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Working for a startup makes less sense

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Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#71

Post by senordevnyc »

rmah wrote: post #63
Answerawake wrote: post #58

"To make the situation worse, the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down." Ok I have seen this written every now and then. What does this person look like and how do I become one given a willing to sacrifice everything else? I can not find a good answer to this question. E…

First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions. Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline. Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers. Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such). That's general…

Eh, I really don’t think this is representative. I’m a self-taught iOS dev who has only ever been self-employed and I just got a $420k / job from a public company. And I’m smart, but not some unfathomable genius.

I think every engineer should at least do some mock interviews on data structures, algos, and system design (there are TONS) of free study resources and then do a round of interviews. You only need one yes.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#72

Post by Thorentis »

kareemm wrote: post #44
Thorentis wrote: post #43

I think another reason that people are wary of joining start ups, is they've realised that: a) The market is now incredibly saturated, and being an early equity owner in a start up that will be worth billions is very rare now. Gone are the days of a unicorn every month or two. b) People have noticed the trend of FAANG companies buying up start ups, and that this is the goal of many (most?) start ups today. Reach crit…

> Gone are the days of a unicorn every month or two. My friend, I've been building software professionally for big companies and small since 2001. There were never days where there was a unicorn every month or two.

I didn't mean that a company became a unicorn every month or two, but it seemed that companies were founded quite frequently that later went on to become unicorns.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#73

Post by youeseh »

I've said this before and I'll say it again. Never accept a lower salary in exchange for equity. Salary is your market rate for providing labor. Equity is what you get for taking on the risk of being out of a job sooner than later.

So with that in mind, if the equity and bonuses in BigTechCo are a sure deal, then it may be worth negotiating for more when you join a startup.

Don't sell yourself short.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#74

Post by Aeolun »

rmah wrote: post #63
Answerawake wrote: post #58

"To make the situation worse, the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down." Ok I have seen this written every now and then. What does this person look like and how do I become one given a willing to sacrifice everything else? I can not find a good answer to this question. E…

First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions. Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline. Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers. Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such). That's general…

This seems to only guarantee the ‘get hired for an exorbitant amount’ part. How about getting the startup off the ground by yourself?

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#75

Post by harimau777 »

avl999 wrote: post #64

It has always been mindboggling to me that startups are still so all in on the Bay Area. Most problems mentioned in the article go away if/when you are willing to staff developers in an area that is not as ridiculous in terms of cost of living as the Bay area. According to StackExchange data, the 50th percentile pay for a Full Stack Developer with a Bachelors degree and 3 years experience (a profile that would seem r…

From the perspective of a potential employee, taking a job in a lower paid part of the country seems like a bad idea. You would generally be giving up some quality of life and neither debt nor savings care about cost of living.

Although maybe it would work if some of the second tier cities agreed to pay off the debt and contribute to the savings of people that agree to work there.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#76

Post by guimonz »

The problem is getting paid in common stock. A pay cut is money that, instead of making, the employee is investing in the early-stage startup. That's no different than the money the investor is putting in.

Employees should get preferred stock in the amount of their pay cut.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#77

Post by savrajsingh »

senordevnyc wrote: post #71
rmah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions. Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline. Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers. Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such). That's general…

Eh, I really don’t think this is representative. I’m a self-taught iOS dev who has only ever been self-employed and I just got a $420k / job from a public company. And I’m smart, but not some unfathomable genius. I think every engineer should at least do some mock interviews on data structures, algos, and system design (there are TONS) of free study resources and then do a round of interviews. You only need one yes.

Congrats dude! All salary or salary and equity?

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#78

Post by munk-a »

aeternum wrote: post #19

Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent c…

Briefly to begin, I'm going to read the above extremely uncharitably, not in an effort to besmirch aeternum but instead to try and tear down some terrible guidelines about life choices that I've seen going around.

Here follows my translation of the advice above:

> Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup.

You'd personally benefit more from working at an established company, but if you work for a startup you'll be trained on the cheap and then an established company can reap more profits from you.

> I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company.

The comfort of a large tech company is nothing compared to the stress filled life of working at a startup, having to constantly innovate on your toes and learn your own ways will push you to develop faster - but if you hit a wall you're truly hooped.

> I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent convincing people that the service is needed in the first place.

I saw a need and dedicated some days of labour to filling that need, because it was a valid need I was praised, if it hadn't sold I'd be chewed out for wasting time - and there is no guidance on which needs might be helpful or not... Within a startup you'll be expected to do user surveys and then market your new product even though no time is formally afforded for either.

> Direct exposure to customers also is really interesting and changes you as an engineer.

I assume when you decided to become a software dev you really meant UX designer? If your perfect world is being given a task to do and doing it accurately to a high level of perfection then have fun trying to quickly adapt your highly designed system to literally contradictory client requests coming from the same customer.

> It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.

Losing your shirt trying to make your day job not collapse and then being excluded from any of the benefits when your company goes public is character building.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#79

Post by adamsea »

garry wrote: post #29
eanzenberg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a VC, scraping off net innovation minus startup-wages is a win. It's a lose for the employees, of course.

I was a software engineer who learned to start a company right off the pages of the site you're looking at right now, Hacker News. It was here where I learned to start a startup. I later worked for Y Combinator as a partner helping founders make products and services. The best ones made something that touches millions of people now. While there is a lot of zero sum thinking in startupland and finance/capitalism in ge…

No disrespect but I think what the people use the product for should be mentioned ... in addition to the number of people using the product. The world has a lot of problems right now. I know there’s some VC in those areas but, well, look at what we talk about.

Touch 20 lives as a teacher and enrich those individuals, or 20 million lives by helping them order groceries over the internet.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense

#80

Post by Answerawake »

rmah wrote: post #63
Answerawake wrote: post #58

"To make the situation worse, the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down." Ok I have seen this written every now and then. What does this person look like and how do I become one given a willing to sacrifice everything else? I can not find a good answer to this question. E…

First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions. Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline. Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers. Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such). That's general…

>First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions.

Sounds like this is not possible without years of exposure to events that force you to this situation. How else would you learn to act like that?

Regarding being "smart": How do you define this? For example, I got a CS degree from a second tier Engineering school. But I was a B-/C+ student. Do I meet the criteria for being "smart" or just lazy?

>Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline.

Is this a hard requirement? What do these schools do that others don't? Is the exposure to other top tier people a necessary requirement from a skills perspective?

>Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers.

How do you choose a field that leads to the original goal: "the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down."

Tech is such a diverse field. There are so many paths to take, none of which guarantee I will reach this outcome. I could become a rock star developer having developed tons of apps, but is that the right path? Or will it lead me to a cubicle job?

>Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such).

This seems like just a lot of practice. Maybe even requiring growing up in a very socially active lifestyle. The opposite for people who sacrifice everything to become great at something eg. programming.

Its looking as if you need to be in a narrowly defined path that needs to either be decided when you are born or you adopt very quickly at a young age in order to accomplish all your steps.

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