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Valid reasons to work for a startup: - You are a cofounder. - You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience

Valid reasons to work for a startup: - You are a cofounder. - You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats"). - They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else. - You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route. Invalid reasons for working at a startup: - Getting rich off stock options. - Making a lot of money in salary. - Work / life balance. - Stability.

ohaideredevs 8y ago
Not exactly a unique experience, but my .05 - I started of at a startup with a "lol just do it" attitude to whatever the problem was. Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Got to see all aspects of the products and the consequences of the decisions we made early on. Learned more in a year than in the last 3 at corp/consulting jobs. Then again, maybe it was noob gainz and I made at least a third less than I would have at a corp job. Not sure if going back to a startup would be nearly as beneficial in terms of "levelling up." Seems like the game now is to grind whiteboard before I get too old for Google. A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  > Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Congrats on using the opportunity to grow in an abusive role. It should not be normalized is the point.
  - brootstrap 8y ago
    On the opposite side of this argument. I was there. I was shit in college but managed a degree and self taught programming. I was hustling hard to graduate and convince someone to hire me as a programmer even though I had no degree. I was 23 at the time. If you are in this scenario, just you, no wife kids etc. What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? I loved the startup and it fit my perfect niche. I would grind 12 hours days, but also had lots of freedom. Remote work, unlimited days off etc. Sure at sometimes you get burnt out but you are a sponge soaking up everything you can. now i'm 28 with wife and kids, no overtime for me. I still work extremely hard and lazer focused, but i show up at 7:30-8am and leave at 4 everyday :p
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      > What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? Because you're normalizing abusive workplace practices. Need I explain further? It's not right, it's not okay, and if you tolerate it, you do a disservice to your colleagues. Maybe you don't care, that's fine. But when you say "What's wrong?" I will point out that it is not to be commended or supported. If your employer encourages, supports, or allows this sort of behavior to exist, I hope you find yourself on the business end of a lawsuit.
      - dnautics 8y ago
        It seems like what's wrong is if it's not telegraphed that this is expected beforehand. We're all adults here and should be able to make informed decisions about how we want to live. Some of us want a lot of pressure and to not sit around bored wondering what to do with our lives. When I was in grad school, 100 hour weeks and working 100 days straight was the norm. Also I made 25k a year. And I loved it, because I loved doing science and I got to be paid to do what I loved. And also, it's maybe worth mentioning that your experiments don't give a damn about labor laws. There really are some important societally beneficial things that simply won't get done if there aren't crazy fuckers like me around (not necessarily the projects I happened to work on, they all turned out to be crap) Honestly what made me mad was that there were a lot of kids who got out of college, and went to grad school because they didn't know what to do next and nobody told them how crazy grad school was. These jokers depressed the asking price for a grad school salary.
- mdorazio 8y ago
  FWIW, I've worked with a lot of entry-level people at normal companies over the years and would estimate that noob gainz are 30-50% higher in startup land for the first 1-2 years of career, maybe 10-20% higher the next two, then flat or actually lower than corporate thereafter. I think it comes down to 1) startups pile a lot more responsibility onto their young hires than normal companies are comfortable with + 2) startups have a lot higher tolerance for failure + 3) small companies in general don't have headcount for specialized roles, so everyone has to level up in multiple areas.
  - jpm_sd 8y ago
    I've worked at two startups, then a BigCo, and now another startup. The wearing of many hats was definitely a leveling-up experience, but I felt that I plateaued in just the way you describe. Equity from both of those first two startups is now worth zero. In my years at BigCo I worked with engineers who have 10-20 years more experience than I do. Often felt like the dumbest guy in the room. I learned a ton. No comparison. But I would never have gotten the job there without my previous startup experience. And without that experience I'm not sure I would even have been able to learn from my BigCo co-workers so successfully. I got tired of corporate politics and a high traffic commute, so now I'm happily back in startup land.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      I feel similarly; I started my career at a BigCo, didn't get much out of it, joined a fairly young company, with (1) more responsibility than someone of my tenure should reasonably have due to (2) high tolerance for failure and (3) they didn't have headcount for the specialized role I was doing. Going back to a BigCo, the experience there was utterly invaluable. I realized that my first go round I had absolutely no idea what I should even be trying to get out of it. This time's different. There's huge value to getting the lay of the land.
    - twic 8y ago
