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This article isn’t about if you should join a startup vs. a big company. It’s about if you should join a startup vs. a FAANG company, which offers outrageous co

by jhbao 5y ago

This article isn’t about if you should join a startup vs. a big company. It’s about if you should join a startup vs. a FAANG company, which offers outrageous compensation & benefits. From that perspective, FAANG is the obvious choice 99% of the time. The more and apt comparison would be if you should work at a startup vs. a corporate job at a HP or Qualcomm. At those type of companies, compensation is not competitive (they often off-shore), benefits are tight, and the work is not interesting. It could very well be argued that a startup, even with high probability of failure, would be more fulfilling.

hashkb 5y ago
Does anyone consider FAANG to be startups? I'm confused by your comment.
- dinkleberg 5y ago
  No, what they are saying is that people present a false dilemma where your options to work are either at a FAANG or at a startup. Most people work at non-FAANG companies. If you're going to do a write-up on relative merits of working at a startup vs a larger company things are going to lean heavily in favor of the FAANG because the overall risk to compensation is much more favorable. But if you compare a startup to a more standard tech company then each side will have more pros and cons.
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    Ya, if we compare startups with say Walmart or Bank of America or InfoSys, startups probably win.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  No, and I don't think that's the parent is suggesting that. They are saying if you are looking for a challenging, highly rewarding role, FAANG is a better fit than startups.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I'm part of a mentoring group for recent college grads. One of our biggest challenges is that much of the conversation on HN, Twitter, Blind, and other sites assumes that FAANG admission is guaranteed. This becomes a major struggle for juniors when they realize that there aren't any FAANG offices in their location. Many others apply to FAANG but don't receive offers, which is devastating if every HN comment, medium article, and Tweet they read revolves around getting into FAANG. It's a strange situation to have to console junior engineers about their "paltry" $130K compensation at comfortable 9-5 jobs in low cost of living cities. I have to remind a lot of people that the FAANG interview acceptance rate is very, very small. This idea that everyone can call up FAANg and get a $200K+ job in their city is not helpful to anyone but top candidates in a few select cities.
- nrp 5y ago
  I fully agree that the fervor around FAANG is unhealthy. However, if you are just at the start if your career, that is the best time to move to wherever the jobs you are interested in are, rather than restricting yourself to what is available near where you currently are. There will be folks that have obligations preventing that, but most recent college grads should have little holding them from moving.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    This comment is a good summary of the problem I was describing: It's easy to say that anyone who can get a FAANG job should get a FAANG job, but if circumstances don't line up, what else? That's where many students draw a blank, because all of the advice they've consumed revolves around FAANG job offers that may not arrive. Statistically, more people are rejected than accepted by FAANG companies. A lot of my mentoring time is spent helping students figure out what's next when their primary FAANG plan doesn't (or can't) work out.
    - NeverFade 5y ago
      The number of successful top tech companies keeps growing. The winner-takes-all reality of our current tech business environment means that the job market is: 1. These top companies that pay very well and offer excellent career growth prospects. 2. Everything else below. So the real answer is "keep working at your fallback option until you can finally graduate to one of the lucrative positions at the top of the pyramid". That's the real, no-BS best course for the employees themselves. For companies below that top, that is horrible situation because it means all their employees (and especially their best) are temps just waiting for their real shot elsewhere. However, it is also the reality: most employees do leave for that golden top-tech offer that pays them x2+ their current comp with no risk. Non-top companies don't really help the situation much themselves; as we all know having FAANG on your resume is the surest way to get interviews, offers, and career upgrades everywhere outside of FAANG as well. So, the "top-tech or bust" attitude will continue.
NationalPark 5y ago
Most tech startups seem to model their hiring practices and organization around FAANG companies (technical screens, OKRs, Agile, reliability teams, etc.) so I think the comparison is actually more interesting if you leave out the "normal" jobs. Since a lot of the skills are transferrable, you're more likely to have the option of either rather than one or the other.
SilurianWenlock 5y ago
Why do HP and Qualcomm want to offshore but FAANGs dont?
- analyst74 5y ago
  The job of an outsourced position and senior+ IC role in top tech firms are fundamentally different. You can't survive just be churning through ticket backlogs. Sometimes you are expect to come up with initiatives, gather support and resources, deliver said initiatives that have a measurable impact to a global company without much guidance or help from your boss; at higher IC tracks, the kind of initiatives you lead can have meaningful impact to a whole sector. These expectations, in a more traditional company, is normally reserved for positions much higher up in the org chart.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Business leadership culture.
axegon_ 5y ago
There are other aspects that you need to take into consideration: bureaucracy, the enforced-by-law company values(last year I got an offer which seemed really appealing until I saw the contract and some of those clauses), the endless "open a jira ticket" for every little thing such as rebooting a development server or whatever(which ends up being a 2 day task with hours of explanations as opposed to ssh; sudo rebbot), the endless and pointless meetings which are filled with "we should" coming from people who love taking credit when something is going right but will toss the blame to anyone they can when they aren't. Not to mention absurd expenses for "business trips" which are pointless in the vast majority of cases. I've been to several of these and they were all a waste of money and time: seriously, fly 20 people across the world just so they can listen to 3 days of "we should" lectures, there goes a ton of money which could have been spent on something useful like training or even a few small bonuses for the people that have worked their asses off. I've worked in such environments for many many years and the idea of ending up in such a place again terrifies me(I certainly started appreciating the absence of all that crap, though I never really knew how much all that truly bothered me until I ran away from it). My point is, if you decide to go with a FAANG, you will get the quirky benefits and traits but at the expense of having to throttle yourself much below your capacity and dealing with a ton of frustration coming from the corporate side of things.
jchonphoenix 5y ago
The reason tech tends to compare vs FANG is that the "canonical" startup is founded by a Stanford or Harvard graduate and hires friends/employees exclusively from Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. This was certainly the case for the tech focused breakouts in the last few decades (FB, Google, Dropbox, Palantir, Stripe). Given these are the example startups, every one of those employees more or less had a FANG offer as a backup.
KwisatzHaderack 5y ago
Ding Ding Ding! And here’s the quote from the article: > contrast, if you were to take a job at a tier 1 tech firm, such as Facebook or Google, as a high-quality engineer your salary can be $200-400k with an additional $100-250K in equity.
SZJX 5y ago
Even then, I don't think lumping all "startups" in one basket is fair. A friend of mine joined Snowflake (and rejected some FAANG offers) when it had ~40 engineers, i.e. when it could still well be called a "startup". He can literally retire after his options are fully vested, just 4 years after he joined (barring some catastrophic event to Snowflake withinin a couple of years' time horizon). AFAIK aiming for late-stage startups has been a common strategy for people trying to strike gold. Maybe it's less valid nowadays? But it doesn't seem to make sense to me to say that working for a startup is 99% of the time worse than working for FAANG. "Overrated" it could be, and many startups, especially early-stage ones, suffer from a huge amount of uncertainty for people aiming for the liquidity event, which they may well underestimate. But I can't imagine anybody, by working at FAANG, getting the amount of money he is now projected to get. Another interesting (and non-US-centric) factor for me is the flexibility a startup can offer in terms of your work and compensation, especially in an era where going remote seems to be an unstoppable trend. If the company is willing to pay all employees the same amount of salary, regardless of where they live in the world, it could be a no brainer for somebody not living in the US to work for such a startup. The salary they get can easily exceed Google L4 total pay (e.g. in the UK and in Germany, not to mention in most other countries). Of course, many companies such as GitLab aggressively adjust their salary according to where you work from, but I've seen more and more companies that don't. It will be very interesting to see how the market sorts itself out in a few years' time: Seems to me the proliferation of remote work could result in US salary and remote salary meeting somewhere in the middle.
majani 5y ago
You giving both examples as product companies is still generous. Most computer scientists work in service companies.

