6 ms·

This tracks. I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career. Early engineers often have first dibs on higher level roles, like

by itake 2y ago

This tracks. I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career. Early engineers often have first dibs on higher level roles, like CTO or director over people that join late. Your initial grant might not be great, but being director at such a company is huge

kijin 2y ago
Yeah, this is often overlooked in all the talk of $300k FAANG salaries. Few people get those senior salaries, and those who do get it because of their unusual skills and experiences. A stint at a startup is still a pretty good way to get those skills and experiences, compared to spending the same amount of time as a junior developer somewhere else. If you can make capital gains equivalent to FAANG senior salaries while doing so, even better! But if not, at least you'll have come out with a more interesting resume.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  levels.fyi will give you some confidence in the wage. Google, Meta, Amazon & microsoft all do banding, so the base wages is mostly public (hence why its all bollocks about wage negotiation, there isn't any.) The first level of senior for most of these orgs will tip the scales at around $300k Having worked at both startup and FAANG, I don;t think startups actually give you the skills to flourish here in corp land. Sure, you might be a good coder, but most of the time its navigating politics that actually gets you promotion (that or good luck with a successful project) You really don't need to be a good coder to be at a FAANG. Sure there are specialisms as you point out. but most of the time its just entry level CRUD, followed by manic debugging with shitty non-documented tools.
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    Wage negotiation means getting to the top of the band sooner. Other people might have to perform well at the level to get to the band, but a wage negotiator might just get there on their first day.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Most of the time the wage is not up for negotiation. Forget about it, you can't change it. HR and your future boss are tied up with company policy which says you start at X and you can't change that. Spend your time instead on getting more vacation from the start. If instead you ask for 25 days of vacation per year instead of the default 10 you have a deal (or maybe they bring you down to 20 days). You can't get 50 days of vacation (there is a company max they can't go beyond), but you can get a lot more time.
      - kridsdale1 2y ago
        I haven’t experienced what you claim. I’ve succeeded to the 99th percentile with wage negotiation the last 2 times I job hopped (both FAANG). The trick is you really do need to do the work to collect a poker-hand of competing offers with which to have leverage. You can then say “I won’t take your offer unless you make it (top of band, L+1, remote)” etc. This has not backfired on me. It just takes 8 times more effort than getting hired at one place. I figured the benefit would compound.
        KaiserPro 2y ago
        Wait so you got an offer at a FAANG for one level, and you negotiated to go up a level in pay, but not actually go up a level?
        bluGill 2y ago
        Every company is different. Congratulations for pulling that off. It won't work everywhere though. The real trick is figuring out where they can negotiate - there is always something.
      - kccqzy 2y ago
        I know multiple successful wage negotiators at FAANG. Before their promotion their annual salary increase is on the order of hundreds to low thousands because they are already at the top salary for their level.
  - cdavid 2y ago
    negotiation is very much a thing even at FAANG. If anything, it can help you being at the top of your assigned band. Other things can be negotiated. Source: I am no great negotiator, but I've always negotiated my salary and got 10-15 % more than what I would have had w/o asking anything. This compounds after a few stints. And I've been a manager in startup/mid size/big tech: always negotiate.
    - compiler-guy 2y ago
      There is also the signing bonus, which is usually available for a recruiter to sweeten things if the first offer is marginal. Google-recruiters for years claimed it was non-negotiable, all the while negotiating it for people who were willing to play the game.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Funny, my experience is engineers (at ICT level) at big companies are also really bad at politics - all they do in public setting is ask for more perks and benefits.
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
      I see this too. An incredible amount of griping about the Wednesday cookies. Not much about how the shop across the street is giving an extra $100,000 for the same work profile.
  - kijin 2y ago
    Being successful at a startup isn't about being a good coder, either. Especially if you're a founding member or an early hire, it often has much more to do with having good insights about where technology meets business, knowing how to tackle difficult problems using limited resources (IRL, not just in a computer), and even a sprinkle of politics if your startup happens to "disrupt" the wrong kind of industry. If your startup has a management team that can abstract away all of that stuff so that you can just code in peace, I agree that your tenure there will probably not be worth the hassle in a resume.
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  That doesn't really address that the burnout/startup/hustle culture is part of the risk/reward valuation employees make to work at a startup. If I can get the same compensation working at a FAANG with less stress, better hours and more balance/control over my life, and the resume entry may be 'more interesting' in some ways, but its hard to argue with FAANG on a resume either why wouldn't I? the choice to risk all of that for only a chance at reaching that compensation is a hard sell. The possibility of pouring your hard work into a company from the start/early on with others equally dedicated, and if it blows up you all blow up is the selling factor. On top of that, how many startups came from employees of previous successes that turned that wealth into more innovation? Restricting that path to wealth for many and concentrating the profits to a smaller and smaller group doesn't seem to me the best economic bet to make long-term.
