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I am currently graduating with a CS degree and interpreting this as a warning to not accept the offer from the exciting startup and instead accept the offer from the big corporate fintech company. Is there any reason I could be wrong?
Companies that have a good ideas and provide needed product/services will survive. I think the era of stupid money chasing silly ideas are over. Same thing happened at the end of the dot-com era.
Dagnabit. Here we go again - this is a fantastic, pragmatic amendment to those notes -> https://dalton.substack.com/p/letter-to-myself-in-late-2008?... For a taste: "Doing multiple small layoffs is a form of cascading failure. Do one layoff, but much much deeper than seems correct. Do it decisively. Do it so that you get profitable. In your case that is something like a 70% cut, not a 5-10% cut. Yes you read that rig…
Also an opportunity: 1. Good people will be more available (there will be public company cuts and private cuts, as well as resignations, especially people working for companies in the Series B to Series D range (who raised those rounds at the old multiples) who will need massive growth/patience for their options to grow into the new multiples). 2. As businesses cut costs, those are opportunities for products and serv…
This is key. Innovation aside, if you can simply provide comparable services at a lower price point, the downturn just increased your customer base tenfolds: nobody is looking too much at cutting costs when things are looking up. Find niches that got too greedy over the past few years, and undercut them.
> No one cannot predict how bad the economy will get Make an effort YC.
Companies that have a good ideas and provide needed product/services will survive. I think the era of stupid money chasing silly ideas are over. Same thing happened at the end of the dot-com era.
I am currently graduating with a CS degree and interpreting this as a warning to not accept the offer from the exciting startup and instead accept the offer from the big corporate fintech company. Is there any reason I could be wrong?
This is the time for you to take the maximum possible risks. Usually as you get older your appetite for risk decreases. Ergo, take that startup offer. You will always have a job as a programmer.
Taking risks for the sake of increasing risk is a combination of naive and stupid. Increased risk taking must come with an increasing reward.
In an economic collapse and likely recession, having a stable job at a large established company would give you stability and, soon enough, capital for buying up home and basement prices.
Working at an unprofitable early stage startup will give you a couple high fives from the founders, but you'll be in constant fear of losing that paycheck. The reward must be substantially higher than a steady big-corp job in normal times, and even more so in today's job and economic environment.
> Ergo, take that startup offer. You will always have a job as a programmer.
Working at a startup does not magically make you a better programmer any more than working at a large company automatically turns you into a cog churning out Java beans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the era of stupid money chasing silly ideas are over It's quite possible that this era of that is over, but I'll eat my hat if another era of stupid money chasing silly ideas doesn't spring up within a decade.
“Yeah, but this time it's different!” - Someone in 5-10 years.
> No one cannot predict how bad the economy will get Make an effort YC.