      I think there's a similar dynamic with consulting - ThoughtWorks / Pivotal Labs type places. You get shunted around between many different projects, there are never enough people, so there are opportunities to take more responsibilities, and things are often a bit fluid, because a consultancy coming in tends to (should!) crack the organisation a bit. There are downsides to all of that, but it's also a way of getting wider faster, if not getting a lot deeper.
- dasil003 8y ago
  FANG is undisputably the best risk-adjusted compensation return for a programmer, and they're up there in terms of working with super smart colleagues, and therefore they have a high floor, compared to say a startup that goes nowhere with the blind leading the blind, but the ceiling is also constrained by what projects you're working on. In terms of raw software engineering development there's probably no substitute for joining early in a hypergrowth scenario, because you'll have to solve way more problems in an efficient way, and understand the direct impact on the business in a way that is totally obscured when you come into a massive corporation with thousands of engineers. It's likely company growth will outpace your personal growth (hence the outside hires), but even so you will get challenged in ways that just don't exist in large, stable companies.
  - pnw_hazor 8y ago
    Though at F and G there is the cost of having to rationalize working for an organization that is evil.
    - dnautics 8y ago
      Nobody ever said that about the As!!
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        I'm pretty certain I've heard Amazon described as "evil". Apple are less objectionable, but I'm sure there are some things that somebody wouldn't like.
        pnw_hazor 8y ago
        It seems Amazon's evilness mostly stems from their reputation for how they treat their employees - not how they treat their customers. My weak sauce rationalization re Amazon is that I wouldn't work there (I love hearing the big sigh from recruiters when I ask if the client they are hiring for is Amazon.) Others who choose to work there do so voluntarily. They haven choosen their own pain. In my mind this is different than using your PhDs to build dark patterns to trick consumers, survelience tech to monetize people, using that surveillance information and neuroscience to manipulate people, and so on. edit: to add -- I forgot about Apple, since I stopped buying their stuff a few years ago. At least they see that privacy protection may have some value in the marketplace.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  I can attest to this as well. I can't recommend this to anyone else, but personally I'm glad I went through it. I had one hellish week where I was so nervous I couldn't eat. Slept 2 hours a night and lost 5 pounds in one week. Employees shouldn't be treated like that, and I will never work at a place like that again, but I am a dramatically stronger engineer because of those experiences.
- enjo 8y ago
  "A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside." This was the main benefit I got from a startup, but that also required winning something of a startup lottery. I was at a company that went from two to 200+ engineers. I was able to grow into the tech lead of the entire thing. That put me into a leadership track at a relatively young age at larger companies. Which has been great. Financially, however, I suspect I would have been better off working at a FAANG from day 1, even being a very early and key employee for a company that exited at 9 figures. Still I now know how fortunate I was. At my current gig we routinely hire startup "tech leads" for non leadership roles. They're probably generally thought of as a tier below a mid level IC coming out of a FAANG company. Startups are a huge gamble. It worked out for me but even the inflated titles are only valuable if the company itself proves to be a winner.
  - retiredcoder 8y ago
    The matching start-up TL to mid-level FAANG seems fair to my observations.
- econner 8y ago
  "Seems like the game now is to grind whiteboard before I get too old for Google." the sad reality of this industry...
dleslie 8y ago
> You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route. This is me. I quit my well paid job and took a massive pay hit so that I could work from home and so be able to spend more time with my daughters. Absolutely worth it.
- rooam-dev 8y ago
  At a start-up? How do you manage live/work balance? Are there any on-call duties? Thanks in advance.
  - jerguismi 8y ago
    There seems to be some kind of understanding that start-up means aways working overtime etc. AFAIK that is not often the case, but people can work quite normally in early-stage companies as well. And mostly it is the founders who are working hard and employees are not required to work the same way.
    - rooam-dev 8y ago
      Yes, I agree. We have (trying to have) a similar culture. The overtime is not expected, but the problem is task/context switching, which got better (less).
    - atomical 8y ago
      I've worked at mostly startups and I have had a normal work schedule except for maybe 1-2 days a year.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    It's a startup, yes. I work eight hours a day on average, and being that we have staff on most continents we don't really have a need to be on call. That said, I've had a handful of 3am emergencies over the course of the last few years. I work in my garage; so I have no commute, and I no longer lose over two hours a day to commuting. That's meant I contribute far less to open source, which I did while on transit. However, I don't miss commuting at all and am thankful for the time recovered. Balance is blissful. While my wife was on maternity leave for twelve months our girls were at home as well, and so my breaks consisted of spending time with my family. Now I walk them to daycare before work and listen to the rain on my roof while I work.
aisengard 8y ago
I'd personally add one - if you're an early enough employee, you can have a hand in personally shaping the culture of the company around you. I suppose this can fit into "work a certain way".
- led76 8y ago
