5 ms·

What is success? The article assumes for the most part that success is mainly monetary, and further it makes the classic mistake of comparing success monetarily

by cudgy 5y ago

What is success? The article assumes for the most part that success is mainly monetary, and further it makes the classic mistake of comparing success monetarily to companies like Facebook. Success is different depending on many factors. For example, if a person needs or likes guidance and structure, a startup is likely not a good fit, especially when they are inexperienced. There are some good points about the strong community in startups and how it can be used to encourage excessive work hours and lower pay. However, that same community feeling and sense of purpose is what I remember fondest from working at startups. In addition, startups give you access to other capable and driven people that you might create a startup of your own with … much less likely at a large company full of risk-averse employees who work on a small piece of the company’s “mission”. What personality type are you? The author likely comes from a structured, religious background and prefers the “certainty” of a corporate environment. Some of us were raised by hippies with little or no religion and high structure. People like that are miserable in highly structured environments in which gaining a sense of the “mission” is impossible. The main point here is that career decisions are highly personal and one person’s hell is another person’s heaven.

geofft 5y ago
> However, that same community feeling and sense of purpose is what I remember fondest from working at startups. In addition, startups give you access to other capable and driven people that you might create a startup of your own with Depends a lot on the specific startup and specific big company. The 50-person startup I worked at right out of college never really found product-market fit, and tried many things, and the product I worked on (and deeply enjoyed working on technically) was always a second-class product to the business. And we were selling B2B software, so I was never motivated by wanting to change the world, just by wanting to ship some cool software. I get that same motivation at my current 1500-person employer, where I work on developer tools; I get to work on interesting technical problems, and the fruits of my work go to help people in, frankly, the same industry as most of our customers at the startup. I'm a little more involved in what out internal customers actually do and therefore find it more motivating to help them, though the work they do, per se, isn't interesting to me. And there are plenty of driven, passionate, and friendly people around who care about the same problems I care about, and it's much easier to find a few of those people and make a community when I've got orders of magnitude more people to try to work with.
tuyguntn 5y ago
> The main point here is that career decisions are highly personal and one person’s hell is another person’s heaven. This. From "depends on person" perspective I fully agree with you, from monetary perspective I agree with the author. After years of working for startups, now success for me means, financially independent to work on whatever I enjoy doing, not some OKR, KPI set by person who already achieved their success story. Haven't reached my success. I was hesitant to do leetcode and join FAANG companies 10-15 years ago, worked for bunch of startups as an employee and contractor, all failed, financially I still depend on big boss, and even can be laid off if layoff season starts again. FAANG are not only more stable, but total compensation for 10 years can easily beat 1B$ exit startups, assuming you get 0.1% of equity there
airstrike 5y ago
> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion? Can't it just be a matter of personal preference, as you said it yourself?
- celim307 5y ago
  Yeah sounds like OP has a chip on their shoulder and is projecting. I wouldn’t trade my years at a startup for anything but they can be run by tyrants in a fiefdom just as much as a VP runs an org, sometimes more so as they have no one they report to.
- jasode 5y ago
  >>> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background >How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion? The author wrote: "From the ages of 19-21, I spent my time as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon church. I worked 12 hours a day for two years straight with only Christmas and Mother’s Day off. [...] For this job, I was paid a total of 0 dollars." It seems reasonable to assume that non-religious people wouldn't do that for $0 pay.
  - jsonne 5y ago
    Ironic because Utah is becoming a tech hot spot driven in part by the large Mormon presence.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      How so? Recursion doesn’t scream full of Mormons to me.
      - jsonne 5y ago
        Just one example. The Mormon mission program is quite possibly the best sales training program in the world. If you can go door to door in a country that isn't your own, in a second language, selling religion then enterprise SaaS is really a breeze. (Note I am not Mormon)
higeorge13 5y ago
It highly depends on the startups, not on people personalities. There are good startups where your work will be appreciated, you will bond with everyone, become friends through the difficulties and hopefully enjoy and celebrate the successes. And there are startups where you will see chaos, poor management, bad attitude to employees, pointing fingers and engineers leaving every couple years. Even startup-oriented personalities cannot stand such workplaces.
jsonne 5y ago
> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background and prefers the “certainty” of a corporate environment. I'm a practicing Catholic and have worked either as a freelancer or a startup founder for >90% of my career. Not sure how you're drawing that conclusion but plenty of my peers are religious in a traditional sense and work in startups.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  It's a thing that engineers (particularly software, hardware guys aren't as rude) really have to watch. Given the tendency for programmers to be that edgy libertarian atheist guy, it's easy to be unthinkingly rude to a coworker who is of a churchly persuasion.
  - meekmind 5y ago
    To that end, Jordan Peterson's lectures on the Bible did me personally a great service in bridging the gap between these seemingly opposed worldviews. JP is considered by many to be a Christian apologist and has done a incredible work in describing a completely rational and sympathetic view of Christianity. I can't recommend highly enough his lectures freely available on Youtube. Having listened to most of them, he completely dispelled from me a variety of common athiest notions and revealed them to be the thoughtless propaganda that they are.. For example, it is commonly understood that religion and science are always opposed. However, it's rarely ever mentioned that Christian theologians for centuries consistently modified their belief structure to reflect reality as their understanding of reality improved. In other words, quite often if there was a seeming contradiction between doctrine and observable fact, the doctrine was changed, as opposed to ignoring the observable fact. Obviously there are exceptions to this, like the Inquisition, or other dark periods through history. Religion is not without it's faults, but that is true of any principle around which people organize. The important part, for the materialist, objectivist, or athiest; is recognizing the organizing principles as being somehow useful to people prior to the refinement of the scientific method. I assume that those people gained real material value, and to dispose of what those people believed without extracting and maintaining that value is simply destructive.
ernopp 5y ago
Spot on. I've been working in startups for 10 years (my whole career so far) because I was optimising for learning, not financial return. I made the bet that startups would be the fastest way to learn (breadth of tasks, workload, exposure to more senior people etc) and I am allergic to larger company bureaucracy.
m463 5y ago
In my experience, working at a startup can get you more experience and responsibility faster, and the work itself can be more satisfying. The compensation itself is a lottery and should be treated as such. And there will be shenanigans. I do think that startups more closely align with people with less personal responsibilities and a higher tolerance for risk. EDIT: downvotes? just saying - this was my personal experience. YMMV.
- tdeck 5y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted but I completely agree. The sweet spot for new grads might be a medium sized "startup" with a few hundred engineers. By that point the comp+benefits should be sorted out and it'll be less of a madhouse, but it's still a bit understaffed so you can take on some interesting responsibility.

