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Downsides to working at a tech giant

blog.garrytan.com

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Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#401

Post by Grimm1 »

jarjoura wrote: post #221

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 average turnover is a little over 2 years at BigTechCo so half of the people never see that 4year total compensation.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#402

Post by sneak »

zadkey wrote: post #68

It seems like he has found the problem with companies. "Even though these companies pay a lot of money, in real terms, what software is doing in society is creating a lot more value than what they pay you. Google's pure profit per employee is actually $1.6 million per year, after all costs." "If you're in the engineering, product, design, marketing, sort of the builder's side of that organization, you've got to know…

> It's the mindset that it's somehow okay to pay employees very small fractions of what they are really worth.

The employee decides what they are “really worth” when they accept, reject, or negotiate an offer. His rejection of the check offered him was his doing precisely that.

That’s not an issue with companies, that is an attribute of human free association and free, consensual dealing in general.

If you offer services at $100/hour but I know I can sell those services for $1000/hour (with my involvement) and you voluntarily accept $100/hour and agree to work for me, I have turned opportunity into profit, and have exploited no one. Sales and marketing and connections to people in specialty markets have a value, too!

(Correspondingly, the hypothetical “you” in this example may have not been able to get or generate more than $100/hour alone. Sometimes the sum is greater than the parts, and the assembly is itself a value-generating activity.)

But ultimately this story illustrates very well that the final arbiter of what price a person places on their time and effort is themself. No one can force you to accept a certain wage, and, as was demonstrated, you can always tell a billionaire to go stuff it.

Seems to have worked out pretty well for OP in the end, even without the CIA-vendor equity.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#403

Post by austenallred »

majormajor wrote: post #324
austenallred wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and FB were paying less when they were founded than most startups I see today, adjusted for inflation. The difference is that now Google and FB pay way more . More than startups could ever dream of competing with. Everyone I know at FB or Google is making $225k+, with the average/median being around $300k/yr. Absolutely no way new startups can play ball with those salaries, and FB/GOOG certainly weren’t paying…

> Absolutely no way new startups can play ball with those salaries Are their ideas just not that promising, or are they just not raising enough money, or what?

Google has an ATM printing money in the basement. Startups do not.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#404

Post by austincheney »

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…

When I was 24 I was a broke college kid who couldn't get a real job and just had his first child. Then the invasion of Iraq happened and I was deployed to Kuwait. About 50 of us came over together and they basically separated the smart people from the rest of us. The smart people were given engineering or analytics positions. I was put on operations which was considered a dumb person's job.

Some context is in order. This unit was/is the 2-star command that runs communications for CENTCOM. We were supporting a network of around 270,000 users at that time due to the surge into Iraq in 2004 and the stand up of the transitional government. That is about the size of Bank of America, the entire company with all its branch locations and total employees. I was the night tech lead of operations of communications over all of it. That was my first time in management as a young staff sergeant. This was an incredible eye-opener for me, but its not a mark of success. I didn't get paid more because of the severity of my decisions or the size of the organization.

Now I'm just some software developer at a big corporate company assigned to a team that struggles to get copy/paste right. When I want to work on software that's vaguely interesting I contribute to open source.

My reflection from all of this is that people often evaluate themselves, and their perspectives of success, using faulty metrics. If you were a fresh 2 week hire on Instagram before they were gobbled up by Facebook are you suddenly a successful software genius due to a magical windfall? In my world as a front-end developer people often consider themselves experts and pat themselves on the back for stringing a few statements together like magic glue over a monster framework that they don't really need but does all the work for them. I don't really consider that a mark of success either and am often a social pariah as a result. If you really, I mean this seriously, really wanted to be rich and financially super successful then why are you spending your time writing software?

For me, personally, I measure success in the problems I solve that other people find value in, which is a large motivation for my contributions to open source. It isn't a number that comes with bragging rights or some form of vanity. Instead, its just something to do or take pride in.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#405

Post by desert_boi »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #349
commandlinefan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is: 1) make sure to know the kind of person who can write you a $72,000 check as if he was leaving a tip at Starbucks, 2) impress him enough that he’s willing to offer you $200 million when you’re 23. I see now where I went wrong in my youth.

