331–340 of 583 posts
Honestly, maybe I’m way out of the normal HN demographic, but my first reaction was, this sounds like, “how I had a lucky escape and didn’t spend most of my early career actively making the world a much worse place.”
I’m no great fan of MS, but given the choice between a job there; or the possibility to work on bringing about a dystopic surveillance future, I just don’t see the hard decision.
For all the startup founders and VCs in this conversation, you are cheap motherf*ckers. When I read that engineers and employees prefer FAANG companies because they pay better, I want to remind you that it wasn't always like this. 10-15 years ago startups paid way better than big tech. Big Tech rewarded you by getting to specialize on problems and working at scale. The reason FB and Google pay well is because when th…
The giants can pay high salaries because they're hugely profitable and don't need to worry about being hyper efficient to make the most of VC money.
Startups on the other hand, are still weak on the profitability part, but have massive room for growth when it comes to valuation. Therefore, the equity they can offer has way more potential value than stock in a large company that's averaging 5% growth or something.
I don't see how a founder of a startup would benefit much from cheaping out on salaries for employees. The vast majority of the payout for founders is company value increasing, not how much of the VC money they keep.
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…
Stories like this are really a dime a dozen. Marc Andreesen and the founders of Tivoli both worked in the same IBM dept. I met Michael Dell when he was building systems in his dorm. So did a thousand other people. Anyone who got in early at Dell got ground into the pulp years before there was a huge payoff. Even those who survived had to wait 10 years. The trick is finding new tech where people are taking risks. Anyb…
But what you are saying seems to be cherry-picked examples, how does one do this without knowledge of the future?
We dont know who the future Andreesen will be, we dont know which one of thousands of groups/departments/companies they will work at, so where do you go work (assuming it were that easy to just choose a company+department+group at will.)
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> The difference is that now Google and FB pay way more. More than startups could ever dream of competing with. Logically speaking, the only way that a company can pay more and still be profitable is if they produce value more efficiently. On a general, macro level. So, if startup founders cannot even dream of providing either cash or equity (adjusted to risk) comparable to the big-techs, does this mean that startups…
Could it be because BigTech, collectively, have created an oligopoly? Perhaps making it easier for startups to compete is another reason for antitrust.
But then again it’s only Google and FB that pay above the line. Microsoft and Amazon salaries, last I checked were pretty subpar.
[1] https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/...
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Well said. You’re also describing a fundamental tension between capitalism and socialism.
Yes, but not in the way I imagine you intended. In capitalism, perhaps 80% of the value you create as an employee is captured by others (see sibling comment.) You can also opt out -- by becoming self employed, by joining a commune or collective, or by becoming a vagrant. In socialism, the percentage of value you create captured by others is nearly 100%, and opting out is illegal -- in many socialist countries, even t…
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Could it be because BigTech, collectively, have created an oligopoly? Perhaps making it easier for startups to compete is another reason for antitrust.
BigTech is insanely big right now. Basically advertising and cloud are humongous cash cows. It’s a good time to work for BigTech and build some safety net. But then again it’s only Google and FB that pay above the line. Microsoft and Amazon salaries, last I checked were pretty subpar.
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If the pessimism in this thread bothers you, imagine how much your woefully out of touch survivorship bias and bothers everyone else in this thread? One of the top comments that responds to your post tells you that the math changed. This is true. The fact that neither you nor Garry talk about the concrete specifics of this means that you're either unaware of it, or worse, intentionally sweeping over it. You really th…
I appreciate this, and am trying to take this to heart. But it is also possible to survive. And if you do that, you don't merely survive, you thrive— that's what product market fit looks like. I've been lucky to see it dozen of times first hand, and it's nothing short of magical. When founders and teams pursue something without product market fit, it's a high cost to pay and a terrible outcome for most everyone. This…
I think there is a big gap in how different people see this. You are right, it is possible to survive. It is also possible to fail. For some people, that is fine -- they can call up an uncle, or a friend (Thiel) and land another job quickly that pays good medical benefits.
For others, an 20/80, or even 50/50 or 80/20 survive/fail just does not cut it. Perhaps they have crushing student loans. Perhaps they have no parents to fall back upon if things go south. Perhaps they have visa issues. Perhaps they have a sick parent to take care of (my case.)
I admire your ambition (and envy it.) I hope people who have social safety nets realize it though. Because not everyone does.
It reminds me of a fellow undergraduate Senior who looked down upon me for going to work on Wall Street while he did the more pure thing of going for the Peace Corps. I asked -- so how do you land a job when you're done with the 2yrs commitment? He said his uncle was going to hook him up at a hedge fund. Nice, if you can swing that. Me? I have no uncles at hedge funds, so the on-campus recruiting super-day was my one and only shot. I dont think that makes my choice less pure, it is just one of relative necessity.
My big mistake? Not being buddies with Peter Thiel in 2003. Don't make my mistake, go back in time and be buddies with Peter Thiel in 2003. Just the fact that he had a buddy who could cut him a check for $70,000 before his startup succeeded says a whole lot about the situation he was in. If you have a buddy who tosses around this kind of cash, your options are different from the options available to the overwhelming…
This is a shallow dismissal, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do, and especially not out of indignation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It's obvious from early in the article that Garry wasn't "buddies" with Thiel. He had just graduated, and a college friend was the connection. That means your point reduces to: people who go to elite colleges encounter opportunities as a result. No one disagre…
In a real sense, this article is very biased. The author had a rare and unique combination of luck, timing, and privilege where the normally highly-irrational calculus of throwing away such a highly prestigious job actually made sense.
Nowadays, FANG dishes out 200k TC offers to new grads even — work hard and do well, and you will make 400k as an L5 in five years at Google or Facebook.
Meanwhile, startups are staying private and only enriching their founders at the expense of their employees (see Adam Neumann), and the standard 120k plus “equity” new grad offer for the first engineer employee at some YC company that just graduated Demo Day no longer makes any sense.
People are just making decisions in their best interest, and you cannot fault them for that. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to encourage talented young people to waste their time otherwise by working for a startup. Let’s revisit the terms of the deal for talented young people first before lamenting that most of them are not willing to be volunteers.