by jhbao 5y ago

hashkb 5y ago

Does anyone consider FAANG to be startups? I'm confused by your comment.

dinkleberg 5y ago
No, what they are saying is that people present a false dilemma where your options to work are either at a FAANG or at a startup. Most people work at non-FAANG companies. If you're going to do a write-up on relative merits of working at a startup vs a larger company things are going to lean heavily in favor of the FAANG because the overall risk to compensation is much more favorable. But if you compare a startup to a more standard tech company then each side will have more pros and cons.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  Ya, if we compare startups with say Walmart or Bank of America or InfoSys, startups probably win.
bdcravens 5y ago
No, and I don't think that's the parent is suggesting that. They are saying if you are looking for a challenging, highly rewarding role, FAANG is a better fit than startups.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I'm part of a mentoring group for recent college grads. One of our biggest challenges is that much of the conversation on HN, Twitter, Blind, and other sites assumes that FAANG admission is guaranteed. This becomes a major struggle for juniors when they realize that there aren't any FAANG offices in their location. Many others apply to FAANG but don't receive offers, which is devastating if every HN comment, medium article, and Tweet they read revolves around getting into FAANG. It's a strange situation to have to console junior engineers about their "paltry" $130K compensation at comfortable 9-5 jobs in low cost of living cities. I have to remind a lot of people that the FAANG interview acceptance rate is very, very small. This idea that everyone can call up FAANg and get a $200K+ job in their city is not helpful to anyone but top candidates in a few select cities.

