251–260 of 348 posts
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and your lack of higher salary history will be a huge red flag to your rental, credit, auto, mortgage, and accredited investor application
I don’t understand what you’re (sarcastically) trying to get at here. That if you ask questions you can’t get a reasonably high salary?
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most companies dont ever reach billion dollar evaluations. say they get sold for a reasonable $100M after 4 years. my 1% stake as a founding engineer should gross me $1M (house money). but since there were 3 rounds I generally end up with car money. I've been through this several times, and ended up with car money or nothing, and I dont think I'm alone. a warning to fresh grads that they may not end up retiring after…
This is a great point. I think that on average you're unlikely to recoup the difference in wages in the event that the company is sold. I worked for a startup for four years and got nothing.
To counter this perspective, usually founders take FAR less salary if at all.
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I would expect most to be disappointing too, and it's a good idea to avoid those. Proper logging doesn't take more time, it just takes more discipline / giving a damn. People and companies that say: we don't have time to do it right Almost always mean: we don't know how to do it right Talent, not time, is the enemy of quality. (at some point that stops being true, but most companies (startups or not) are soooo far fr…
For the first year or so, the only way to get builds of our software was for me to click "build" in Visual Studio, on my laptop. I definitely knew how to set up a build server, CI pipeline, etc. It just would have meant that every time I (not we!) changed the build, I would have to fix my own machine and the pipeline. I'd much rather spend that time fixing one more issue, or adding one more feature. There are numerou…
This is good stuff. I want to emphasize one point. A company may offer you options, or restricted stock units, or any sort of equity in the company. When they do this, they are asking you to invest in the company. They are asking you to buy your shares with your scarcest resource: time. Do NOT be the slightest bit embarrassed to ask any question you want about the company's capital situation, funding prospects, premo…
> And, remember, you can't pay your rent or buy groceries with unvested options. You need cash money for that. You can't pay your rent or buy groceries with vested options either.
Then again the UK is saner when it comes to employee shares - and I am lucky that I have EMI options - which are taxed at 10% CGT and 0 income tax.
The only valid reasons for working at a seed-stage / series A startup: You are a founder. They are working with a technology or in an industry that you specifically want to work with and it is very hard to work on it professionally, and doing side projects are infeasible. You need experience and you have no other option to get experience. You are getting a significant title bump that moves your career forwards. Inval…
I guess this might fall under "You need experience and you have no other option to get experience.", but I ended up on the path of working for startups because 1. I never graduated from university (life came up, and I couldn't afford to keep going); but, also, 2. I don't live in the US (I'm Canadian.) Any of the US bigcorps that want to hire programmers, expect them to get a visa and move to the US. You know what you…
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> If you want your startup to run for more than a year I've never seen a start-up fail on account of technical debt. Re-engineering is expensive, but it means you have something worth re-engineering. I've seen lots of start-ups fail because money that should have been spent attracting and retaining users got burned on an elaborate engineering process.
Ok but like middle ground exists here. There is a huge difference between thinking carefully about what you need to do right and planning what bits are going to end up as technical debt, and how you can fix it later - and what actually ends up happening in my experience where everything is shit because we're too busy being a s t a r t u p to practice engineering.
The point is the middle ground exists closer to shitshow than well-oiled shop. If the CEO doesn't understand this, they won't be CEO for long.
I believe that equity is mostly SF thing. One of my friends works in a startup in Berlin where he was offered equity as one of the founders (10th engender or sth like that). Chances that he will be able to liquidate them in foreseeable future is non existing. Nobody else that I know was offered an equity, even though quite a lot of my friends work for well funded startups. I worked in some and nobody offered me anyth…
And I would not call it spoiled its just that in the US "engineers" (using the term widely) have managed to get a fairer share of the pie.
the answer to every question on this list: "We are a private company and don't share this information." Outside of the room, the Engineering team laughs at your questions, Operations and the CEO give each other quizzical looks before laughing too, and they go on to the next candidate. You get smug satisfaction for not going with "THAT Company who cant answer simple questions", until a reminder about the rent payment…
>Outside of the room, the Engineering team laughs at your questions, Operations and the CEO give each other quizzical looks before laughing too, and they go on to the next candidate. This is such a short sighted perspective that it's laughable. Good management will see that the candidate is thinking about joining the team as a long-term commitment and isn't just making a job change for a pay increase over their last/…
There are no engineering questions on this list, and the more I think about it, the more correct I think that is. Unless you're stretching the definition of a startup, most of what passes for current engineering is volatile and subject to lots of change. Better to ask questions about the team and their experience so you know what you'll need to build.
It's bad form (imo) to ask about benefits, salary, equity, etc during an interview, and hold those questions as a candidate is evaluating an offer.
I've joined a few different startups all series B or later, and have asked at least 2 of them how many total shares there were. Neither would tell me.