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Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

jatins.gitlab.io

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Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#211

Post by xondono »

ChrisGammell wrote: post #157
xondono wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I do hardware (sch/pcb) design in spain, I’m in a lead position in a small company. When I look at what I’ve built, I have experience with technologies that most of my college mates are still mystified with (e.g. DDR4 or x64 architecture). Most electronics in europe are industrial/power electronics, and most engineers spend their days doing what amounts to paperwork. In contrast I’ve had to ship new designs on…

Would love to hear more about your database system!

Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronic and Amp Hour fame? Boy I better not screw this up! :D

Bad news: I use Altium

Good news: I’m trying out kicad on my spare time (feel free to take the credit)

As to the question, Altium is quite flexible in regards to using a database as a library, but it is riddled with bugs, workarounds and generally weird stuff. I’ve tried from the extremely simple to the overly complex. In that order:

- Easy level: Excel files on a shared NAS.

Pros:

* easy to set up.

* easy to convince management to try it out.

Cons:

* Not really a database

* You need to close Altium to add parts (this is very frustrating during sch capture)

- Medium level: Acces database (mdb) on a shared NAS

Pros:

* easy to set up (not as quite as excel but similar)

* you can add parts from inside Altium itself (with limited input interface)

Cons:

* because of how buggy Altium is the database tends to get completely corrupted. Almost daily backups are mandatory.

* You need to set up a form for part management, directly editing the mdb files is a path to disaster even with as little as 2 people.

Insane level: SQL server on AWS. Conected to local LAN through VPN. A simple php CRUD on apache for management.

Pros:

* Can handle heavish loads (a T2 micro can support about a dozen hardware engineers working in parallel)

* should be more scalable

* hides a lot of the complexity of the database for the junior engineers.

* small sized NAS won’t suffer while someone is generating a BOM.

* changes to database are more manageable if someone on the team knows sql.

* more reliable and resilient to altium bugs

Cons:

* No internet connection means no one works.

* possibly the most expensive solution

PS: I’m on my phone, I’ll reformat stuff when I get my pc to make it more legible

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#212

Post by TomMarius »

exelius wrote: post #194
bluedino wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

401k’s haven been that spectacular for the last 15 years

Exactly my point! We can’t grow at 7% in perpetuity; so at some point it’s going to have to slow down. It feels like that’s starting to happen.

Why can't we? From my point of view, we've just began. Maybe we will see a low decade now, but the decade after that will be incredible.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#213

Post by lambdasquirrel »

birken wrote: post #53

One thing that gets glossed over a lot with startups is that often times the technical skill level is really low. If you are a young engineer and you are hoping to learn technical skills, be very very careful about which startup you join because you might end up at one where nobody actually has any idea what they are doing. And if you yourself are in the learning phase of your career, you might not have the experienc…

One other issue is that even at a startup that did this right, you're still in danger of learning from a smaller set of individuals. It can lend itself to group-think / inbreeding.

I'm not sure that startup vs. big company is useful anymore, if it ever has been. You can be in a team in a big company that is an awful place for learning, for example.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#214

Post by lambdasquirrel »

luminati wrote: post #141

Honest question: Why does every blog post that talks about working with a startup, always pick Facebook and Google for the comparison? Both these companies are extreme outliers (probably in the history of business!). Their outsized pay comes from their outsized profits, which comes from selling your data. I find it very ironic, that these very same people who diss startups love dissing Google and FB as being evil, bu…

Facebook and Google are so big they pretty much set the standard for what people talk about. You might prefer to say, I dunno, AirBnB, but that detracts from the point people are trying to make, which is that a bigger de-risked company is better on financial terms.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#215

Post by smallgovt »

TomMarius wrote: post #212
exelius wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my point! We can’t grow at 7% in perpetuity; so at some point it’s going to have to slow down. It feels like that’s starting to happen.

Why can't we? From my point of view, we've just began . Maybe we will see a low decade now, but the decade after that will be incredible.

+1, doesn't it seem like ML can drive just as much GDP growth as the technology that spurred growth over the past decades? it's not clear the US will be at the forefront, but nobody is stopping investors from diversifying their portfolio globally.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#216

Post by icedchai »

bluedino wrote: post #192
exelius wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the 7% return figure trotted out as average equity returns; but I think that number reflects a lot of “easy money” from the asymmetry of global industrialization in the post-WW2 era. Europe and America spent the 1920s through 1940s building fossil fuel powered heavy industry through a couple of particularly destructive wars. Then we spent the next 50 years spreading it around the globe, with American and Europe…

401k’s haven been that spectacular for the last 15 years

My Vanguard account, which I've had since 2007, is showing 10.8% returns over the past 10 years.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#217

Post by davidjnelson »

autotune wrote: post #166
sanderjd wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW: I kind of feel the opposite. Or at least I think the experience is a real trade-off. The skills I gained as a first employee at a startup were more along the lines of business and marketing. The engineering skills required were pretty trivial: manage a small Heroku setup, write early backend and frontend app boilerplate, spin up an initial db schema, integrate CSS from a contract designer, work on email templat…

The more interesting skills someone learns when implementing Heroku is when they learn it doesn't scale and the challenges in migrating off of it.

haha! sadly true. I really wish they had the equivalent of aurora serverless.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#218

Post by icedchai »

TomMarius wrote: post #212
exelius wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my point! We can’t grow at 7% in perpetuity; so at some point it’s going to have to slow down. It feels like that’s starting to happen.

Why can't we? From my point of view, we've just began . Maybe we will see a low decade now, but the decade after that will be incredible.

Also keep in mind we already had a "low" decade... the "lost decade" of 2000 through 2012-ish. That was a bad time for investing.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#219

Post by icedchai »

refurb wrote: post #187
docker_up wrote: post #119

I was employee 40, and approximately 15th engineer of a YC startup where the founders made roughly $50M each, and I made just under $80,000. During this time, had I gone to work at a FANG, I would have probably made a few million dollars just from being a senior software engineer. I have another friend who has been at 3 startups during this time and deeply regrets leaving his FANG job because he also missed out on mi…

I was employee 40, and approximately 15th engineer of a YC startup where the founders made roughly $50M each, and I made just under $80,000. Wow. Employee 40 is still an early employee, but apparently not when it comes to equity.

After the first 10 employees or so, you're looking at nickle and dime stock option allocations (0.05%, 0.10%...) Factor in dilution, liquidation preferences, etc. and you're looking at a nice down payment at a house... if you're lucky enough to have a successful exit. That's a very big if.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#220

Post by sidlls »

brianwawok wrote: post #19
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #2

Early stage hires at startups have the worst of both worlds: they face the downsides (lower wages, tons of risk, expectation to work long hours) but have muted upsides (small equity grant relative to founders, not even guaranteed to be hired in an acquihire situation). It is arguably even riskier than being a founder.

> It is arguably even riskier than being a founder. Depends what the founder put in. Founder put in 100k? Or founder put in 12 months of unpaid work to build a MVP? He has a fair bit to lose on a splat. Engineer #7? I suspect most developers can find a new job in 1-2 weeks, so the only thing "lost" is potential equity.

Why do you suspect that about developers? I've yet to have a hiring process be faster than a month, and that was unusual. The last time I went looking the turnaround time from recruiter pre-screen to an offer was six weeks. My job hunt lasted three months and I ended up not taking any of the middling offers I got. These were mostly series A and B "startups." I've shifted my focus to bigger, FAANG-like companies.
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