Emotional debt in startups • Hacker News Board

Re: Emotional debt in startups

#61

Post by yashap » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

_yj7v wrote: post #38

yashap wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verrrrrry few people earn 3-4 million in the corporate world by 37. Depending on whether you get an undergrad or a masters, that’s ~12-15 years of work. That means you’d have to AVERAGE 200K-333K per year, over your first 12-15 years, to hot that. That’s really, really rare - considering you’d be starting at a much lower salary, you’d have to be at ~$500K by your mid 30s. Founding startup(s) is really, really hard, b…

I'll tell you another reason why people underestimate difficulty of startups. The probabilities are completely uncertain. You just never know how big it can get or how likely it is. If you are optimistic like I was, you "hope for the best" since that one guy did it right? In essence, you don't know how hard the problem is. In the corporate world you do know the probabilities, so you get scared by it. TL;DR: Once you…

I’m certainly not arguing that founding a startup is a good choice, financially or otherwise. It’s super hard and you’ll likely go bust while making very little money. Just arguing against making it seem like it’s at all easy or common to earn $3-4 mil by the age of 37 in the corporate world - it really isn’t. That’s an exceptional outcome. To do that you basically need to become an insanely young executive, or to land a job as a dev at a place like Google/FB straight out of undergrad, which is also rare.

For example, this is the typical salary range for a Senior Software Engineer in Vancouver (in CAD): https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

“Big 5” salaries in SF/Seattle are way, way above what you’ll make almost anywhere else. Lots of startups are founded outside the Bay Area/Seattle, where these types of salaries don’t really exist.

Re: Emotional debt in startups

#62

Post by fatbird » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

_curious_ wrote: post #56

fatbird wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, I think you're missing the point. It's not about whether one is, or should be, tough enough, or is overly sensitive. As with technical debt, there's necessarily going to be a certain amount of emotion that needs to be discharged; and as with technical debt (or financial debt), there's nothing wrong with incurring it and paying it off, if that's part of your plan to succeed. The only mistake is n…

"The only mistake is not recognizing that you're incurring debt, and not having a plan or means to deal with it. Unacknowledged debt of any kind compounds and eventually destroys." True story! "I would guess that your pilot example was less about nerves of steel than about someone who had learned to handle (i.e., process) a lot of stress effectively--which is just a way of saying that nerves of steel is more about ef…

Efficiently incurring is like having a high volume credit card that you constantly pay off: lots of cash moving through, but debt isn't building up.

Withstanding cumulative effects is like continually re-financing your home to pull more equity out: at some point you can't keep up, and the failure mode is catastrophic.

Re: Emotional debt in startups

#63

Post by ptrenko » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

yashap wrote: post #61

_yj7v wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll tell you another reason why people underestimate difficulty of startups. The probabilities are completely uncertain. You just never know how big it can get or how likely it is. If you are optimistic like I was, you "hope for the best" since that one guy did it right? In essence, you don't know how hard the problem is. In the corporate world you do know the probabilities, so you get scared by it. TL;DR: Once you…

I’m certainly not arguing that founding a startup is a good choice, financially or otherwise. It’s super hard and you’ll likely go bust while making very little money. Just arguing against making it seem like it’s at all easy or common to earn $3-4 mil by the age of 37 in the corporate world - it really isn’t. That’s an exceptional outcome. To do that you basically need to become an insanely young executive, or to la…

I know so many people who have Google/FB jobs straight out of college. It depends on your perspective, but its not rare.

I assume anyone who wants to startup is atleast a top 5% engineer. Otherwise its just a bad punt. You have to be terribly good to be in the startup biz

Re: Emotional debt in startups

#64

Post by rconti » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #23

DoreenMichele wrote: post #19

It seems to me we are doing something really wrong if people have so very much emotional baggage from their success. I saw some TV show where some guy said he flew more than a hundred missions in the Air Force and was shot at in all of them. He went into commercial real estate after he left the Air Force. He figured it would be less nerve wracking than that. With nerves of steel, he made a killing. I've spent plenty…

> I saw some TV show where some guy said he flew more than a hundred missions in the Air Force and was shot at in all of them. He went into commercial real estate after he left the Air Force. He figured it would be less nerve wracking than that. > With nerves of steel, he made a killing. I think the trouble with anecdotes is there is always a counter anecdote. In our state there has been a spate of doctors committing…

One of my favorite sayings is "first world problems are still problems".

The reality is, if it's difficult for you to handle/process, that's worth honoring. Just because you're really hardcore in dealing with one kind of situation doesn't mean that you're prepared for a different kind of stress, even if it seems much 'easier'.

When your coworker just getting into fitness starts walking regularly, then jogging, then trains for a bit and runs their first 5k, you congratulate them, you don't tell them "that's nothing, I ran a marathon last weekend".