  It's fulfilling to do that, but all successful startups go through a phase where they become more professional and hire a lot of experienced leaders. The culture the 'old' team worked to create very quickly gets diluted and replaced. Not necessarily for worse, or for bad reasons, but it's a reality that a lot of early employees find challenging.
codingdave 8y ago
Or if you are an older dev, picking up some more modern skills. I joined a startup for just under a year, and while I did not go in intending for it to be short-term, it ended up that way. But I modernized my skill set, got to work with more modern processes, and walked out a stronger dev than when I walked in.
- coderunner 8y ago
  Do you mind saying how old you are? One of my fears is if you're an programmer, you either need to move into management or quit being a programmer because of age bias. I prefer coding over management though.
  - codingdave 8y ago
    I'm 46. I cannot say whether age bias had any impact on my job searches. There have been interview processes that did not result in offers, which did not happen when I was younger. Maybe I was lucky early on. Maybe something has changed. But I can say that every time I have looked, I have found work.
throwaway5752 8y ago
"Making a lot of money in salary." I think a bit of perspective is in order. When the bar for comparison is technical principles at FAANG, yes. If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just fine. That is "wealthy" for a lot of people in this country. I know someone that delivered food to restaurants. He woke up at 4am, and periodically did double shifts. His work life balance was worse than almost any developer I know. And he had to carry stuff. [That was a bad work/life balance]. Seriously, count you blessing if you're in software now. I have been doing this 20 years and this is the best it's been since before the .com bubble ended.
- bloomer 8y ago
  The comparison isn't between working at a software startup and delivering food. It is between working at a software startup and a different software job. The other software job is almost always better for the reasons listed above.
- dxbydt 8y ago
  > “If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just fine.” lol wut ? if you work in a typical SF startup, you can do precisely none of these things. Like, literally zero.
  - aetherson 8y ago
    Well, it depends on the definition of "startup." If you work exclusively at seed-stage or A-round companies with like less than 15 employees, your salary will be a lot lower than if you work at lots of B and C-stage companies. I've worked at companies that at least called themselves startups for my entire career, and I own a house in San Bruno, my wife and I each have paid-for cars, we can put our kids through school, and we put away savings.
    - ummonk 8y ago
      How much more expensive would your house be today than when you bought it? How about 5-10 years from now?
m12k 8y ago
Another valid reason: - You'd like to found a company yourself but would prefer to learn from other people's mistakes first.
JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
What kind of startup are we talking about here? E.g., 1-10 person company, or one that's accepted a few rounds of founding and has a measurable likelihood of IPOing in a few years? Both can reasonably be considered startups.
ssalazar 8y ago
> Invalid reasons for working at a startup: > - Making a lot of money in salary. Once a startup raises a series A is there actually any reason to pay below-market? Fresh out of college I was employee #1 at a startup that had funding, and was basically at the mythical "Google salary for new college graduate" figure that is thrown around here, and higher than competing offers from name brand tech cos.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Equity grants from public companies are pretty liquid and as good as salary.
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  Yes, because startups are usually still cash poor after a Series A and you don't want to burn more than you need to. The whole point is to conserve cash until you can find more money or turn a profit, and employee salary is usually the largest cost for most companies.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  >> Once a startup raises a series A is there actually any reason to pay below-market? Yes, because there is a greater fool competing with you who seems to thinking the theoretical value of their illiquid options is worth a trade-off for equivalent actual cash.
- phamilton 8y ago
  > is there actually any reason to pay below-market? "market" is a big chunk of change. "Google salary" is not market. It's closer to 50% of market. (GSUs and annual bonus are significant aspects of comp that are basically cash). "Netflix salary" is market, and for a series A company there are a lot of reasons not to pay senior engineers 300k+.
enobrev 8y ago
In general, I agree with this. I'm also working with a startup now, and not as a founder, and a couple of your reasons to do so resonate. But also, as to your invalid reasons list: - The money is good. - The work-life balance is excellent. - And it's perfectly stable. This usually is not the case. But if you're in a position to negotiate for these things and the founders are in the right position to offer them, it can be.
ryanSrich 8y ago
> Work / life balance Disagree here for one specific type of startup...remote (which I know you mentioned). Here's an example day at BigCorp: - Rise and shine at 5am to work out early enough - Leave the house by 7am - 1+ hour commute into work - Start work at 8am - Stay until 8pm - Get on/in the car, train, bus for a 1+ hour commute home - Late dinner around 9pm - Veg out because you're exhausted and go to bed by 11pm Here's an example day at RemoteStartup: - Rise at 7am to work out - Make breakfast at 8am - Standup at 8:30 while eating breakfast - Work until 5pm - Spend some family time and eat dinner until 8pm - Work another 2 hours before bed around 10pm The work life balance in scenario #2 is far and away more desirable to most people.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  You're being downvoted, but I agree. I worked at a BigCorp and it was one of the worst years of my life. The work/life balance was awful, and the pay was shit compared to the hours I put in and satisfaction I got out of the job. All other experiences I've had have been much more satisfying. On top of this, people think BigCorp is a safe bet where a startup is not, but BigCorp lays people off in large swaths all the time because their stock price moves a millimeter in some random direction.
