Just hire abroad. Working in a completely remote environment is entirely feasible, and it's actually in many, many ways, more comfortable and productive.
Working for a startup makes less sense
381–390 of 392 posts
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#382Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#383Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There ought to be a sizable subset of highly skilled engineers who have achieved financial independence and would enjoy tackling a challenging problem in a startup. The flip side of this equation is that those same engineers can tackle pretty much any challenging problem they choose, while continuing to take home those massive paycheques from a big tech firm. Big tech operates in almost every part of industry simul…
> at will Is it that easy to switch departments/focus? I thought internal transfers, while easier than interviews, were not trivial.
Internal transfers are close to mandatory in many cases. Veterans are strongly encouraged to move every 2-3 years to cross-polinate engineering knowledge and culture.
For someone at a senior level (Amazon SDE III/Facebook IC5), an internal transfer is at most a perfunctory whiteboard session, and often just a conversation - you already have passed an interview loop to get into the company, after all, and have an easily-verifiable track record thereafter.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#385> The two things I really like about working for smaller places or starting a company is you get very direct access to users and customers and their problems
I don’t understand this at all. Big companies have lots of individual projects, where engineers get direct access to customers. At my big co, we all watch every App Store review come in, conduct thousands of interviews with customers and have a direct say on what gets built.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cofounders typically get double digit or at least mid-high single digit grants in equity. Whereas employees typically have 1% or less in equity. If they're this vital to the success of the startup, they should receive equity accordingly.
Cofounders do get equity but don't get paid until funding. Employees get equity and pay. If it's a startup, the employee will get value = equity + (K * market wage) + benefits where K is less than 1. That value should be competitive with the market and key contributors should get more equity but NOT in the range of cofounder because otherwise something doesn't add up. There is an implicit startup social contract and…
How exactly should they do it?
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good summation of the current challenges with startups that are attempting to compete on technical merit. I know this first hand as I started a computer vision company right around 2012 when the "AI" boom was really picking up steam. I would never dream today of starting a very technical company because every major will poach your talent (happened to me), invest in your competitors or attempt to acquire you…
> I would never dream today of starting a very technical company because every major will poach your talent (happened to me), invest in your competitors or attempt to acquire you (some people don't want to be acquired). Damn, this is exactly what I want to do. Computer vision too. Do you have any advice other than "don't"? Would basing the company on the East coast near a tier-1 research university help with talent?…
My first startup used computer vision to extract tables from PDFs. We had great engineers but my co-founder and I didn't know enough about ML back then to design a proper feedback loop.
My advice is to find a technical co-founder who has built and scaled a CV system at a larger tech company, but who is looking for a new challenge. There are a lot of annoying problems that can be solved with CV as long as you create a way for users to help you get labeled data.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you have an engineer who could be working at BigTechCo; she works at your company a year, and then that raise you specify happens. Engineer continues to work there for three more years. Company amounts to little, acquired for $2MM, engineer gets nothing. Of course, everyone is disappointed. But it's still unfair for that engineer who gave up half a million dollars or more to work at the startup to get nothing…
Why is it unfair? The engineer was part of a team that collectively destroyed economic value. What is the fair portion of bonus on top of salary that they should be rewarded with for that performance? By all means understand it; I’ll never argue against that, but I find liquidation preferences quite reasonable.
It's not a reward. The engineer's work is a commodity they are selling to the company. Partly for wages and partly in exchange for equity. That is a real investment they are losing just like the VC's if things go bust.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#389Strongly 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…
Is there any way I can contact you? My email is in my profile.
I'm working on something to make the interview process and the offer piece a lot more transparent. I've been part of terrible interview/offer loops too, and the problem aggravates me to no end.
I'd love to speak with you.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind sharing what your rent was during those 3 years? The best figure would actually be comp minus taxes and rent. edit: Oh, I see you were in Boston -- that's a great deal then. I still wouldn't want to work for Google for idealogical reasons, but I can see why the money would attract others. You also had ~9 YEARS of full time experience at that point, which makes it a lot less impressive.
I'm in Boston, and our rent was about $1100/month for a couple. Rents are higher now ( https://www.jefftk.com/p/boston-rents-over-time ) and we have kids now. Taxes would be higher but we donate 50% of our income ( https://www.jefftk.com/donations ) so I'm not sure how you'd count that? Also, I didn't have ~9 years of full time work when I started at Google, I had 3.5. My first full time programming job started fall…
If you were making 60k+ through your college "internships," I would put them at the same level as full-time work. My first college internship was $9/hour with no benefits, and it lasted
6 weeks...
Also, donations are discretionary, so you wouldn't count them at all -- you would just count your salary minus your tax rate (not counting deductions, so that the average Joe can get some context).