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It’s not that start-ups don’t pay as well as Google, it’s that they don’t pay as well as mid-range companies, like insurance companies, payroll tech companies,
by mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It’s not that start-ups don’t pay as well as Google, it’s that they don’t pay as well as mid-range companies, like insurance companies, payroll tech companies, auto manufacturers, newspapers, etc.
Start-ups are just other businesses. The relevant pool of peer companies to consider for salary benchmarking is all other companies your desired candidate might work for. Nobody cares about the funding situation, age, cool new tech, meaningless options, or meaningless job titles. You just have to pay competitive market salaries and benefits, period.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoYes, exactly! I don’t care about your mission or your “key values”. What’s the comp? What are the benefits? That’s it.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoThe other big problem is that start-ups will sweet talk you regarding freedom to choose tooling, getting greater responsibility, etc., but none of that is enforceable and subject to change on a whim. You’ll go in believing you traded off some salary in order to get freedom or seniority you wouldn’t get at a traditional company, but it’s just a big lie. “Flexibility” will quickly give way to a bastardized “wear many hats” failure mode where you are being grinded into a burnout by supporting a bunch of shitty tooling with no capacity to hire people to handle the workload. You’ll quickly find that growth start-ups == nobody gives a shit about craft or even basic maintenance to keep a product healthy, they just want a small number of overqualified, underpaid people to absorb that headache on a permanent triage basis like employees are band-aids to constantly stop the bleeding.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoSo true.