  - halfnibble 8y ago
    Can someone tell me what letter "BigCorp" starts with? I'm scared because I'm looking at a job at a big corp., but I was under the impression that I could leave the office at 5pm.
    - kingnothing 8y ago
      I've worked at Uber and Salesforce, and put in very normal hours at both. 8 hour days were standard for devs.
    - orthecreedence 8y ago
      I was at AOL. My team was acquhired as a "startup within a larger company!!1" which ended up meaning: lower pay, longer hours, no equity, no actual autonomy. But I was young and foolish and, caving to peer pressure, decided against my better judgement to take the gig. After my 1 year cliff (and successfully launching the Editions app that they soon after shitcanned) I got the fuck out. EDIT: keep in mind, my hours were a product of my specific team, and the fact that I was commuting from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto. It would have likely been a regular 9-5 on other teams, and I'm pretty sure most of the other people there had regular hours.
vkou 8y ago
To add another invalid reason for working at a startup: - get good experience on many different technologies If you want to learn how to do things quickly, often in a way that barely holds together, then yes, you will get that work experience in a startup. If you want an opportunity to learn how to do things right, you need to work with experts. Your startup is incredibly unlikely to have experts on many different technologies.
maxxxxx 8y ago
"- You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route." for this you have a much better chance at an established small company that doesn't need crazy growth. From what I see most startups prefer putting everybody into a big bullpen.
kemitchell 8y ago
What's "valid" isn't a matter of immutable natural law. Clearly there are some contributors to startups---founders and early investors---who demand and get low-probability, high-reward financial bets that can, albeit probably won't, pay off big. Whether that bet is available to others, and to what extent, is a matter of choice. If you've got something valuable to offer, and want founder-like exposure to risk and reward, negotiate a founder-like equity package. If they won't give it to you, it's not because they're a startup. It's because they're unwilling to give it to you. Perhaps they don't think you're worth it. Perhaps they just don't want to share the pie like that.
hinkley 8y ago
At some point in my career I discovered - to my horror - that I was learning as much or more new tech at consulting gigs than I did as a salaried employee. Even, I daresay, when I was working at startups. When I pointed this out to people they didn't believe me. So it turned into a bit of a troll for me to say "yeah I'm going to go consult for a while to build up my skillset" and then watch their eyebrows do gymnastics. You might assume, as I did, that they hire contractors who already know everything. They hire people with a reasonable skill in a couple areas they don't possess. But to actually contribute you have to drink from the firehose, going deep into the tech you were hired for and the constellation of technologies they use that interact with those things in any way. As soon as you start discovering XY Problems you find they were trying to get you to make X happen because they don't know how to do Y (or didn't know Y was possible) and the clock is ticking.
ankit219 8y ago
Maybe, one more in valid reasons. - Less politics, and more autonomy (if you are given a certain role). - The dopamine or kick that comes with solving problems and the joy of getting results fast. Quite a few occasions, I have felt more involved in a startup than a big MNC. Maybe different kind of culture. (Consulting is the worst in case you like to see results for your ideas though)
krupan 8y ago
Other reasons for working at a start-up: - way less big company type politics - you won't get lost among the crowd at the big company - if you join early enough you get to define how work is done, instead of just going with whatever process already exists at the big co - you will know the CEO personally and have chances to discuss ideas and concerns with them in person, at big co there is zero chance of that Also, the stability argument is interesting. I've actually experience more stability at the start-ups I've worked at than I have at the big companies. Big companies re-organize often and your manager, manager's manager, etc. might change several times in a single year. Lay-offs happen seemingly willy-nilly for reasons peons will never be told. Start-ups don't have any organization to re-organize, and don't have the people to be continually shifting things around and laying people off. Big companies have multiple projects running in parallel, waiting to see which one will pan out. If you are working on one that doesn't pan out, it will be cancelled without a second thought (often with lay-offs involved). Start-ups have one project and it better work out or the company dies. It will not be cancelled lightly.
jkchu 8y ago
I think a point of confusion is that "startup" means different things to different people. I believe the parent comment here really means "average, early-stage SF startup" in place of "startup".
acjohnson55 8y ago
I've had great work / life balance at the last couple startups I've been at. I think you can find the full range at both startups and big companies.
analog31 8y ago
Wow, the music business.

