Startup jobs with low salary and negligible equity, what gives?

Post by eropple » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

lsc wrote: post #80

untog wrote: post #50

In short: you know too much. These salaries are taken by fresh college grads who don't know better, and think the adventure of "a startup" is better than working for a larger company (it can be, but there's no guarantee). Many startup CEOs would like you to believe they are the only ones doing interesting work, but there are plenty of larger organisations that are still fun to work for, and more likely to value you a…

>In short: you know too much. These salaries are taken by fresh college grads who don't know better, and think the adventure of "a startup" is better than working for a larger company (it can be, but there's no guarantee). While you are right, you make it sound like $90K is underpaid for someone right out of college. $90K is pretty good for a promising kid with a fresh degree but no real experience. More than fair; t…

Post by TheCoelacanth » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

hyperbot wrote: post #55

If the pay is not high enough for your needs, you shouldn't bother looking at startups, or at least you shouldn't be looking at pre-series-A startups. Everybody has their own motivations for why they choose to work somewhere, and money/compensation isn't always the top consideration. At early-stage startups where money is tight, salary will usually be difficult to negotiate too much, but equity can be negotiated more…

Post by joshavant » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 7:33 PM UTC

ef4 wrote: post #83

patio11 wrote: post #57

Joel Spolsky had a really interesting insight [+] once about hiring pools: they're disproportionately filled with people who you don't want working for you, because if you're hireable, you exit the hiring pool fairly quickly, and the dynamics of this system quickly mean that the pool is filled full of people who aren't even FizzBuzz qualified. I think the other side of the market is isomorphic to this: any publicly a…

Yes, definitely this. Don't go through the front door. At most, use publicly listed job ads as a form of research. Never assume they represent all the jobs that are actually available to you. There is no substitute for actually talking to people and getting to know them. Make your own wishlist of companies you'd like to work for. People running startups who are even minimally competent know they need to network a lot…

Post by montz1 » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 8:52 PM UTC

informatimago wrote: post #5

You missed H1B.

Post by lsc » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

smeyer wrote: post #86

lsc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In short: you know too much. These salaries are taken by fresh college grads who don't know better, and think the adventure of "a startup" is better than working for a larger company (it can be, but there's no guarantee). While you are right, you make it sound like $90K is underpaid for someone right out of college. $90K is pretty good for a promising kid with a fresh degree but no real experience. More than fair; t…

>they are unlikely to get much more at a real company It depends on the school. For my friends going into software out of college, 90k was towards the bottom end (the top end was more like 200k).