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I think we need to consider each company separately. Smaller firms may have smaller codebase and less complex infrastructure and processes to get familiar with
by pm90 5y ago
I think we need to consider each company separately.
Smaller firms may have smaller codebase and less complex infrastructure and processes to get familiar with. Learning all of that wouldn’t take more than a week or a month, tops.
Larger, public companies like FAANGS will often have completely custom stacks, specialized developer tools and a ton of checks before anything you write hits production. Learning to navigate this will take a lot longer. IIRC Facebook has a bootcamp of several weeks (months?) just to get new engineers familiar with their shit.
In either case, I personally don’t think it’s a “wash” since even at the bigger company it’s not like you’re not doing anything and once you get familiar with the stack you can be productive af.
- RussianCow 5y agoYou're completely right—to be fair, the company I was referring to is giant and likely has several months' worth of things to learn, which is very different than joining a startup. But even if a one-year cliff seems excessive for most companies, I still don't think there's anything wrong with a cliff of some sort. Maybe 6 months makes more sense for a medium-sized company, but there's still a breakeven point for new hires, and unless you're one of the first 5 or so employees, that point is probably somewhere between 3 and 9 months. I don't think it's unreasonable for companies to want to pay less during that "trial" period; if you don't like it, join a different company, or just hold out until your equity vests.