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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

• kristopolous 6y ago
  For me I'm far too naturally transgressive to work at a large company. I really wish I could, life would be easier, less work, less stress, pay better... None of them will take me so I keep help building and (sometimes) exiting startups. It's really exhausting. 20 years of this... I wish more companies would value those who "challenge the book" instead of "follow the book" or that I could find a way to obediently follow it instead of challenge it. I've honestly thought about figuring out how I could put things on ice for a few years and get a PhD, because then I'd have the proper paperwork to allow for my disposition and could finally stop this exhausting startup life.
  • WaxProlix 6y ago
    You should get a therapist (or a life coach?), these sorts of problems are rarely confined to just the work space.
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      Yeah, probably. It's certainly worth giving it a go.
  • knodi 6y ago
    Do you mean transgressive as another word for asshole, in interacting with your coworkers?
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      No not at all. Nobody has ever quit under my management. People quit bosses, not jobs and I've always kept my people. So I think I've been pretty good
  • bluntfang 6y ago
    >I wish more companies would value those who "challenge the book" instead of "follow the book" or that I could find a way to obediently follow it instead of challenge it. it sounds like you've identified a personal problem with a clear goal, the next logical step would be to shop around therapists who think they might help you achieve that specific goal. and i think it's very important to shop them. Maybe even read a few books on how to find the right therapist for you. It's important to not get stuck on one who you don't like or who isn't interested in help you the way you want to be helped. I've found with therapy that sunk cost fallacy is real when you've found one that really doesn't fit with your goals.
  • dannykwells 6y ago
    So I have a PhD, and do empathize with being "transgressive", but I'll say I think it's less about the PhD than it is about being right. If you are bull headed and drive really hard in a new area, you better be right because you are taking responsibility and accountability for that area (whether you think you are or not). High risk, high reward - sound familiar? This is true at Google, at startups, in academia. So it's really more of a personality thing - if you're ok being obedient, you also don't need to bear the stress of accountability. But if not, well, no degree will alleviate that stress.
    • giantg2 6y ago
      "...if you're ok being obedient, you also don't need to bear the stress of accountability." I agree with most of what you're say, but I think this can be wrong. Management seems to push stress and blame down to the individuals, even if they are obedient. I see a lot of stress in my job and I'm only an intermediate developer.
  • elwell 6y ago
    I like the simplicity of your homepage.
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      I stopped feeling obligated to being fancy a couple years ago. It's running off a raspberry pi at my apartment and is really more about giving me access to my network of computing resources here. I've been meaning to make a generative poetry engine and just put it there without disclosing it. It could probably be pretty believably human if it's restricted enough.
      • elwell 6y ago
        You're reminding me of good memories. I made a (pretty bad) rhyming poem generator in middle school. Whimsical coding is a most enjoyable form.
  • nogabebop23 6y ago
    >> those who "challenge the book" instead of "follow the book" This is a valid position and one I can identify with personally, but as I've gotten more emotionally mature over time find it's a little more subtle. You need to include your risk propensity and methodology into the calculation. Even within established companies roles, teams and individual situations are going to be vastly different. Are you willing to take bet-your-career risks? Have you earned some shared vulnerability with the people you want to change? Do you truly care about them and your company? I've learned these are all necessary if not sufficient regardless of the corporate landscape. I believe there is a third way where you work within the system to affect meaningful change (or bring it down from the inside, depending on how radical your viewpoint). I've come to the realization that small minorities want either dramatic change or none at all; the vast majority are just apathetic, which is your biggest enemy. Start-ups likely skew towards the big change camp. You can make a difference in the former environment but it is exhausting and risks turning you apathetic as well.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • omarhaneef 6y ago
    Yeah, I know what you mean. I have a similar issue: just way too good looking for large companies. I could make more money and have less stress at a large company, but my good looks keep me out. Fortunately, this dinky startup is willing to tolerate someone this handsome.
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      I'm sorry, that's really uncalled for and a complete misrepresentation of the topic. Would you like to add to the conversation instead? I'll be happy to read whatever you have to say.
      • omarhaneef 6y ago
        I am (obviously?) kidding, which you would know if you saw me. (Too good looking for startups too). I did not mean to upset you.
