4 ms·

In my very personal experience, many times startups are not full of the brightest engineers, especially if they are based in a major tech hub such as the Bay Ar

In my very personal experience, many times startups are not full of the brightest engineers, especially if they are based in a major tech hub such as the Bay Area: most talented engineers these days, if location is not an issue, first try a shot at FAANG or similarly big companies where they can experience problems at massive scale and very high compensation. Hence, many folks who end up accepting to work at a startup are less talented engineers (you're left with the "scraps" of the market), so if you're a high performing individual you might find that you really don't need to put that many hours in to be effective, as compared to your peers (and that's deeply depressing as well, and one of the reasons why I left startups for FAANG, other than compensation; talent is SO SO SO much better). I speak for direct experience, I rode a startup train for a long time at a company that grew a lot, and rarely put in more than 40 hours a week into the job, while others were routinely putting 60+. And I kept being praised by the management and technical leadership. The problem (lack of local talent due to big company competition) became severe enough that we had to bootstrap multiple remote teams in easily overlooked areas because the new local hires (San Francisco) were literally trashing the product due to poor development/testing.

brootstrap 8y ago
Interesting... i'm in a similar space where I found a decent startup, grinded for a year or two... and have pretty much been riding a gravy train ever since. In the midwest, making 100k in my late 20s and going full time remote soon. we got bought up by some corporate shmos as well so got a pretty penny in stock options
neilv 8y ago
I hear conflicting ideas about who's getting the most capable people, and I don't know what's true. Maybe a decade ago, a knowledgeable colleague, speaking of one of the better-regarded FAANGs, told me, "First they hired the A students, then they hired the B students, now they're hiring the C students." More recently, the sentiment I heard among CS-ish PhD students at one big university was that FAANGs (or, at least, particular ones) aren't seen as the cool places to go anymore, and people would rather do their own startups, or get professorships. Personally, I'd consider most of the FAANGs (but not one-sided hire-hazing rituals). But technical cofounder, or working on a startup that's already funded, or a rare research lab position, is seeming more likely to be a good match.
- deanmoriarty 8y ago
  In my 10 year career, I've done 2 startups in the Bay Area (both early, one I left after Series A, another one I left after Series C) and more recently Google, and I can say the level of talent doesn't even compare in my opinion: from my experience, the engineers were so bad quality that I was feeling depressed and wasting my time most of the time (and constantly saying to myself "am I just a jerk in thinking of everyone else as doing bad work?"). Typical thing, that really happened: a coworker at a startup ("senior engineer") had to do some calls to a very simple HTTP API from an embedded C++ component. She proceeded to hand craft her own HTTP requests and manually dispatch them to a manually instantiated connection using sockets, and then manually parsing HTTP responses (!!). I suggested to not spend time on such irrelevant code, I was ignored. Management didn't chime in. She kept having problems and problems once that 100s-lines long thing hit production, as you can imagine (every software engineer should know that writing a network client from scratch is not easy!): finally I broke down, linked libcurl in the application, and in 2 hours and 30 lines of code I had the whole thing solidly working. And that's how I afforded working 40 hours a week instead of 60. At Google, this would never happen.
  - reallydude 8y ago
    Some developers use work as an excuse to try something new (or to do something different). This was probably someone who thought a problem was easier than they imagined. Hubris comes hand in hand with experience (seniority?). These kinds of initiatives happen all the time in every company, including Google. A team lead generally would quash this in the interest of reliability/safety/etc, I think.
  - pnw_hazor 8y ago
    Are you happy helping google do what it does? Building a surveillance society and monetizing people? I think that it would get to me after awhile. Though when younger I probably wouldn't have thought too much about it.
    - deanmoriarty 8y ago
      I am actually very, incredibly proud and happy of what I do. First of all, selfishly I am learning like crazy. I am able to work on the world's most advanced software defined networking implementation in Google Cloud, and it's just amazing and mind boggling. Second, I create real value for a lot of people: the reliability I help improve has a direct effect on the happiness of the Google Cloud customers that run on our platform. Third, even outside my Cloud business unit, while no company is perfect and there are clearly issues around data usage and centralization, I still think Google's effect on society is wildly and massively positive, it improves all our lives like not many other companies have ever done, so I have no problem at all working here. But that's just me, I have no problem in accepting that your opinion might be different and you would never work there for ethical reasons, your (my?) loss :-)

brootstrap 8y ago

Interesting... i'm in a similar space where I found a decent startup, grinded for a year or two... and have pretty much been riding a gravy train ever since. In the midwest, making 100k in my late 20s and going full time remote soon. we got bought up by some corporate shmos as well so got a pretty penny in stock options

neilv 8y ago

I hear conflicting ideas about who's getting the most capable people, and I don't know what's true. Maybe a decade ago, a knowledgeable colleague, speaking of one of the better-regarded FAANGs, told me, "First they hired the A students, then they hired the B students, now they're hiring the C students." More recently, the sentiment I heard among CS-ish PhD students at one big university was that FAANGs (or, at least, particular ones) aren't seen as the cool places to go anymore, and people would rather do their own startups, or get professorships. Personally, I'd consider most of the FAANGs (but not one-sided hire-hazing rituals). But technical cofounder, or working on a startup that's already funded, or a rare research lab position, is seeming more likely to be a good match.

deanmoriarty 8y ago
In my 10 year career, I've done 2 startups in the Bay Area (both early, one I left after Series A, another one I left after Series C) and more recently Google, and I can say the level of talent doesn't even compare in my opinion: from my experience, the engineers were so bad quality that I was feeling depressed and wasting my time most of the time (and constantly saying to myself "am I just a jerk in thinking of everyone else as doing bad work?"). Typical thing, that really happened: a coworker at a startup ("senior engineer") had to do some calls to a very simple HTTP API from an embedded C++ component. She proceeded to hand craft her own HTTP requests and manually dispatch them to a manually instantiated connection using sockets, and then manually parsing HTTP responses (!!). I suggested to not spend time on such irrelevant code, I was ignored. Management didn't chime in. She kept having problems and problems once that 100s-lines long thing hit production, as you can imagine (every software engineer should know that writing a network client from scratch is not easy!): finally I broke down, linked libcurl in the application, and in 2 hours and 30 lines of code I had the whole thing solidly working. And that's how I afforded working 40 hours a week instead of 60. At Google, this would never happen.
- reallydude 8y ago
  Some developers use work as an excuse to try something new (or to do something different). This was probably someone who thought a problem was easier than they imagined. Hubris comes hand in hand with experience (seniority?). These kinds of initiatives happen all the time in every company, including Google. A team lead generally would quash this in the interest of reliability/safety/etc, I think.
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  Are you happy helping google do what it does? Building a surveillance society and monetizing people? I think that it would get to me after awhile. Though when younger I probably wouldn't have thought too much about it.
  - deanmoriarty 8y ago
    I am actually very, incredibly proud and happy of what I do. First of all, selfishly I am learning like crazy. I am able to work on the world's most advanced software defined networking implementation in Google Cloud, and it's just amazing and mind boggling. Second, I create real value for a lot of people: the reliability I help improve has a direct effect on the happiness of the Google Cloud customers that run on our platform. Third, even outside my Cloud business unit, while no company is perfect and there are clearly issues around data usage and centralization, I still think Google's effect on society is wildly and massively positive, it improves all our lives like not many other companies have ever done, so I have no problem at all working here. But that's just me, I have no problem in accepting that your opinion might be different and you would never work there for ethical reasons, your (my?) loss :-)