> 2) impress him enough that he’s willing to offer you $200 million when you’re 23 I think the answer to that is "Go to Stanford". For literally 99.999% of people that is never possible.

I think you're not giving the meritocracy at MIT enough credit. I went to a state university.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#406

Post by mattlutze »

arjie wrote: post #215
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…

It's just the reversion-to-the-mean effect described elsewhere[0]. It seems bothersome that on a startup news website run by an incubator, the view is that startups aren't a good idea. However, that's only because HN is now what /r/programming+technology+apple+google was, not what HN was. It's not really a startup news website. So I wouldn't worry too much. The people in startups are probably in real-world groups, an…

It may also be that the big pile of folks here with experience in startups have done the math and can argue that working a startup isn't the best way to maximize the outcome of your time.

HN doesn't just have to be a "startups are the best" echo chamber.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#407

Post by austenallred »

nullspace wrote: post #314
austenallred wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and FB were paying less when they were founded than most startups I see today, adjusted for inflation. The difference is that now Google and FB pay way more . More than startups could ever dream of competing with. Everyone I know at FB or Google is making $225k+, with the average/median being around $300k/yr. Absolutely no way new startups can play ball with those salaries, and FB/GOOG certainly weren’t paying…

> 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…

I don’t think it’s crazy to say that a line of code written at Google will, risk adjusted and averaged across all lines of code written at Google, create more value for society than the risk adjusted and averaged line of code at a random startup.

But in startups averages don’t matter as much - it has power-law style returns, so if you happen to work at an insanely valuable startup those lines of code might be 1,000x as valuable as the average line of code written at Google.

Ergo, if you can/want to play the odds with those kind of risks you go to a startup, even knowing the risk adjusted value is lower (loving your work also matters, and some prefer startups - myself included). If you want a sure thing you go to Google.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#408

Post by hindsightbias »

TuringNYC wrote: post #333
hindsightbias wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really want to believe you, because that means I could also end up rubbing shoulders with Thiel, Andreesen, and their crew at will. 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 w…

The population of innovation is a sliver of subset of the engineering/CS/AI community. UI-Urbana (Andreesen), Stanford (Page/Brin), Harvard (Zuck), etc, etc. That gets you down to a couple of 1000 people or so. The size of an American High School.

You don't have to see the future, you just have to know where those working on it are and meet enough of them. They're in places like a Supercompute booth or MIT poster session trying to tell you. They may not have The Big Idea yet, but talent tends to stand out.

Andreesen didn't randomly pick an IBM group. He picked one doing Unix distributed system management and virtualization 25 years ago. I didn't have foresight to make the same choice, it just seemed obviously interesting and there were only three major players in that space.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#409

Post by tracer4201 »

Grimm1 wrote: post #400

Edit: The sites I'm using make it seem like the RSU compensation is the one time grant for 100k+ over the 4 year period so if its really a 400k+ stock grant over the 4year period then yes there's really no way to compete with that for early stage companies and leaving that amount of money on the table is inadvisable if you can avoid it. That said I still hold my point about the type of experience you'll gain at a sta…

Maybe I misunderstood what you’re saying here but I don’t think it’s accurate. My salary plus stock compensation has been $300K+ each year as long as I’ve been with my company. Of course there’s market volatility in RSUs but I have yet to take home less than $300K in any year during the 5 years I’ve been at a FAANG. I’m an engineer FWIW.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#410

Post by freddie_mercury »

georgeburdell wrote: post #212
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…

FAANG pay has gone through the roof while startup pay has not. I am not a software engineer, but I still work in a field rife with startups. I don’t even work at a FAANG, but I do work for the industry leader in my field and I’m making a safe $250k annually after 5 years. I have gotten a few startup offers just to test the waters and I’m generally being offered $175k + $50k-$100k in stock options. Sounds OK if you ex…

> FAANG pay has gone through the roof while startup pay has not

That's because FAANGs have been profitable and startups haven't, in general.

There's no rule of the universe saying startups have to be unprofitable.

A profitable startup can, in fact, pay through the roof.

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