by cudgy 5y ago

geofft 5y ago

> However, that same community feeling and sense of purpose is what I remember fondest from working at startups. In addition, startups give you access to other capable and driven people that you might create a startup of your own with Depends a lot on the specific startup and specific big company. The 50-person startup I worked at right out of college never really found product-market fit, and tried many things, and the product I worked on (and deeply enjoyed working on technically) was always a second-class product to the business. And we were selling B2B software, so I was never motivated by wanting to change the world, just by wanting to ship some cool software. I get that same motivation at my current 1500-person employer, where I work on developer tools; I get to work on interesting technical problems, and the fruits of my work go to help people in, frankly, the same industry as most of our customers at the startup. I'm a little more involved in what out internal customers actually do and therefore find it more motivating to help them, though the work they do, per se, isn't interesting to me. And there are plenty of driven, passionate, and friendly people around who care about the same problems I care about, and it's much easier to find a few of those people and make a community when I've got orders of magnitude more people to try to work with.

tuyguntn 5y ago

> The main point here is that career decisions are highly personal and one person’s hell is another person’s heaven. This. From "depends on person" perspective I fully agree with you, from monetary perspective I agree with the author. After years of working for startups, now success for me means, financially independent to work on whatever I enjoy doing, not some OKR, KPI set by person who already achieved their success story. Haven't reached my success. I was hesitant to do leetcode and join FAANG companies 10-15 years ago, worked for bunch of startups as an employee and contractor, all failed, financially I still depend on big boss, and even can be laid off if layoff season starts again. FAANG are not only more stable, but total compensation for 10 years can easily beat 1B$ exit startups, assuming you get 0.1% of equity there

airstrike 5y ago

> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion? Can't it just be a matter of personal preference, as you said it yourself?

