I don't think the author is comparing apple to apples. Instead of contrasting joining startups and joining FAANGs, we should really compare joining top-notch st

I don't think the author is comparing apple to apples. Instead of contrasting joining startups and joining FAANGs, we should really compare joining top-notch startups with joining FAANGs. That is, just like good companies are scarce, so are good startups. Look back, and we can see that those who join square, pinterest, airbnb, uber (before early 2015), facebook (before its IPO) all did really well. By the way, Netflix circa 2008 was still in a sense a startup, as they were still being threatened by blockbuster and most doubted their streaming initiative and the company had fewer than 150 engineers. Even those who joined Uber in 2016 or later got something back. Uber's success did give halo to its employees. As a result, many became senior managers or directors or staff engineers in other reputed companies, even though they had started their career only 3 or 4 years before. The trick to land on a promising startup is taking sunken cost seriously. Switch to a different company decisively and swiftly once you are convinced that the company has a bad leadership. And trust me, there will be many signs. Take Uber after 2016, for instance, you would see 1. Head of HR reported to this hot-head VP, who was the buddy of the CEO; 2. CFO told employees that they RSU hold period was a year instead of 6 months and the reason is for employees' own good; 3. CEO told employees that he didn't want to go IPO simply because he didn't want the employees to check stock price all day. 4. Uber copies pretty much every policy from Amazon yet could execute well and everyone was launching project for promotion and the company had more than 800 services. 5. CEO forced managers to A/B test packages to see how low a package can go to hire people. 6. Company splurged 10s of millions hosting extravagant parties for 4 days straight in Vegas for bogus metrics like total number of trips; 7. HRs used number of people hired as the key metric to boast that Uber was the fastest-growing company. See? When you see so much distrust from the top, you should just jump ship, and use the halo you get from UBER to land on a different top startup, whatever that is, and rinse (in case you ended up joining WeWork).