361–370 of 430 posts
Reading all these grumpy comments made me think that there's a well.. startup opportunity for a counsel type firm that gives consultations to would be employees and guides them thru the startups minefield for an extra fee. This service would partner with law and accountings firms and terms would be a fixed 500 usd fee for a more or less standard consultation and an offer review, plus 5% of stock options gains should…
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They say “skin in the game” but they mean “skin in the machine”. These sorts of word games work on young naive people, especially young men. Maybe we need to broadly educate people that this sort of exploitation is not okay...
The valley is a machine, caked with blood, running on flesh.
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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…
> that's what you have to do to change the world It may be what you need to change the world. But making a n uber clone for dogs is not changing the world. Literally 99% of startups have zero claim to trying to change the world.
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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 consider myself on call 24/7 and tell my team this but in 3 years have never been woken up, nor have I had to wake someone else up. One day it will happen but once in 3+ years is perfectly reasonable.
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…
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…
People untrained in escaping these dark thought patterns usually aren’t as happy as they could be.
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…
Why do HP and Qualcomm want to offshore but FAANGs dont?
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>>> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background >How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion? The author wrote: "From the ages of 19-21, I spent my time as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon church. I worked 12 hours a day for two years straight with only Christmas and Mother’s Day off. [...] For this job, I was paid a total…
Ironic because Utah is becoming a tech hot spot driven in part by the large Mormon presence.
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Does anyone consider FAANG to be startups? I'm confused by your comment.
No, what they are saying is that people present a false dilemma where your options to work are either at a FAANG or at a startup. Most people work at non-FAANG companies. If you're going to do a write-up on relative merits of working at a startup vs a larger company things are going to lean heavily in favor of the FAANG because the overall risk to compensation is much more favorable. But if you compare a startup to a…
What is success? The article assumes for the most part that success is mainly monetary, and further it makes the classic mistake of comparing success monetarily to companies like Facebook. Success is different depending on many factors. For example, if a person needs or likes guidance and structure, a startup is likely not a good fit, especially when they are inexperienced. There are some good points about the strong…
In my experience, working at a startup can get you more experience and responsibility faster, and the work itself can be more satisfying. The compensation itself is a lottery and should be treated as such. And there will be shenanigans. I do think that startups more closely align with people with less personal responsibilities and a higher tolerance for risk. EDIT: downvotes? just saying - this was my personal experi…
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> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background and prefers the “certainty” of a corporate environment. I'm a practicing Catholic and have worked either as a freelancer or a startup founder for >90% of my career. Not sure how you're drawing that conclusion but plenty of my peers are religious in a traditional sense and work in startups.
It's a thing that engineers (particularly software, hardware guys aren't as rude) really have to watch. Given the tendency for programmers to be that edgy libertarian atheist guy, it's easy to be unthinkingly rude to a coworker who is of a churchly persuasion.
For example, it is commonly understood that religion and science are always opposed. However, it's rarely ever mentioned that Christian theologians for centuries consistently modified their belief structure to reflect reality as their understanding of reality improved. In other words, quite often if there was a seeming contradiction between doctrine and observable fact, the doctrine was changed, as opposed to ignoring the observable fact.
Obviously there are exceptions to this, like the Inquisition, or other dark periods through history. Religion is not without it's faults, but that is true of any principle around which people organize. The important part, for the materialist, objectivist, or athiest; is recognizing the organizing principles as being somehow useful to people prior to the refinement of the scientific method. I assume that those people gained real material value, and to dispose of what those people believed without extracting and maintaining that value is simply destructive.