celim307 5y ago
Yeah sounds like OP has a chip on their shoulder and is projecting. I wouldn’t trade my years at a startup for anything but they can be run by tyrants in a fiefdom just as much as a VP runs an org, sometimes more so as they have no one they report to.
jasode 5y ago
>>> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background >How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion? The author wrote: "From the ages of 19-21, I spent my time as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon church. I worked 12 hours a day for two years straight with only Christmas and Mother’s Day off. [...] For this job, I was paid a total of 0 dollars." It seems reasonable to assume that non-religious people wouldn't do that for $0 pay.
- jsonne 5y ago
  Ironic because Utah is becoming a tech hot spot driven in part by the large Mormon presence.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    How so? Recursion doesn’t scream full of Mormons to me.
    - jsonne 5y ago
      Just one example. The Mormon mission program is quite possibly the best sales training program in the world. If you can go door to door in a country that isn't your own, in a second language, selling religion then enterprise SaaS is really a breeze. (Note I am not Mormon)

higeorge13 5y ago

It highly depends on the startups, not on people personalities. There are good startups where your work will be appreciated, you will bond with everyone, become friends through the difficulties and hopefully enjoy and celebrate the successes. And there are startups where you will see chaos, poor management, bad attitude to employees, pointing fingers and engineers leaving every couple years. Even startup-oriented personalities cannot stand such workplaces.

jsonne 5y ago

> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background and prefers the “certainty” of a corporate environment. I'm a practicing Catholic and have worked either as a freelancer or a startup founder for >90% of my career. Not sure how you're drawing that conclusion but plenty of my peers are religious in a traditional sense and work in startups.

kingsuper20 5y ago
It's a thing that engineers (particularly software, hardware guys aren't as rude) really have to watch. Given the tendency for programmers to be that edgy libertarian atheist guy, it's easy to be unthinkingly rude to a coworker who is of a churchly persuasion.
- meekmind 5y ago
  To that end, Jordan Peterson's lectures on the Bible did me personally a great service in bridging the gap between these seemingly opposed worldviews. JP is considered by many to be a Christian apologist and has done a incredible work in describing a completely rational and sympathetic view of Christianity. I can't recommend highly enough his lectures freely available on Youtube. Having listened to most of them, he completely dispelled from me a variety of common athiest notions and revealed them to be the thoughtless propaganda that they are.. For example, it is commonly understood that religion and science are always opposed. However, it's rarely ever mentioned that Christian theologians for centuries consistently modified their belief structure to reflect reality as their understanding of reality improved. In other words, quite often if there was a seeming contradiction between doctrine and observable fact, the doctrine was changed, as opposed to ignoring the observable fact. Obviously there are exceptions to this, like the Inquisition, or other dark periods through history. Religion is not without it's faults, but that is true of any principle around which people organize. The important part, for the materialist, objectivist, or athiest; is recognizing the organizing principles as being somehow useful to people prior to the refinement of the scientific method. I assume that those people gained real material value, and to dispose of what those people believed without extracting and maintaining that value is simply destructive.

ernopp 5y ago

Spot on. I've been working in startups for 10 years (my whole career so far) because I was optimising for learning, not financial return. I made the bet that startups would be the fastest way to learn (breadth of tasks, workload, exposure to more senior people etc) and I am allergic to larger company bureaucracy.

m463 5y ago

In my experience, working at a startup can get you more experience and responsibility faster, and the work itself can be more satisfying. The compensation itself is a lottery and should be treated as such. And there will be shenanigans. I do think that startups more closely align with people with less personal responsibilities and a higher tolerance for risk. EDIT: downvotes? just saying - this was my personal experience. YMMV.

tdeck 5y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted but I completely agree. The sweet spot for new grads might be a medium sized "startup" with a few hundred engineers. By that point the comp+benefits should be sorted out and it'll be less of a madhouse, but it's still a bit understaffed so you can take on some interesting responsibility.