301–310 of 430 posts
The pay wasn't a critical thing in my suffering. Now I'm making a third less and feeling ten times better.
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This is relatable. It's incredibly satisfying building new things rather than maintaining decades old cruft, regardless of the paycheck, hours and stability. Also the joy of working in small nimble teams and the freedom to experiment with new technologies. Like everything in life these things are a tradeoff.
Umm, I do enjoy the things you mentioned (building new stuff, experiment with new tech) but I love doing that on my free time, without pressure, deadlines and bosses. At work, though, I love: boring stuff I can deal with easily, long epics that end up in features that are barely used (so, no big deal with critical bugs, also no need to be on call). At work I can be done in 4h and call it a day (which gives me TON of…
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I'm not arguing that it isn't more risky for the founder. I'm saying that the payoff potential that remains esp when you look at the pool of startups, is almost never worth it compared to a job at a bigco, even at the top end. Eg this is me explaining why I wouldn't work at a startup as I shoulder more risk and very very low chance at a payoff better than I could get at a bigco, and worse case you spend 5 more years…
I think the key thing missing from your analysis is that some (most?) people aren't optimizing their careers for minimal risk and maximal pay. There are a great many other factors at play.
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…
If so, it's voluntary exploitation. She can quit on Monday. Don't give 2 weeks notice if you feel the situation is abusive.
You'll lose a paycheck, but you always have to be prepared for that when at startups. Mainly because they die all the time, but also for these kinds of scenarios.
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…
I’ll never again work obscene hours without obscene compensation. Even with the compensation I’m highly unlikely to do it.
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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…
> 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 crazy thing is, they think they can just throw manhours at bad planning and somehow make it work. You can literally plan well, have a good life and still come out ahead of these chaotic organizations that make everybody run in circles out of pure panic. I have seen this so often in fi…
So i wholly agree that the old adage "work smarter, not harder" applies here.
The fool is most likely yourself if you are available 24/7 and work long hours more often than not.
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> what founders risk in terms of opportunity costs and lower wages is usually only slightly more than very early stage employees Maybe this is different for others, but my co-founder and I spent 2 years bootstrapping before we got our first customer. We gave up 2 years of wages and consumed our savings to do this with no assurance of success, and even after that first customer it was another full year before we had a…
Stable doesn't really describe early stage startups at all. Just because there is a paycheck doesn't mean there will be one when a big account falls through. But anyway, I would urge founders to think more about the logarithmic utility of money and whether it makes sense to take 30x+ the gains of early employees. In particular, think of the number that make it all worthwhile and ask if you need to capture all the gai…
The generosity emerges out of the availability for lending the capital to strangers in society thanks to the successful investment realization.
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I'm part of a mentoring group for recent college grads. One of our biggest challenges is that much of the conversation on HN, Twitter, Blind, and other sites assumes that FAANG admission is guaranteed. This becomes a major struggle for juniors when they realize that there aren't any FAANG offices in their location. Many others apply to FAANG but don't receive offers, which is devastating if every HN comment, medium a…
I work at a company that doesn’t offer a total compensation package competitive with a FAANG, but still definitely very healthy, and we do lose many straight-outta-college candidates all the time who are demanding base pay of $200k+ because “that’s what I’d get if I worked for Google.” After denying that, unfortunately, some candidates insinuate that being offered $1.x * 10^5 for an entry-level position is a shrewd p…
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…
My point is, if you decide to go with a FAANG, you will get the quirky benefits and traits but at the expense of having to throttle yourself much below your capacity and dealing with a ton of frustration coming from the corporate side of things.
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There are two types of options, NSO and ISO. You want ISO as an employee because it's better for taxes, but that has a 90-day exercise window set by the IRS. You can push for yourself paying higher taxes in exchange for more flexibility, but it's a tradeoff. https://carta.com/blog/pte-90-day-window/
Zach Holman one of the first github employees didn't get to exercise any of his options for the aforementioned reasons. When they tell you to throw your life away to believe in the vision, nobody tells that 24 y/o to get a lawyer to understand what that actually means. He compiled a list of startups with sane exercise windows: https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows
The a16z link is astonishingly self-serving. Their top line solution was: “One existing solution to the ‘dead equity’ problem has been — and still can be — to make exceptions where appropriate for certain exiting employees. In fact, employers make exceptions all the time for certain employees, depending on their contribution to the company, critical skill set, and so on.” Riiiiiiight - asking nicely for a handout when you are quitting is a great strategy!!
And I would love to know how they come to this conclusion “In our model, we estimate that moving from the current 90-day window to a 10-year window will cost the average remaining employee as much as 80% in incremental dilution.” - just, wow.