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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

#371

Post by stavros »

meekmind wrote: post #370
kingsuper20 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To that end, Jordan Peterson's lectures on the Bible did me personally a great service in bridging the gap between these seemingly opposed worldviews. JP is considered by many to be a Christian apologist and has done a incredible work in describing a completely rational and sympathetic view of Christianity. I can't recommend highly enough his lectures freely available on Youtube. Having listened to most of them, he c…

But why not just let religious people be religious? I don't understand why I have to watch some lectures just so I can let people believe in whatever they want.

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

#372

Post by zepto »

Grimm1 wrote: post #356
zepto wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that case, you leave. Depending on how long it takes you to get to this point, it could have cost you a great deal in lost opportunity and benefits. The fact that you can get another job is irrelevant to that. Which is the point of this overall thread - you could easily have been better off at an established company.

I don't know how that follows, you're not going to necessarily escape terrible bosses just by going to an established org. If that's the thought you'll have quite the rude awakening. Everything you just said is true of working at a big co as well. Plenty of people at big cos have bad bosses, plenty get over worked. Plenty feel they have no input etc etc, this is a human organizational and work issue that is true of b…

> you're not going to necessarily escape terrible bosses just by going to an established org

No, but you will be paid more over time and switching jobs won’t cost you deferred payment in terms of vesting.

If you can land a startup job with the same salary and benefits as a bigco, then by all means do so. This is more about the poor value of deferred compensation.

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

#373

Post by ZephyrBlu »

ffggvv wrote: post #308
reikonomusha wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ironically google pay is competitively low when youre at that tier. having worked there and other places google pays the least out of top tier companies. (no im not considering amazon or msft as the same level)

Which companies do you consider top tier?

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

#374

Post by ZephyrBlu »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #367
jsonne wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic because Utah is becoming a tech hot spot driven in part by the large Mormon presence.

That’s interesting, I remember taking a negotiations course at MIT, and the professor noted that when she was teaching Mormons, they had ridiculously high social and human capital compared to most of their urban peers, especially because of the travel to other countries in many cases.

> ridiculously high social and human capital compared to most of their urban peers

I don't understand what this means. Are you just talking about connections?

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

#375

Post by Grimm1 »

zepto wrote: post #372
Grimm1 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how that follows, you're not going to necessarily escape terrible bosses just by going to an established org. If that's the thought you'll have quite the rude awakening. Everything you just said is true of working at a big co as well. Plenty of people at big cos have bad bosses, plenty get over worked. Plenty feel they have no input etc etc, this is a human organizational and work issue that is true of b…

> you're not going to necessarily escape terrible bosses just by going to an established org No, but you will be paid more over time and switching jobs won’t cost you deferred payment in terms of vesting. If you can land a startup job with the same salary and benefits as a bigco, then by all means do so. This is more about the poor value of deferred compensation.

> In a bad startup you typically can’t ‘push back’ meaningfully. If the management doesn’t understand how to treat people well, people pushing back won’t educate them, and employees have to get work done to justify their presence rather than fighting battles all the time.

Is what started our sub thread here, I didn't believe we've been talking financials. If we have been, then in base salary I guess I still disagree, but yeah at least with RSUs it's hard to beat. That said I've interviewed for startups where the base salary for an IC position was like 230k+, they're rarer, founded by exceptional past founders who raised ridiculous sized rounds, and all just as rare as a job at a FAANG so I don't know, is the real problem that all 85th percentile and below of all jobs pay like shit or treat people poorly?

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

#376

Post by mLuby »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #365
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a well-known phenomenon around subjective well-being. It plays out in very interesting ways, for example, most millionaires don’t view themselves as wealthy. People untrained in escaping these dark thought patterns usually aren’t as happy as they could be.

> People untrained in escaping these dark thought patterns

What is this training of which you speak?

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

#377

Post by btheshoe »

NeverFade wrote: post #355
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is a good summary of the problem I was describing: It's easy to say that anyone who can get a FAANG job should get a FAANG job, but if circumstances don't line up, what else? That's where many students draw a blank, because all of the advice they've consumed revolves around FAANG job offers that may not arrive. Statistically, more people are rejected than accepted by FAANG companies. A lot of my mentorin…

The number of successful top tech companies keeps growing. The winner-takes-all reality of our current tech business environment means that the job market is: 1. These top companies that pay very well and offer excellent career growth prospects. 2. Everything else below. So the real answer is "keep working at your fallback option until you can finally graduate to one of the lucrative positions at the top of the pyram…

Companies below the top can pay competitive rates, of deal with their employees wanting to go to the top. this is a natural consequence of market economies

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

#378

Post by mLuby »

BurningFrog wrote: post #304
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…

> This is exploitation plain and simple 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.

> Don't give 2 weeks notice

If they want you gone too, then sure. Otherwise, consider if and how that move may affect your next job's reference or background checks.

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

#379

Post by jchonphoenix »

jhbao wrote: post #138

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…

The reason tech tends to compare vs FANG is that the "canonical" startup is founded by a Stanford or Harvard graduate and hires friends/employees exclusively from Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. This was certainly the case for the tech focused breakouts in the last few decades (FB, Google, Dropbox, Palantir, Stripe).

Given these are the example startups, every one of those employees more or less had a FANG offer as a backup.

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

#380

Post by throwaway052221 »

taurath wrote: post #258
softwaredoug wrote: post #193

10+ years ago part of the allure of tech startups was they really “got” what made technologists jobs fulfilling. Back then companies had management that had no idea how to build high quality software. There was lots of waterfall like process and TPS report style bureacracy. Fast forward to the present. FAANG companies dominate the economy. They pay well, offer upside in actual stock, AND most crucially: they do a bet…

The current stereotype among my circle in FAANG is that they move slowly and you’re more likely to be working on something dreadfully boring and also have few opportunities to branch out. That’s what keeps a lot of people going to startups though I agree with the OP the financial and work life arrangement gets less and less ideal.

This stereotype doesn’t hold true for Facebook.

On excitement: As a software engineer you get to choose the team (out of 100s) you join after completing bootcamp. Unless you intentionally choose something boring I just don’t see this being the norm! You are also free, and often encouraged, to switch teams every few years.

On velocity: This may be more subjective but as someone who has worked at 2 startups and founded another I’ve not noticed too much difference in pace. It’s been a very fulfilling experience for me.

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