There's a LOT of survivorship bias in this article. I personally worked in small companies (30 - 200 employees total) and startups (4 employees, including myself) before ending up at a big tech company, and I would have preferred to do this journey in the opposite direction - that is, work a few years at a BigCorp, and then work for a startup. Getting to see what works and what doesn't work in the context of a bigcor…

I just cringed at the thought of some BigCo software company project management tracking obsessive approach being pigeonholed onto a startup. Or the various other ‘processes’ that built up continually over the years at BigCo to minimize any sort of risk at the expense of speed and flexibility. The bigger benefit is working with really smart people. I think you’re over valuing the utility of a lot of the stuff that go…

Yeah, I could have been more clear - the BigCo I'm at is still pretty light on process, and teams are free to use whatever project management approach they want. As seattle_spring conjectured, I was thinking more about technical best practices. I've learned many patterns from the software I work with now, and I've been able to grow from working with really smart engineers that have enough experience to be pragmatic without compromising on quality.

An (admittedly controversial) example is repos-per-service vs a monorepo: now that I've worked at a bigco with a monorepo, I would have used a monorepo at my previous company.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#210

Post by account73466 » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #173

keithwhor wrote: post #90

The pessimism in this thread really bothers me. I’ve read anecdotes on entrepreneurship being on the decline, but it pains me to read so many negative takes on startups. We’re actively training our young people to avoid taking risks, and it’s going to fuck us — especially if some of those young people have the ambition be early employees at, say, a startup that takes on climate change in a big way. Look — the fact th…

Work at startups because you’ll work with people who have risk profiles that are much more likely to generate outsized returns as a group. This is statistically not true. S&P 500 Index funds have outperformed VC's as a group for any reasonable time period.

I can imagine this to be true but do you have a source for that information?