Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sorry but I don’t buy it. Startups employees are squeezed out by vc dilution and lack of big exits. Those $1m total equity cash out from startups I fear are fairly rare. Whereas working for faang type companies, a l5 is more or less guaranteed to make $300k a year. $500-750k is doable without being a “brand name”. Timing and luck, but the spread is much smaller. Startup founders have made a devils deal with vcs t…
Maybe a devil's deal, but not with the goal of under-paying employees. I know very few founders who have the highest salary at their own company, which is as it should be. Founders of VC-backed companies are making an explicity equity-vs-salary trade-off. And every founder I know would love to pay employees more. The challenge is that taking VC money is a commitment to try to figure out how to grow relatively quickly…
Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
611–620 of 968 posts
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#612Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#613As with many people here I had little faith in options. And now having more visibility as to how share structures evolve this has lessened even further. Despite best intentions as things progress the value of options and non-founder, non-VC held shares frequently take a whack. There is also a whole host of problems including liquidity and tax issues.
Ive have however seen some traditional companies structure early employee incentive in a completely different manor. They leave the cap table for investors and founders and instead arrange either a bonus or a profit sharing scheme that does well for these employees.
This typically works on trust, but Im sure there is a way to formalise it. Either through employee contracts which have a defined profit sharing goals (in a similar manor to a sales persons targets). Or even perhaps through contracts which ensure cash bonuses based on acquisition value are full-filled.
There must be ways to orchestrate it without effecting the finance of the company or complicating acquisition too much. For example, creating a pool of "tickets" associated with future revenue/profit/exit sharing commitments that can then be vested in a manor similar to options.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
Between 2008 and 2012 I worked in 3 different places where all developers and researchers had their own offices (interns were paired usually). It wasn’t even a second thought, it was just baked into the culture that obviously the work requires huge blocks of hours spent alone, privately engaged in contemplative work. One was a defense research lab, one was a boutique company that makes computational fluid dynamics so…
> Whatever my next job is, it has to give private offices, end of story. Given how incredibly rare private offices seem to be these days I can't imagine what kind of leverage you must have to be able to stick to such a requirement. Especially since unlike salary and other benefits it's not something that any company can decide to give you. Either they have private office culture or not. If they are an open office com…
Obviously, if you are desperate for a job due to other factors, you may be literally unable to turn down a suboptimal offer. It’s unfortunate that companies bank on this, and sometimes even angle their search criteria to specifically find classes of candidates they can exploit with low offers, inadequate workspace, etc. But it’s a fact of life.
When you’re not in that situation and you are free to turn a place down, then you just have to decide what matters to you and ruthlessly stick to it.
To your other points, I think they are not actually big deals. Relative to other costs, building private space on an existing floor is not that bad. Of course, companies are mostly not worried about the cost but are worried about the anger and reaction from existing staff who hate the open plan space they are stuck in.
If a company has a top-down “no office” culture, like “not even our CEO has an office!” then just walk away. Those people are so far gone it’s not worth it. You know from day one that insincere corporate evangelism matters more to them than your actual work. You are more office furniture and less engineer at that point.
It doesn’t matter if this is ~70% of all IT jobs. They are bad jobs. Ok to take them if you’re in a pinch, but why would anyone choose them? They’ll never be forced to reform their habits to recruit adequate staff that way.
Another big option is to ask the company to rent a dedicated office for you from a co-working space. So you’ll be “remote” except working from a single office that they lease for you (or you could lease it yourself and be reimbursed or grossed up for it). This is exceedingly cheap for well-capitalized companies and if they are serious about your productivity and ability to actually collaborate, they’ll do it (as opposed to only being concerned if it superficially looks like people are collaborating because of the open plan layout).
There are plenty of solutions for a motivated company. Existing office build out is not a serious barrier, only cultural unwillingness to be adaptable to people whose jobs require private space to work.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's really just a distinction without a difference. The point is that for reasonable definitions of normal, this is true. Some people don't believe that. Sure not every engineer takes home that much, but its also not only the top 5 or 10%, its significantly more than that.
What evidence do you have that significantly more than 10% of engineers earn more than $400K? Are you talking software engineers? Software engineers in the Bay Area? Software engineers in the Bay Area working for a subset of companies? I suspect the reason this 'debate' exists is that we are not specific enough with our language to make our meanings clear to one another. :) To me it's difficult to tell whether the co…
Yes, to be clear that's what this argument was predicated on. Someone said "A significant percentage of SWEs at FANG style companies take home more than 400K per year" and other people said "I don't believe you.
No one ever said "A significant portion of all swes everywhere make more than 400K." That would indeed be a silly statement.
Specifically, this was the statement that started this thread:
>400k is not unusual for a senior engineer working at big tech for several years in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, or even a city like LA
That statement is objectively true for practically any reasonable definitions of "not unusual".
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
You literally have no idea what you're talking about. Every one of my friends who is a senior software engineer, including myself, at a decent-sized company has a total compensation between $300-400k per year. One of my good friends has a total comp of $650k, with almost $300k base salary. I have friends at Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Apple, etc. We all share compensation information with each other. My friend at…
Where does your friend with $650k TC work and what is their role/level?
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he’s correct. MSFT pays a lot more in the Bay Area than Seattle because the cost of living is so much lower in Seattle (no state income tax, housing, etc) that they can get away with paying a lot less. My total compensation went up by ~80% going from MSFT to FB (but my housing costs 3x in the Bay Area vs what I had in Boston so it’s not as large an increase as it sounds).
What you're saying is that the difference isn't between companies - MSFT vs FB - but between areas : Seattle vs Bay. I'm mostly aware of pay in the Bay and a few similar areas, and it is largely equivalent at the levels posted here.
(Or at least that's the official line. I haven't examined any de facto pre-tax pay disparities between the two locations. But at least they don't adjust comp when one transfers between those locations, or between either of them and NYC; whereas they do for relos those areas and significantly cheaper areas.)
Source: personal memories of policies from 3-5 years ago, which could have changed but probably haven't.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#618Just a few cons.... The big players have drastically pushed up developer comp. The "maybe" money that might come from a best-case startup exit isn't holding up well against the RSUs of the big players. I have friends pushing total comp north of 400K / year at the usual suspect companies. Over a five-year-span-till-liquidity your "maybe" money is competing against a near-guaranteed $2M in comp. Equity grants for early…
Not that 400K isn't believable, I don't think it's the norm, but being outside of the Bay Area or the US for that matter, I'll buy it. However there's one other area where startups have failed to evolve, doing a worse job than big companies actually and that's accepting remote employees. Big companies have been doing better because at the very least they are opening offices in multiple countries, whereas most of the…