If the cost of housing was substantially lower, perhaps these great engineers would work for startups that could really use their talent, as they might not care as much to being millionaires so they can afford what's considered a middle class home for their family in most other places besides SF/Bay Area.
Working for a startup makes less sense
121–130 of 392 posts
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had kind of the opposite experience. At the startup we were really sluggish it was hard to learn anything because we were jumping into any possible business opportunity before even thinking about ROI because money was always tight. 80% of the time was wasted supporting clients and fixing bugs that were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early. I think the biggest difference is money. A well funded…
> were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early. Can you explain more about this? The mantra is generally ship early and iterate fast. How come the tech team was spending 80% in a bugs rat race? The earlier statement of "80% of the time was wasted supporting clients" seems perfect? i.e. what else should you be doing other than supporting clients who are willing to pay with features and bug fixes? Feel l…
Right, they ship a product with bugs, and than spend all of the time in fire drills instead of core functionality.
Nobody wants to pay for bug fixes.
Do more QA and avoid making your customers part of the QA team.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#123Strongly 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
Enjoy having 90 days to exercise your worthless stock options!
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#124Yes 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…
Briefly to begin, I'm going to read the above extremely uncharitably, not in an effort to besmirch aeternum but instead to try and tear down some terrible guidelines about life choices that I've seen going around. Here follows my translation of the advice above: > Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. You'd personally benefit more from work…
> If your perfect world is being given a task to do and doing it accurately to a high level of perfection
I think it should be obvious if that is what you desire start-ups are not for you. Whoever hired you failed at their job.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#125I've had a related discussion with a few VCs in recent months. Some kinds of startups are effectively impossible to build given current structural constraints on financing them, creating an adverse selection for startups that fit the classic model rather than startups with the highest expected ROI.
Broadly speaking, engineers will work at a discount to market-clearing wages of maybe 20% if they really like the startup. This is not necessarily an issue if you are well-funded and require ordinary levels of skill from your engineering team, which is most startups. Some types of software startups can't be built without a team of engineers where the market-clearing wages are typically more like $500k-1M. Even at a 20% discount to market, the amount of capital involved just for headcount is far too large for early stage investors, and startups that try to fit within the capital they can raise by getting by with less qualified engineers always fail at technical execution. Consequently, startups that have this property are effectively un-investable because there is not enough capital available in the early stages to achieve technical viability even though they may be great investments in the abstract. This wasn't a serious issue a decade ago, but it is spreading to a larger set of startups as wages rapidly escalate.
Given a long-term glut of capital, this could be addressed in principle by designing a model that modifies the distribution of capital/equity over time to accommodate startups that have difficulty financing the initial wage gap. As the startups grow, one would expect the average wages to start reverting toward the mean, but these startups won't get out of the gate without that initial investment in capable and very expensive engineers.
I've had interesting and productive discussions around this, it is seen as a way to bring fresh blood into an early stage pipeline that is drying up. It is obvious to almost everyone that the classic model of how you finance and build a startup team is breaking down in the current market environment, with an adverse impact on expected returns.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#126Strongly 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…
> Fuck being an employee for a startup so they can bleed you dry.
Could not agree more, and this is my stance which I will happily share with anyone who cares to listen. I was first employee (and only engineer) at a startup which dangled 'equity' in front of me but didn't deliver. Contract was so full of gotchas that the path to me seeing some sort of actual payoff was astronomically unlikely.
90 day exercise windows upon leaving or even getting sick and being forced to leave. Liquiditation preferences for VC shareholdings. No way to sell your options on a secondary market. Permission of the board required to actually exercise them. Half a dozen clauses that allowed the board to revoke your options at any point in time. Basically, they want you to give your fucking life to them for 5-10 years with only a contract not worth the paper it's written on as an incentive.
Between the shitty equity terms and the fact I was building a damn tech company to make someone other than myself rich, I told them to go fuck themselves and took a job at Google for over 3x times the pay. I have no regrets. Being an early employee at a startup is a complete waste of time and I still beat myself up for being so naive. Sharing this so other people don't make the same mistake.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#127My experience: engineering at Startup #1 for 2 years, then Google for 3 years, then Startup #2 for 4 years, and now I've been working with seed stage companies as a VC for the last 7 years. The amount I earned as an engineer was highest at Startup #1 (got lucky!), significantly lower at Google, and a little lower than that at Startup #2. Startup #2 is still chugging along, which could eventually make it on par with o…
> I was senior enough to be single-handedly responsible for large projects like a distributed search engine and a logging and analytics service.
I'm going to be honest, I don't think this is the norm. I worked at a start up for years and never experienced that level of ownership or challenge. We basically built a glorified CRUD with VC money. Good for you! But I don't think this is the case for many? Or maybe it was just me.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#128Maybe startups should try cities like Pittsburgh, Columbus, Atlanta, Knoxville, etc. Lots of talent that will work for less for the simple reason that the cost of living is not so stupidly high. Hell even SoCal, Portland, Austin, and Chicago are bargains compared to NYC or worse SF.
Problem is that all the capital is in NYC and SF, and they still prefer to invest locally. At this point VCs should just skip the middle man and cut checks directly to landlords and property speculators.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#129Well said. Startups can't really compete with MGAFA those days. Not the people, not the resources. For domain like ML, it is hard to imagine what you can realistically achieve outside of working in those companies.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#130I've had a related discussion with a few VCs in recent months. Some kinds of startups are effectively impossible to build given current structural constraints on financing them, creating an adverse selection for startups that fit the classic model rather than startups with the highest expected ROI. Broadly speaking, engineers will work at a discount to market-clearing wages of maybe 20% if they really like the startu…
> Some kinds of startups are effectively impossible to build given current structural constraints on financing them
There are a lot of things that are impossible to raise money for, that are possible to bootstrap. If you're willing to work on something for 5 or 6 years without getting paid, there are lots of opportunities that open up that have high barrier to entry because they essentially can't be copied by venture backed companies.