ohaideredevs 8y ago

Not exactly a unique experience, but my .05 - I started of at a startup with a "lol just do it" attitude to whatever the problem was. Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Got to see all aspects of the products and the consequences of the decisions we made early on. Learned more in a year than in the last 3 at corp/consulting jobs. Then again, maybe it was noob gainz and I made at least a third less than I would have at a corp job. Not sure if going back to a startup would be nearly as beneficial in terms of "levelling up." Seems like the game now is to grind whiteboard before I get too old for Google. A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
> Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Congrats on using the opportunity to grow in an abusive role. It should not be normalized is the point.
- brootstrap 8y ago
  On the opposite side of this argument. I was there. I was shit in college but managed a degree and self taught programming. I was hustling hard to graduate and convince someone to hire me as a programmer even though I had no degree. I was 23 at the time. If you are in this scenario, just you, no wife kids etc. What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? I loved the startup and it fit my perfect niche. I would grind 12 hours days, but also had lots of freedom. Remote work, unlimited days off etc. Sure at sometimes you get burnt out but you are a sponge soaking up everything you can. now i'm 28 with wife and kids, no overtime for me. I still work extremely hard and lazer focused, but i show up at 7:30-8am and leave at 4 everyday :p
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    > What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? Because you're normalizing abusive workplace practices. Need I explain further? It's not right, it's not okay, and if you tolerate it, you do a disservice to your colleagues. Maybe you don't care, that's fine. But when you say "What's wrong?" I will point out that it is not to be commended or supported. If your employer encourages, supports, or allows this sort of behavior to exist, I hope you find yourself on the business end of a lawsuit.
    - dnautics 8y ago
      It seems like what's wrong is if it's not telegraphed that this is expected beforehand. We're all adults here and should be able to make informed decisions about how we want to live. Some of us want a lot of pressure and to not sit around bored wondering what to do with our lives. When I was in grad school, 100 hour weeks and working 100 days straight was the norm. Also I made 25k a year. And I loved it, because I loved doing science and I got to be paid to do what I loved. And also, it's maybe worth mentioning that your experiments don't give a damn about labor laws. There really are some important societally beneficial things that simply won't get done if there aren't crazy fuckers like me around (not necessarily the projects I happened to work on, they all turned out to be crap) Honestly what made me mad was that there were a lot of kids who got out of college, and went to grad school because they didn't know what to do next and nobody told them how crazy grad school was. These jokers depressed the asking price for a grad school salary.
mdorazio 8y ago
FWIW, I've worked with a lot of entry-level people at normal companies over the years and would estimate that noob gainz are 30-50% higher in startup land for the first 1-2 years of career, maybe 10-20% higher the next two, then flat or actually lower than corporate thereafter. I think it comes down to 1) startups pile a lot more responsibility onto their young hires than normal companies are comfortable with + 2) startups have a lot higher tolerance for failure + 3) small companies in general don't have headcount for specialized roles, so everyone has to level up in multiple areas.
- jpm_sd 8y ago
  I've worked at two startups, then a BigCo, and now another startup. The wearing of many hats was definitely a leveling-up experience, but I felt that I plateaued in just the way you describe. Equity from both of those first two startups is now worth zero. In my years at BigCo I worked with engineers who have 10-20 years more experience than I do. Often felt like the dumbest guy in the room. I learned a ton. No comparison. But I would never have gotten the job there without my previous startup experience. And without that experience I'm not sure I would even have been able to learn from my BigCo co-workers so successfully. I got tired of corporate politics and a high traffic commute, so now I'm happily back in startup land.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    I feel similarly; I started my career at a BigCo, didn't get much out of it, joined a fairly young company, with (1) more responsibility than someone of my tenure should reasonably have due to (2) high tolerance for failure and (3) they didn't have headcount for the specialized role I was doing. Going back to a BigCo, the experience there was utterly invaluable. I realized that my first go round I had absolutely no idea what I should even be trying to get out of it. This time's different. There's huge value to getting the lay of the land.
  - twic 8y ago
    I think there's a similar dynamic with consulting - ThoughtWorks / Pivotal Labs type places. You get shunted around between many different projects, there are never enough people, so there are opportunities to take more responsibilities, and things are often a bit fluid, because a consultancy coming in tends to (should!) crack the organisation a bit. There are downsides to all of that, but it's also a way of getting wider faster, if not getting a lot deeper.
dasil003 8y ago
FANG is undisputably the best risk-adjusted compensation return for a programmer, and they're up there in terms of working with super smart colleagues, and therefore they have a high floor, compared to say a startup that goes nowhere with the blind leading the blind, but the ceiling is also constrained by what projects you're working on. In terms of raw software engineering development there's probably no substitute for joining early in a hypergrowth scenario, because you'll have to solve way more problems in an efficient way, and understand the direct impact on the business in a way that is totally obscured when you come into a massive corporation with thousands of engineers. It's likely company growth will outpace your personal growth (hence the outside hires), but even so you will get challenged in ways that just don't exist in large, stable companies.
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  Though at F and G there is the cost of having to rationalize working for an organization that is evil.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    Nobody ever said that about the As!!
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      I'm pretty certain I've heard Amazon described as "evil". Apple are less objectionable, but I'm sure there are some things that somebody wouldn't like.
      - pnw_hazor 8y ago
        It seems Amazon's evilness mostly stems from their reputation for how they treat their employees - not how they treat their customers. My weak sauce rationalization re Amazon is that I wouldn't work there (I love hearing the big sigh from recruiters when I ask if the client they are hiring for is Amazon.) Others who choose to work there do so voluntarily. They haven choosen their own pain. In my mind this is different than using your PhDs to build dark patterns to trick consumers, survelience tech to monetize people, using that surveillance information and neuroscience to manipulate people, and so on. edit: to add -- I forgot about Apple, since I stopped buying their stuff a few years ago. At least they see that privacy protection may have some value in the marketplace.
tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
I can attest to this as well. I can't recommend this to anyone else, but personally I'm glad I went through it. I had one hellish week where I was so nervous I couldn't eat. Slept 2 hours a night and lost 5 pounds in one week. Employees shouldn't be treated like that, and I will never work at a place like that again, but I am a dramatically stronger engineer because of those experiences.
enjo 8y ago
"A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside." This was the main benefit I got from a startup, but that also required winning something of a startup lottery. I was at a company that went from two to 200+ engineers. I was able to grow into the tech lead of the entire thing. That put me into a leadership track at a relatively young age at larger companies. Which has been great. Financially, however, I suspect I would have been better off working at a FAANG from day 1, even being a very early and key employee for a company that exited at 9 figures. Still I now know how fortunate I was. At my current gig we routinely hire startup "tech leads" for non leadership roles. They're probably generally thought of as a tier below a mid level IC coming out of a FAANG company. Startups are a huge gamble. It worked out for me but even the inflated titles are only valuable if the company itself proves to be a winner.
- retiredcoder 8y ago
  The matching start-up TL to mid-level FAANG seems fair to my observations.
econner 8y ago
"Seems like the game now is to grind whiteboard before I get too old for Google." the sad reality of this industry...