nrp 5y ago
I fully agree that the fervor around FAANG is unhealthy. However, if you are just at the start if your career, that is the best time to move to wherever the jobs you are interested in are, rather than restricting yourself to what is available near where you currently are. There will be folks that have obligations preventing that, but most recent college grads should have little holding them from moving.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  This comment is a good summary of the problem I was describing: It's easy to say that anyone who can get a FAANG job should get a FAANG job, but if circumstances don't line up, what else? That's where many students draw a blank, because all of the advice they've consumed revolves around FAANG job offers that may not arrive. Statistically, more people are rejected than accepted by FAANG companies. A lot of my mentoring time is spent helping students figure out what's next when their primary FAANG plan doesn't (or can't) work out.
  - NeverFade 5y ago
    The number of successful top tech companies keeps growing. The winner-takes-all reality of our current tech business environment means that the job market is: 1. These top companies that pay very well and offer excellent career growth prospects. 2. Everything else below. So the real answer is "keep working at your fallback option until you can finally graduate to one of the lucrative positions at the top of the pyramid". That's the real, no-BS best course for the employees themselves. For companies below that top, that is horrible situation because it means all their employees (and especially their best) are temps just waiting for their real shot elsewhere. However, it is also the reality: most employees do leave for that golden top-tech offer that pays them x2+ their current comp with no risk. Non-top companies don't really help the situation much themselves; as we all know having FAANG on your resume is the surest way to get interviews, offers, and career upgrades everywhere outside of FAANG as well. So, the "top-tech or bust" attitude will continue.

NationalPark 5y ago

Most tech startups seem to model their hiring practices and organization around FAANG companies (technical screens, OKRs, Agile, reliability teams, etc.) so I think the comparison is actually more interesting if you leave out the "normal" jobs. Since a lot of the skills are transferrable, you're more likely to have the option of either rather than one or the other.

SilurianWenlock 5y ago

Why do HP and Qualcomm want to offshore but FAANGs dont?

analyst74 5y ago
The job of an outsourced position and senior+ IC role in top tech firms are fundamentally different. You can't survive just be churning through ticket backlogs. Sometimes you are expect to come up with initiatives, gather support and resources, deliver said initiatives that have a measurable impact to a global company without much guidance or help from your boss; at higher IC tracks, the kind of initiatives you lead can have meaningful impact to a whole sector. These expectations, in a more traditional company, is normally reserved for positions much higher up in the org chart.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Business leadership culture.

axegon_ 5y ago

There are other aspects that you need to take into consideration: bureaucracy, the enforced-by-law company values(last year I got an offer which seemed really appealing until I saw the contract and some of those clauses), the endless "open a jira ticket" for every little thing such as rebooting a development server or whatever(which ends up being a 2 day task with hours of explanations as opposed to ssh; sudo rebbot), the endless and pointless meetings which are filled with "we should" coming from people who love taking credit when something is going right but will toss the blame to anyone they can when they aren't. Not to mention absurd expenses for "business trips" which are pointless in the vast majority of cases. I've been to several of these and they were all a waste of money and time: seriously, fly 20 people across the world just so they can listen to 3 days of "we should" lectures, there goes a ton of money which could have been spent on something useful like training or even a few small bonuses for the people that have worked their asses off. I've worked in such environments for many many years and the idea of ending up in such a place again terrifies me(I certainly started appreciating the absence of all that crap, though I never really knew how much all that truly bothered me until I ran away from it). My point is, if you decide to go with a FAANG, you will get the quirky benefits and traits but at the expense of having to throttle yourself much below your capacity and dealing with a ton of frustration coming from the corporate side of things.

jchonphoenix 5y ago

The reason tech tends to compare vs FANG is that the "canonical" startup is founded by a Stanford or Harvard graduate and hires friends/employees exclusively from Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. This was certainly the case for the tech focused breakouts in the last few decades (FB, Google, Dropbox, Palantir, Stripe). Given these are the example startups, every one of those employees more or less had a FANG offer as a backup.

KwisatzHaderack 5y ago

Ding Ding Ding! And here’s the quote from the article: > contrast, if you were to take a job at a tier 1 tech firm, such as Facebook or Google, as a high-quality engineer your salary can be $200-400k with an additional $100-250K in equity.

SZJX 5y ago

Even then, I don't think lumping all "startups" in one basket is fair. A friend of mine joined Snowflake (and rejected some FAANG offers) when it had ~40 engineers, i.e. when it could still well be called a "startup". He can literally retire after his options are fully vested, just 4 years after he joined (barring some catastrophic event to Snowflake withinin a couple of years' time horizon). AFAIK aiming for late-stage startups has been a common strategy for people trying to strike gold. Maybe it's less valid nowadays? But it doesn't seem to make sense to me to say that working for a startup is 99% of the time worse than working for FAANG. "Overrated" it could be, and many startups, especially early-stage ones, suffer from a huge amount of uncertainty for people aiming for the liquidity event, which they may well underestimate. But I can't imagine anybody, by working at FAANG, getting the amount of money he is now projected to get. Another interesting (and non-US-centric) factor for me is the flexibility a startup can offer in terms of your work and compensation, especially in an era where going remote seems to be an unstoppable trend. If the company is willing to pay all employees the same amount of salary, regardless of where they live in the world, it could be a no brainer for somebody not living in the US to work for such a startup. The salary they get can easily exceed Google L4 total pay (e.g. in the UK and in Germany, not to mention in most other countries). Of course, many companies such as GitLab aggressively adjust their salary according to where you work from, but I've seen more and more companies that don't. It will be very interesting to see how the market sorts itself out in a few years' time: Seems to me the proliferation of remote work could result in US salary and remote salary meeting somewhere in the middle.

majani 5y ago

You giving both examples as product companies is still generous. Most computer scientists work in service companies.