        • kristopolous 6y ago
          You didn't! Just trying to steer things in a more fruitful direction. In the startup world they usually call this employee waves. Hoffmann, Christensen & Collins all broke up different people as part of different waves (using different models) and that some people "belong" in certain waves. Others, such as say, Davidow and Von Hippel went into detail on how to insulate new technology from late wavers at established firms in order to successfully incubate it (Christensen talks about this as well). See Kidder's book on the Eagle project and Fergusons book on the IBM PC for some examples. Also search "sony missed ipod" for some really interesting counter-examples. Also how BBN beat Raytheon for ARPAs IMPs is a fascinating example. Anyway, I'm a first waver who wants to improve on being a much later waver.
        • kyuudou 6y ago
          I'm tempted to try a cover of the old 80s/90s era song Right Said Fred "I'm too sexy for your startup" Thanks for unglooming my day!
  • giantg2 6y ago
    It's funny how management tells us to think outside the box and then admonishes us when we do and they don't like it.
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      Defending and perpetuating the power structure is what institution building is. If you won't be a steward of the dominant institutions, then you're not an extension of its power, your a transgressor to it. "Thinking outside the box" is cute virtue signalling but honestly that's what gets you kicked to the curb. It will always be that way for any established entity because that act is fundamentally one of disestablishment
      • giantg2 6y ago
        Completely agree. The only way to get power or money is to have the people who have power or money want give you some. The owner/leader of a company will only give power to others if it is necessary and they are sufficiently similar to themself.
• hitekker 6y ago
  I'd add "Mental Health" to the bottom list.
• thinkingkong 6y ago
  The invalid reasons are all accurate. The only challenge is (almost?) everyone has a friend or colleague that worked at Slack or Uber and made stupendous amounts of money; far in advance of what they would get at a FAANG. It doesn't take into account luck & risk, but this kind of casual relationship with successful startups colours peoples expectations in a different light.
  • novok 6y ago
    You might of made a stupendous amount of money if you worked at Uber 2014 or sooner. 2015 or later and you had a stock that was flat or worse for 5 years at this point.
  • brogrammernot 6y ago
    How much money do you actually need though? I’ve worked for 5 startups now and my equity payout has been 0, 0, 0, 0, and now I stand I make low 7 figures from the equity on this last company (publicly traded now). During those startups the following happened: - I saw my nieces and nephews so little they forgot my name. They were young, sure, but it still stung when they look at you like a stranger - Messed up a 8+ year relationship with my significant other and we haven’t talked in years - Let my student debt pile up to take on more equity than salary (dumbass idea for the record) - Lost friends along the way because I could never do anything - Missed many family/friends birthdays as I was working - Worked 80 hour weeks for a long time What did I feel after I saw my equity/stock rise to above 7 figures? Stupidity. I gave up a lot on my journey and money can’t get it back, in fact, the money I stand to earn doesn’t enable me to do much more than what my salary already does. I can travel, eat well, have luxury goods if I want (I’m not that type of person but anyways), and so forth. My point being that this was a.) self-inflicted and b.) not worth the combined opportunity cost of all of those years. So for every “friend” who made lots of money at Uber or other places, there’s a story like me or a story where someone’s never made anything from equity because profitable exits are fucking hard
    • 9erdelta 6y ago
      Working ridiculous hours at a startup (I can barely remember anything from 2016) really drove home to me that time is way way way way way more valuable than money. Use it wisely (unfortunately wisdom is hard to get before the time has been wasted). Took a few years to get out of startups but I'm out (ish) now and I'm way more picky about how much time I'll work on something these days.
• ignoramous 6y ago
  See also: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
• maps7 6y ago
  I would like to work for a startup as a way to move/improve my stack but looking at some startup job postings show that they want Googler-tier devs with decades of experience while paying nothing
  • goatherders 6y ago
    What they want and what they end up hiring are very rarely the same.
  • bb88 6y ago
    I would recommend going the consulting/contracting route. Mostly because you get to see how different companies approach problems. When you move from company to company you take the best ideas forward.
• nogabebop23 6y ago
  to add another valid (yet totally invalid) point: You want an impressive job title. At an established company you're going to be a Software Developer or Engineer level n; at a startup you can easily be Lead, Director of or even a VP if that's important to you.
  • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Is there such thing as an impressive title, in software development, if the company is unheard-of? This is a sector where people with no relevant formal education and three years on-the-job experience sometimes get called senior.
    • nicoburns 6y ago
      To be fair, "senior" doesn't seem to be particularly high up the ladder of job titles at tech companies these days. You get titles like "lead", "principle", and "staff", which are all considered more senior than senior. At the end of the day, job titles are mostly for getting past recruiters. Interviewers (if they're any good) will judge you on your actual experience and capabilities.