dleslie 8y ago

> You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route. This is me. I quit my well paid job and took a massive pay hit so that I could work from home and so be able to spend more time with my daughters. Absolutely worth it.

rooam-dev 8y ago
At a start-up? How do you manage live/work balance? Are there any on-call duties? Thanks in advance.
- jerguismi 8y ago
  There seems to be some kind of understanding that start-up means aways working overtime etc. AFAIK that is not often the case, but people can work quite normally in early-stage companies as well. And mostly it is the founders who are working hard and employees are not required to work the same way.
  - rooam-dev 8y ago
    Yes, I agree. We have (trying to have) a similar culture. The overtime is not expected, but the problem is task/context switching, which got better (less).
  - atomical 8y ago
    I've worked at mostly startups and I have had a normal work schedule except for maybe 1-2 days a year.
- dleslie 8y ago
  It's a startup, yes. I work eight hours a day on average, and being that we have staff on most continents we don't really have a need to be on call. That said, I've had a handful of 3am emergencies over the course of the last few years. I work in my garage; so I have no commute, and I no longer lose over two hours a day to commuting. That's meant I contribute far less to open source, which I did while on transit. However, I don't miss commuting at all and am thankful for the time recovered. Balance is blissful. While my wife was on maternity leave for twelve months our girls were at home as well, and so my breaks consisted of spending time with my family. Now I walk them to daycare before work and listen to the rain on my roof while I work.

aisengard 8y ago

I'd personally add one - if you're an early enough employee, you can have a hand in personally shaping the culture of the company around you. I suppose this can fit into "work a certain way".

led76 8y ago
It's fulfilling to do that, but all successful startups go through a phase where they become more professional and hire a lot of experienced leaders. The culture the 'old' team worked to create very quickly gets diluted and replaced. Not necessarily for worse, or for bad reasons, but it's a reality that a lot of early employees find challenging.

