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Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

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Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#161

Post by wpietri »

wpietri wrote: post #157
RamshackleJ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always curious about companies who talk about "caring about things other than just money". Maybe I'm missing somethings but if you are a for-profit company by definition you care about money, any claims other wise feel like marketing.

I used to work for a proprietary financial trading firm, where we turned the founders' pile of money into a bigger pile of money. It's the purest "only care about the money" circumstance, and even there they occasionally cared about things other than money. E.g., the people they worked with. More broadly, though, you misunderstand what companies are about. They're just a collection of people who get together to do a…

(That isn't to say that reptiles in suits won't put on the mask of "changing the world!" when it gives them an advantage. We could all name examples like that. But there are plenty of sincere people out there.)

Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#162

Post by ditonal »

bla2 wrote: post #5

Sounds like the market is telling startups that early engineers are worth more than 0.1% of stock options.

O.1% of common shares with complicated tax options. Investors get preferred shares cause they invest money. But engineers get common shares even though they're asked to take paycuts.

Startups insist this is "standard". Well I hope it's standard for them to fail until they actually value engineers. I don't see why engineers need to be a monastic underclass to subsidize founders and VCs.

Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#164

Post by znq »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #140
znq wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. For both of our companies [1][2] we pay a fair salary plus a quarterly bonus on top of that based on what we can give (based on the company's quarterly profit results). We also offer remote retreats (so far Cape Town, Thailand, Martinique, Spain and Skiing in the Alps) and the biggest contributor to everyone's satisfaction is that we let everyone work from where ever they want and as much as they want as l…

The problem is there's no way to know how true the promises are. What do "flex hours" mean to them? Is it conditional, if so, on what? How far does their trust really go? Compensation doesn't have this problem. You can't offer me $160k and then pay me $120k six months down the road. I mean, you can, but not with a straight face. The soft benefits you described are one CTO/manager/investor change, or engineer bus acci…

Totally agree. A lot of it is based on trust and a future that no one can predict nor guarantee. We're a small company of 20 (in my opinion) great people and we just have a different relationship with our employees than most other business owners.

While I totally get that the future is always uncertain, I think past actions of myself and our management team (which also includes employees) speak a lot for how we are probably gonna do things in the future. Our philosophy is called Optimizing for Happiness, because we try to base our decisions on what is best for everyone's happiness, even if it means to sometimes make less of an profit as long as the overall profit is still positive.

It's difficult to explain how we do things, but to give you one example of the past. We had always very successful quarters, except of one where we couldn't pay bonuses. In that quarter people did not complain, but also offered us to voluntarily work less (and get paid less) to overcome this situation. In the end it didn't come that far but I highly appreciated it. And I think this can only happen if it's a give and take from both sides and everyone genuinely caring about each other.

Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#165

Post by vojant »

I ma co-founder of London based startup and salary was one of the reasons I decided to build dev team in Poland. East Europe is great resource for smart software engineers asking for 50% of what we would have to pay in London (and London is still 50% behind SF). I am surprised why so little startups are looking for remote employees.

Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#166

Post by tdumitrescu »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #39

One of my friends was rejected while interviewing for some SV startups. But was not rejected by Google. Now he works in Google. Startups should re-think how they're interviewing people. Seems like they suffer more from broken interview process, not Google salaries.

But when everyone on HN is constantly complaining about how the Google interview is ridiculous and shouldn't be emulated by startups, this sounds like a perfectly acceptable outcome. Skills needed for successful startup engineering vs Google engineering are not the same.

Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#167

Post by natosaichek »

Arizhel wrote: post #19
krschultz wrote: post #7

If you are a startup and are trying to compete head to head with Google / FB / Amazon / Apple / Microsoft for the same people, you are going to have a really hard time recruiting. But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons. There are plenty of great engineers that want to work remotely and don't have that option at the large companies. There are also plenty…

>But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons. There are plenty of great engineers that want to work remotely and don't have that option at the large companies. They don't have that option at startups either, because the startups all want people who'll be at the office 18 hours a day with "team spirit". I think this article is useless. Startups are only for pe…

I'm 35 and have only worked at startups. I'm at the largest company I've ever worked for now, and we've grown since I started from ~20 to ~80 employees. Previous companies I was in the first 10. I think you need to pick your startups better. Every company I've worked at has pad me reasonably well(admittedly less than the big companies), has not required more than 40 hours/week except literally for one or two days around a high pressure launch or demo.

I guess you're right, in that I wouldn't go work for a large tech company - it would be hard to convince me to give up the level of freedom I have and ability to contribute to company direction.

I treat startup stock like lottery tickets. It'll almost certainly not pay off, but it's a nice dream. All the companies I've worked at are still around and doing well, so the payout(s) still might happen someday.

Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#168

Post by elastic_church »

krschultz wrote: post #7

If you are a startup and are trying to compete head to head with Google / FB / Amazon / Apple / Microsoft for the same people, you are going to have a really hard time recruiting. But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons. There are plenty of great engineers that want to work remotely and don't have that option at the large companies. There are also plenty…

> But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons.

There's something in the water at the big companies, many employees there think they have passed a rite of passage and that EVERYONE NOT WORKING THERE simply didn't pass.

I wish I wasn't exposed to evidence of this, but unfortunately I have. Many people don't consider the idea that others just don't want to work there.

In one example of this, I was brought in to interview at one of the big ones, referral, special project. I liked the idea of not necessarily being just some pawn in the never-ending recruitment draft, but someone on a special project.

And here I am, talking with the project manager and how other organizations sometimes do custom integrations into their enterprise product. Regarding those other organizations, and I quote "Now this is some 100 million dollar company in Canada, so you know their engineers don't know anything"

and I'm like YOU KNOW I WORK FOR 100 MILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES... RIGHT? I work in Series A and Series B startups primarily, after their 12 million funding rounds close they its often at a 50 - 100 million paper valuation.

The hubris....

Other examples are what I've heard from bus drivers talking about their riders, other engineers that disagree with the hubris, and just the general society that also puts Googlers and other big tech company employees on a pedestal because of the enviable compensation and perks.

Re: Big Tech Company Salaries Are Hurting Startups

#169

Post by antisthenes »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #80
RamshackleJ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always curious about companies who talk about "caring about things other than just money". Maybe I'm missing somethings but if you are a for-profit company by definition you care about money, any claims other wise feel like marketing.

To me the big non monetary currency is time. Average US commute time is about half an hour [1], add to that another 15 minutes on each side for context switching and "settling in" and it's an easy 10 hours a week at least you're saving. Remote work isn't for every job or person, but the financial difference would need to be significant to drag me back into an office. 1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/20…

Jesus...That certainly puts things into perspective.

10 hours a week is an extra book you can read or 5 movies to watch or just...10 hours to relax and work on your side projects.

520 hours per year.

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