  • drchopchop 6y ago
    That can be important, especially if you've been "under-titled" at your previous job and need to reset yourself on the career ladder. It's a lot easier to go from senior -> lead -> VP -> CTO by jumping into the startup world than it is to climb the ladder at a megacorp.
    • marcinzm 6y ago
      Sure but everyone knows the titles are inflated so it only matters if you plan to stay in startups perpetually. Megacorps won't pay any attention to your inflated title. edit: And I've seen interviewers pause at such titles and comment "are you sure you want to work here, we can't offer you as nice of a title." So it may count against you even.
• skrebbel 6y ago
  Frankly I'm getting tired of this drum HN keeps beating about startups not offering a good work/life balance. Some startups don't, true. Some FAANGs don't either, what's the difference? I know plenty of startups that have a sane working culture as a key point of differentiation in the job market.
  • drchopchop 6y ago
    Agreed, I am 40+ and am a CTO at a startup which has great work/life balance. We pay approximately market (for a normal dev job, not FAANG), haven't had people do overtime in well over a year, are transparent about finances, and have practically zero politics. It is also possible for a startup to be "stable", especially if it's bootstrapped/profitable.
    • high_derivative 6y ago
      'have practically zero politics' tingles my bs-meter. How would you know how your employees feel about this? There is always politics. Of course not for the ones who cannot be promoted further, but for everyone else. My boss not acknowledging the existence of politics would be a red flag to me.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • hehsjsbb 6y ago
        Politics isn't just about promotion. It's about what kind of work people get to do, whose opinion is respected, etc. I don't care about getting promoted in my current role (at a small start-up where the eng org is flat), but I'm miserable because there's obviously a clique of people who are "trusted" and take over the technical direction of anything interesting. What's left is basically just implementing their ideas and then having them rewrite it on you or nitpick it in PRs until they practically wrote it.
        • giantg2 6y ago
• marcinzm 6y ago
  > - Making a lot of money in salary. Startups pay more in salary than non-tech non-finance companies do in total comp. Startups that are far enough along (pre-IPO Uber, Lyft, etc.) pay more than FAANG (the RSUs aren't liquid but you need to only wait a year or two).
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • trimbo 6y ago
    Uber employees who joined in 2015 actually saw their RSUs decrease in value by the time the lockup ended in 2019. 4 years of working at a pre-IPO unicorn for negative growth. Heard this from multiple people but here's an article: https://www.financialsamurai.com/how-uber-employees-failed-to-get-rich-off-the-uber-ipo/ https://www.financialsamurai.com/how-uber-employees-failed-t...
    • marcinzm 6y ago
      That depends totally on the RSU package they got when they joined. Negative growth if the package was 50% higher than their previous or FAANG comp is still a net gain.
      • pb7 6y ago
        This is true and was the case for some people but if you had taken an Uber offer, for example, to Facebook or Google, they would have matched it.
      • trimbo 6y ago
        If it was 50% higher when they were hired, they still probably made less. All FAANG stocks climbed 100+% over the same timeframe. Amazon, 500%. [Edit] But... I think you might have missed the point. The reason to join a pre-IPO company is to make far more money post-IPO when the stock rises. Joining Facebook in 2008 or Google in 2000 would be equivalents here, and those people became very, very wealthy on the day of the IPO due to this pop vs when they joined. Uber employees who joined 4 years before IPO had their stock drop instead.
• Swizec 6y ago
  Personally I like to work with startups because: - they pay more than enough for my near-term financial goals - the equity is ok - they let me work on sidehustles - I get to work on stuff that is truly make or break for the company, not some bullshit pet project a PM needs to get promoted
  • pb7 6y ago
    Wouldn't it feel like it's a little bit bullshit if the company went out of business shortly after and all that work was for nothing? All of our work is so ephemeral.
    • dilyevsky 6y ago
      Same happens in big cos when sometimes hundreds or more engineering years are scrapped purely because of internal political wars or “reorgs”
      • pb7 6y ago
        That's precisely my point. Startup work is not any more meaningful or everlasting than work at a big company. GP claimed PMs at big companies only come up with meaningless work but I think the work is meaningless almost everywhere. Every human needs purpose but pouring yourself into something that is very likely to have so little permanent impact seems foolish. I think there is a desperate call for balance in life which is why work-life balance provided by stable companies is valuable, not because the work you do there is any more or less important than a startup.