codingdave 8y ago

Or if you are an older dev, picking up some more modern skills. I joined a startup for just under a year, and while I did not go in intending for it to be short-term, it ended up that way. But I modernized my skill set, got to work with more modern processes, and walked out a stronger dev than when I walked in.

coderunner 8y ago
Do you mind saying how old you are? One of my fears is if you're an programmer, you either need to move into management or quit being a programmer because of age bias. I prefer coding over management though.
- codingdave 8y ago
  I'm 46. I cannot say whether age bias had any impact on my job searches. There have been interview processes that did not result in offers, which did not happen when I was younger. Maybe I was lucky early on. Maybe something has changed. But I can say that every time I have looked, I have found work.

throwaway5752 8y ago

"Making a lot of money in salary." I think a bit of perspective is in order. When the bar for comparison is technical principles at FAANG, yes. If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just fine. That is "wealthy" for a lot of people in this country. I know someone that delivered food to restaurants. He woke up at 4am, and periodically did double shifts. His work life balance was worse than almost any developer I know. And he had to carry stuff. [That was a bad work/life balance]. Seriously, count you blessing if you're in software now. I have been doing this 20 years and this is the best it's been since before the .com bubble ended.

bloomer 8y ago
The comparison isn't between working at a software startup and delivering food. It is between working at a software startup and a different software job. The other software job is almost always better for the reasons listed above.
dxbydt 8y ago
> “If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just fine.” lol wut ? if you work in a typical SF startup, you can do precisely none of these things. Like, literally zero.
- aetherson 8y ago
  Well, it depends on the definition of "startup." If you work exclusively at seed-stage or A-round companies with like less than 15 employees, your salary will be a lot lower than if you work at lots of B and C-stage companies. I've worked at companies that at least called themselves startups for my entire career, and I own a house in San Bruno, my wife and I each have paid-for cars, we can put our kids through school, and we put away savings.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    How much more expensive would your house be today than when you bought it? How about 5-10 years from now?

m12k 8y ago

Another valid reason: - You'd like to found a company yourself but would prefer to learn from other people's mistakes first.

JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago

What kind of startup are we talking about here? E.g., 1-10 person company, or one that's accepted a few rounds of founding and has a measurable likelihood of IPOing in a few years? Both can reasonably be considered startups.

ssalazar 8y ago

> Invalid reasons for working at a startup: > - Making a lot of money in salary. Once a startup raises a series A is there actually any reason to pay below-market? Fresh out of college I was employee #1 at a startup that had funding, and was basically at the mythical "Google salary for new college graduate" figure that is thrown around here, and higher than competing offers from name brand tech cos.

ummonk 8y ago
Equity grants from public companies are pretty liquid and as good as salary.
tomnipotent 8y ago
Yes, because startups are usually still cash poor after a Series A and you don't want to burn more than you need to. The whole point is to conserve cash until you can find more money or turn a profit, and employee salary is usually the largest cost for most companies.
TuringNYC 8y ago
>> Once a startup raises a series A is there actually any reason to pay below-market? Yes, because there is a greater fool competing with you who seems to thinking the theoretical value of their illiquid options is worth a trade-off for equivalent actual cash.
phamilton 8y ago
> is there actually any reason to pay below-market? "market" is a big chunk of change. "Google salary" is not market. It's closer to 50% of market. (GSUs and annual bonus are significant aspects of comp that are basically cash). "Netflix salary" is market, and for a series A company there are a lot of reasons not to pay senior engineers 300k+.

enobrev 8y ago

In general, I agree with this. I'm also working with a startup now, and not as a founder, and a couple of your reasons to do so resonate. But also, as to your invalid reasons list: - The money is good. - The work-life balance is excellent. - And it's perfectly stable. This usually is not the case. But if you're in a position to negotiate for these things and the founders are in the right position to offer them, it can be.

ryanSrich 8y ago

> Work / life balance Disagree here for one specific type of startup...remote (which I know you mentioned). Here's an example day at BigCorp: - Rise and shine at 5am to work out early enough - Leave the house by 7am - 1+ hour commute into work - Start work at 8am - Stay until 8pm - Get on/in the car, train, bus for a 1+ hour commute home - Late dinner around 9pm - Veg out because you're exhausted and go to bed by 11pm Here's an example day at RemoteStartup: - Rise at 7am to work out - Make breakfast at 8am - Standup at 8:30 while eating breakfast - Work until 5pm - Spend some family time and eat dinner until 8pm - Work another 2 hours before bed around 10pm The work life balance in scenario #2 is far and away more desirable to most people.

