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Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

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Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#131

Post by swensel »

rcruzeiro wrote: post #125
rjzzleep wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my own household/wife I have a person who's worked her ass off for a hugely incompetent CEO who has a majority stake. When I say ass off I mean 12-14 hours a day even on weekends. A promise of unlimited holidays and then coercing all employees to work during government mandated holidays and now he's trying to scam her out of her less than 1% options by coercing her to write a maternity leave policy that would ma…

It's funny how often I got rejected after saying that I am not 24/7 available and that I believe that, if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The words they used in the rejections were always something like: "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willin…

I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environment and an auto restart doesn't fix the issue? I am curious because I'd like to have a better answer for potential startup opportunities that won't spend money on a 24/7 ops team and ask this of their devs.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#132

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dleslie wrote: post #75

I generally agree, having worked for a number of startups most of the concerns seem valid; however, there is a unique arrangement that has benefited me: As a Canadian, I can generally make a higher wage working for an American startup than working for anything local. Usually I can expect 1.5x to 2x over the mean local rate for my skills and experience; and since I don't _need_ health benefits and I enjoy guaranteed p…

Yah there's another aspect to that, too, which is that American startups are in my experience better managed than in Canada and the investment and startup community far better in the US.

After working at a local startup it becomes clear that most of the founders all know each other, went to private school together, etc. etc. it's kinda gross. A bit over a decade ago I worked at one, had a bad experience, and then went to work for a New York HQ'd late stage startup -- higher pay, good management, decent people, decently managed, and was acquired by Google a year later.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#133

Post by hluska »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #116
hluska wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - where do you pay tax on options before they have been exercised?? Every country whose tax system I'm familiar with treats receiving an option as a tax neutral event, but exercising them is taxed as per the country's capital gains legislation.

The issue is you are taxed on them when you exercise them before you can actually sell them to get the money to pay the taxes.

I don't see how that is an issue. Exercising options is a form of income. Why not pay tax on income?

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#134

Post by [deleted] »

derwiki wrote: post #103
NeverFade wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. As a senior engineer, I get startup offers at the Staff-Principal levels, and even those grant no more than 0.1-0.5% equity at most, on top of ~$180-200k salary. That simply isn't competitive with big established companies like FAANG that offer me $400k+, far better career growth prospects, and far lower risk. For most startups, the equity will be worthless, and the whole company will either shut down or get a…

Why especially as a senior eng?

[deleted]

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#135

Post by the-smug-one »

ghaff wrote: post #29
amelius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the promise of UBI. Everyone can work on their hobby.

Enjoy working on your hobby on the government's $1,000/month because that's what any remotely plausible basic income is going to be like.

That's what every Swedish student's income is like :).

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#136

Post by cblconfederate »

rrdharan wrote: post #67
notjustanymike wrote: post #53

I personally work for startups because I prefer building and owning big projects over maintaining someone else's cog in the corporate clocktower. I'm not interested in working on the "retention" team, or the "console ad integration" team. I want to build the main thing and feel like I make an impact every day I go to work. It is possible to do that at a larger business but the odds are stacked against me. Google has…

The average engineer at a startup is far more likely to work on something for two years that ends up being pointless, and canceled, by economics, when the entire startup fails.

But if you view your work as something that you do primarily for yourself, you end up with a net gain

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#137

Post by rjzzleep »

swensel wrote: post #131
rcruzeiro wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how often I got rejected after saying that I am not 24/7 available and that I believe that, if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The words they used in the rejections were always something like: "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willin…

I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environme…

Hire for it? Don't coerce your employees into doing something you you don't want to pay for?

What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be.

Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone.

The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#138

Post by jhbao »

This article isn’t about if you should join a startup vs. a big company. It’s about if you should join a startup vs. a FAANG company, which offers outrageous compensation & benefits. From that perspective, FAANG is the obvious choice 99% of the time.

The more and apt comparison would be if you should work at a startup vs. a corporate job at a HP or Qualcomm. At those type of companies, compensation is not competitive (they often off-shore), benefits are tight, and the work is not interesting. It could very well be argued that a startup, even with high probability of failure, would be more fulfilling.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#139

Post by cmrdporcupine »

davidw wrote: post #129

I would love to see more small-ish companies in a niche with a good product, and competent people that are maybe slowly growing, but not on the rocket ship ride. That kind of environment has always felt like a place where you can get good work done.

Exactly! But it could be that a company like that is just really hard to run now. Investment very difficult to get and potential talent eaten up by FAANGs.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#140

Post by bostonsre »

rjzzleep wrote: post #101
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #36

I think this is a really good article, but I think that one of the things it misses is that a huge reason the math works out so badly for startup employees is because founders and VCs take the lion's share of the gains. I mean, in my experience at startups, founders typically own around 40% of the equity. The option pool for all other employees is around 10-20%. Now, I certainly believe startup founders deserve far m…

From my own household/wife I have a person who's worked her ass off for a hugely incompetent CEO who has a majority stake. When I say ass off I mean 12-14 hours a day even on weekends. A promise of unlimited holidays and then coercing all employees to work during government mandated holidays and now he's trying to scam her out of her less than 1% options by coercing her to write a maternity leave policy that would ma…

They're not all that bad. I've worked in a horrible startup before and they absolutely forced everyone to work harder with longer hours instead of working smarter. We had a few ~12-16 hour deploys that started after a full work day where the entire engineering department was required to stay and the oncall was brutal 2 week long slogs because no effort was allowed to be put into actually fixing stuff.

But on the other hand, I've also been at ok jobs that were pretty great companies and the one I currently work at is absolutely amazing and it's a joy to work at. The pay has been pretty awesome as well.

Larger companies in my experience can be soul crushingly beaurocratic and the slower pace means your skillet grows more slowly (no big tech companies in the valley, just some large public companies after startup acquisitions).

It's just anecdotal from my experience and I'm not really sure how big of a haystack the amazing startup needles are in but they are out there. Work is work, but you spend a huge portion of your life at work, if you can enjoy it thoroughly, you can live a happier life.

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