        • dilyevsky 6y ago
          I disagree - it’s just way harder to come by any meaning in the corporate world than it is in startup. Startups have to assign meaningful work to everyone they hired or they die. Not so for big (or even medium) corp so they have to play the “work life balance” card so you don’t blow your brains out from boredom. Ofc that also means big cos are more welcoming to people who didn’t want anything to do with their work in the first place and just in it for the paycheck (nothing wrong with that) and it’s always a spectrum.
• lkbm 6y ago
  Main reason: it's more fun. I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work. I can stay in my lane and do my specific job tasks, or I can run around putting out fires and helping wherever help is needed. I mindlessly build the specific design product handed me, or I can guide my own work in accordance to the needs of our customers and the business. I can follow policy and fill out forms when making any decision, or I can just do what's right because who has time to write policies and look over approval forms? tbf, tech is relatively good at a lot of these. As I understand it, Facebook gives a fair bit of latitude to engineers, and Google used to be famous for their 20% time. But the longer a company exists, and the bigger it gets, the more bureaucracy and controlling it'll get. Every big disaster means a new policy on how to prevent future disasters. I think pg wrote an essay stating that the most valuable skill in an early startup employee is "helpfulness" (maybe not though -- cursory search didn't find it). You do what needs to be done. This is roughly your "wear many hats" point, but more than just different technologies, and not just being new. If you just want to have a well-defined, steady, sane-every-day job, a startup is terrible. If you every want to say "that's my job", a start-up is terrible. If you're the sort of person people will come to for help with whatever comes up (and enjoy being that), start-ups can be great.
  • episteme 6y ago
    I'm not sure you can say the startup impact is measurable either. You certainly can't measure it by monetary value. Mindlessly building what is handed to you is a culture problem and not a company size problem. Some startups have less freedom than some corporations but both usually grant more freedom to more senior people. You can still 'wear many hats' at some mega corps too, if the company only has 'engineer' as a title then you are expected to basically do 'everything' . The team you are on will decide what the balance is though. I think all of what you said could apply to both sizes of the companies.
  • vlunkr 6y ago
    Both of these comments make good points, but are two ends of a false dichotomy. Not every startup is going to have horrible work/life balance, and not every job at a big company is going to be boring and soul crushing. And there are all sorts of jobs in the middle and to the side of this spectrum.
• mac01021 6y ago
  I worked as a software engineer for a large media company, outside of any tech hub. I switched to working remotely for a San Francisco-based startup because they offered me a 30% raise over what my current employer was willing to pay. Two years later, when working for the startup became less palatable, I went back to my old company. My manager there struggled with the HR dept as hard as they could and got them to just match my startup salary in order for me to come back. Which I guess is just to say the parent comment is not universally correct.
• znpy 6y ago
  So far I stayed away from both startups and consulting companies (Accenture, NTT Data and similar) and it went fairly well. One day I'll reconsider this choice, probably when I'll have a bit more of financial stability (read: bought a house and paid it in full) and can afford some more risk. Most people seems to overlook the fact that most startups die within a year, and some more startups drag a long death march before dieing. You might have fun or do crazy interesting things, but if the company goes bust it might not be pretty. For the moment, I'll stay conservative about this kind of things.
• johncolanduoni 6y ago
  I mean, making a lot of money in salary is a very valid reason if they actually pay you a lot of money in salary (it does happen).
• KorematsuFred 6y ago
  I have learned this hard way.
• biztos 6y ago
  I've seen people hired into startups that just got their A-round and they made sub-FAANG market rate plus whatever crazy stock incentive they agreed to. And the exit strategy was usually acquisition by FAANG anyway. So I would add as a valid reason: - Startup will pay you as much as anyone else, and won't be boring. Caveat: may only apply to early hires!
• dinht 6y ago
  Certainly you can get a considerable amount of salary, depending on your angle of working in a startup. In the recent career changes, I often look at 1-2 years old start-up where tech side has been rather stagnant. My angle is clear -> getting stuffs done, move the tech forward and make sure it is aligned with the company's direction But this is not enough for founders to have a peace of mind regarding your commitment. - If you have already built a reputation, then that's enough for you to argue for a market rate salary. - Else you would need to trade for some equity. What are you getting out of this compared to a corp job: - The work is likely more interesting. - Away from corporate landscape (if that's not your thing) - Gaining experience in new domain, doing thing in new ways.
• doopy1 6y ago
  I work at a startup, not a co-founder, salary is not amazing, but pretty good - most I've ever made. Work life balance is also the best I've ever had. Just my data point.