orthecreedence 8y ago
You're being downvoted, but I agree. I worked at a BigCorp and it was one of the worst years of my life. The work/life balance was awful, and the pay was shit compared to the hours I put in and satisfaction I got out of the job. All other experiences I've had have been much more satisfying. On top of this, people think BigCorp is a safe bet where a startup is not, but BigCorp lays people off in large swaths all the time because their stock price moves a millimeter in some random direction.
- halfnibble 8y ago
  Can someone tell me what letter "BigCorp" starts with? I'm scared because I'm looking at a job at a big corp., but I was under the impression that I could leave the office at 5pm.
  - kingnothing 8y ago
    I've worked at Uber and Salesforce, and put in very normal hours at both. 8 hour days were standard for devs.
  - orthecreedence 8y ago
    I was at AOL. My team was acquhired as a "startup within a larger company!!1" which ended up meaning: lower pay, longer hours, no equity, no actual autonomy. But I was young and foolish and, caving to peer pressure, decided against my better judgement to take the gig. After my 1 year cliff (and successfully launching the Editions app that they soon after shitcanned) I got the fuck out. EDIT: keep in mind, my hours were a product of my specific team, and the fact that I was commuting from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto. It would have likely been a regular 9-5 on other teams, and I'm pretty sure most of the other people there had regular hours.

vkou 8y ago

To add another invalid reason for working at a startup: - get good experience on many different technologies If you want to learn how to do things quickly, often in a way that barely holds together, then yes, you will get that work experience in a startup. If you want an opportunity to learn how to do things right, you need to work with experts. Your startup is incredibly unlikely to have experts on many different technologies.

maxxxxx 8y ago

"- You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route." for this you have a much better chance at an established small company that doesn't need crazy growth. From what I see most startups prefer putting everybody into a big bullpen.

kemitchell 8y ago

What's "valid" isn't a matter of immutable natural law. Clearly there are some contributors to startups---founders and early investors---who demand and get low-probability, high-reward financial bets that can, albeit probably won't, pay off big. Whether that bet is available to others, and to what extent, is a matter of choice. If you've got something valuable to offer, and want founder-like exposure to risk and reward, negotiate a founder-like equity package. If they won't give it to you, it's not because they're a startup. It's because they're unwilling to give it to you. Perhaps they don't think you're worth it. Perhaps they just don't want to share the pie like that.

hinkley 8y ago

At some point in my career I discovered - to my horror - that I was learning as much or more new tech at consulting gigs than I did as a salaried employee. Even, I daresay, when I was working at startups. When I pointed this out to people they didn't believe me. So it turned into a bit of a troll for me to say "yeah I'm going to go consult for a while to build up my skillset" and then watch their eyebrows do gymnastics. You might assume, as I did, that they hire contractors who already know everything. They hire people with a reasonable skill in a couple areas they don't possess. But to actually contribute you have to drink from the firehose, going deep into the tech you were hired for and the constellation of technologies they use that interact with those things in any way. As soon as you start discovering XY Problems you find they were trying to get you to make X happen because they don't know how to do Y (or didn't know Y was possible) and the clock is ticking.

ankit219 8y ago

Maybe, one more in valid reasons. - Less politics, and more autonomy (if you are given a certain role). - The dopamine or kick that comes with solving problems and the joy of getting results fast. Quite a few occasions, I have felt more involved in a startup than a big MNC. Maybe different kind of culture. (Consulting is the worst in case you like to see results for your ideas though)

krupan 8y ago

Other reasons for working at a start-up: - way less big company type politics - you won't get lost among the crowd at the big company - if you join early enough you get to define how work is done, instead of just going with whatever process already exists at the big co - you will know the CEO personally and have chances to discuss ideas and concerns with them in person, at big co there is zero chance of that Also, the stability argument is interesting. I've actually experience more stability at the start-ups I've worked at than I have at the big companies. Big companies re-organize often and your manager, manager's manager, etc. might change several times in a single year. Lay-offs happen seemingly willy-nilly for reasons peons will never be told. Start-ups don't have any organization to re-organize, and don't have the people to be continually shifting things around and laying people off. Big companies have multiple projects running in parallel, waiting to see which one will pan out. If you are working on one that doesn't pan out, it will be cancelled without a second thought (often with lay-offs involved). Start-ups have one project and it better work out or the company dies. It will not be cancelled lightly.

jkchu 8y ago

I think a point of confusion is that "startup" means different things to different people. I believe the parent comment here really means "average, early-stage SF startup" in place of "startup".

acjohnson55 8y ago

I've had great work / life balance at the last couple startups I've been at. I think you can find the full range at both startups and big companies.

analog31 8y ago

Wow, the music business.