Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Working for a startup makes less sense

zainamro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 392 posts

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#111

Post by account73466 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #65

Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies. To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side. Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made. 1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me t…

You review seems pretty accurate. Very rarely there is some lucrative incentive to join as an employee.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#112

Post by cj »

senordevnyc wrote: post #65

Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies. To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side. Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made. 1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me t…

From your post, it sounds like you value:

1) Safety and predictability in compensation

2) Ownership over your company’s strategy (e.g. mobile) only if you’re paid highly for doing it (not a bad thing, but many other people exist who would willingly take a pay cut for the ability to have an actual impact on company strategy)

3) A highly organized and logical hiring process and qualification evaluation

4) Custom negotiated options contract outside of industry norms OR BigCo stock that has value today

5) 5 weeks of paid vacation

It definitely sounds like you made the correct decision by choosing BigCo over startup.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#113

Post by smileysteve »

aeternum wrote: post #19

Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent c…

> It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.

There's a thin line between growth through mistakes and learning bad habits (because of lack of training and no colleagues with experience).

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#114

Post by ec109685 »

aeternum wrote: post #19

Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent c…

I think it depends on the big company. With aws or on-prem cloud native tech, there is a lot of freedom and responsibility given to individual engineers to build services and applications in an autonomous fashion. This goes for everyone, including folks with a year of two out of college.

I have seen no limit to what an individual engineer can accomplish at my big company as long as they have the desire and ambition.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#115

Post by Grimm1 »

I believe this post does a very good job of bringing the elephant in the room into the discussion. The current structure of equity compensation for early-stage startup companies is simply not enticing enough to get people to choose that over the salary and predictable path of BigTechCos. I love working in startups and even I, when presented with the choice, pad the salary knowing that throughout the funding rounds, if the startup is lucky, any fractional percent that I have will be so diluted that I'm likely to walk away with nothing to show for the work I put in beside the cash I opted for, hopefully, some new connections and some learnings. While some of the more successful startups can compete with those companies on base salary it is just not enough necessarily to convince the top talent that you are the right move for their career. That said there are ways to improve this such as the increased transparency OP wrote about in their post. We should also give more equity to early employees and have favorable terms around vesting for these employees and better timing around the loss of options after leaving a company. Of course this negatively impacts founder equity and potentially investors as well. But to me, worrying about that negative impact to founders and investors comes off as short sighted on part of the investors and founders. Ensuring your early employees will be taken care of means they'll work harder for your company and this will increase the chance you'll survive long enough to see an event that makes anyone a return on their investment. The numbers are so overwhelmingly stacked against startups that worrying about the couple million less you'll have because you gave out 1-1.5% equity to your early employees is really silly, very much chicken before the egg. Instead we currently have the weird known but unspoken fact that your early employees will likely get nothing in a liquidity event while still asking them to put their all into your company which is unethical at best and downright manipulative and harmful at worst. So yeah startups are in a weird place. This doesn't even touch on companies that just stay private forever which is another issue all together.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#117

Post by toomuchtodo »

soup10 wrote: post #105
senordevnyc wrote: post #65

Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies. To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side. Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made. 1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me t…

>watching them get squeezed by big tech companies offering sky high comp fills me with glee. Enjoy your new life as a corporate drone! Note to the salty drones in the comments below: I started a business that was passively profitable for years and now pretty much just work on what interests me

“They said from their desk at 8pm at night, while the drone had already gotten home, had dinner with their family, and was putting their kids to bed.”

Comp and work/life balance smoothes over a lot of negatives inherent in corporate life.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#118

Post by ec109685 »

Isn’t this also a function of the limited runway VC’s give to startups. If they 10x’d the amount of funding for seed and series A, startups could afford to hire the best.

It would add a lot more risk, but given the outsized rewards, it would still be profitable for some VC’s.

Otherwise, there will be lots of ideas left un-persued because many experienced engineers will not want themselves or their employees to live (in relative terms) an ascetic lifestyle while perusing their dream.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#119

Post by hitekker »

cj wrote: post #112
senordevnyc wrote: post #65

Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies. To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side. Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made. 1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me t…

From your post, it sounds like you value: 1) Safety and predictability in compensation 2) Ownership over your company’s strategy (e.g. mobile) only if you’re paid highly for doing it (not a bad thing, but many other people exist who would willingly take a pay cut for the ability to have an actual impact on company strategy) 3) A highly organized and logical hiring process and qualification evaluation 4) Custom negoti…

> Custom negotiated options contract outside of industry norms

I think you mean the GP wants options within industry norms, which are outside of a failing startup's shoestring budget. On a separate note, what are your thoughts on the glassdoor ratings of Localize?

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Localize-Reviews-E1427641....

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#120

Post by ben509 »

soup10 wrote: post #105
senordevnyc wrote: post #65

Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies. To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side. Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made. 1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me t…

>watching them get squeezed by big tech companies offering sky high comp fills me with glee. Enjoy your new life as a corporate drone! Note to the salty drones in the comments below: I started a business that was passively profitable for years and now pretty much just work on what interests me

But it's not your whole life because we're living longer and it's enough money to retire earlier. Suck up the drone life, retire early and spend 50 years with no boss, no customers, just tooling away on whatever you please.
Post reply on HN