  - kijin 2y ago
    Some people just like the hustle culture. They can't seem to stand the boredom of a sustainable company with years of runway. So it obviously depends on your personality. For some, the thrill is worth the risk. For others, it's a huge bag of nope. I for one am clearly moving toward the latter group as I get older.
    - hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
      >I for one am clearly moving toward the latter group as I get older. For me, I'm strongly moving towards the mentality that a startup I care about would at least give me outcomes I care about and an environment I can enjoy without the BS of big tech corporate and the need to prioritize stability, but its largely because I can increasingly afford to consider risks and lower income positions because my current job and income that isn't a startup. The time/stress trade offs at big tech are increasingly diminishing vs startups (hussle culture taking over there now too), so if I'm going to have to deal with it it might as well have the least amount of BS possible... Its interesting how I prioritized stability early on in my career, and now consider less stable/risky roles that are more interesting or exciting, while you seem to be going the other direction. There are certainly a lot of different journeys through life.
  - 2y ago
high_na_euv 2y ago
What skills precisely you think about when it comes to an early engineer, but not founder/business person?
- aqme28 2y ago
  Scaling up a business, for one. By the time "scaling up" is actually computationally relevant, the founders are no longer coding. Also general coding practices for large teams or multiple intersecting teams.
ragnot 2y ago
You'll find that outside the startup, the director/vp/cto title doesn't translate. Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position". Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.
- taylodl 2y ago
  The corporate world is simply a different environment with a different set of rules and a different set of engagements and thus requiring a different set of skills. A director or VP at a startup and a director or VP at a Fortune 500 company are two totally different things.
  - gnkyfrg 2y ago
    [dead]
- ecshafer 2y ago
  A CTO of a startup might be coding day to day, making technology decisions, and have a team or two underneath them. In F500 or Corpro world, this is more like a engineering manager or tech lead. In most big companies a manager does zero coding and rarely makes a tech decision, you go up to a director level, they might have 100-200 people under them, direct reports are almost all managers, and they never touch tech. Go higher up to VP or CTO levels and they are just so divorced from code that it doesn't make sense why a CTO in a startup would translate.
- mattlutze 2y ago
  > Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position". It's not about age, it's about what you actually had to do. Company size, company age and political complexity are strongly correlated. A successful large company engineering director spends their day mostly doing politics across the org, while a successful small company engineering director spends a lot of their day writing code, being an architect, filling in for product management. > Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part. Big companies want you to know how to play the long game.
aqme28 2y ago
Unfortunately, the company preferred to hire experienced ex-FAANG managers for those roles.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  Everyone: Big Tech ruins news/social media/small businesses/democracy! Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else!
  - p_j_w 2y ago
    I dont think FAANG employees are better than everyone else, but these two things don’t sound mutually exclusive.
    - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      Agree. Just an inflammatory observation that we are prone to both villainize and glorify the institutions that be without much cognitive dissonance. :) On second thought, "irrationally preferred during hiring" gets at that idea better.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else! Rather: FAANG employees are pushed into startups by VCs.
    - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      How so? They get paraded around as tokens of competence by VCs?
      - mjmsmith 2y ago
        I've always found it amusing that FAANG pedigree is considered a plus for startup founders when the skill set is not only different but sometimes detrimental.
meritage31 2y ago
>> I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career. Startups hire those people when they are risky and the future is unclear. Once there is traction, the VCs and insiders bring in friends for cush Director/VC posts. Quite often the people who took the real risks get left out.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  And that seems like safe capital preserving thing to do. A director role isn’t a prize for loyalty, it’s a job with a skill set. Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gnkyfrg 2y ago
    [dead]
  - timr 2y ago
    Sorta. A very common pattern is for startups to make abysmal hires for these "executive" roles, because the people in those roles in big tech bring loads of politics and a very narrow type of experience. They bring in their friends, and it isn't terribly long before the people who got the company to the place of initial success are gone. I've seen this play out many times. Not to say that the early employee is necessarily guaranteed to be better, but at least they're a known quantity, have demonstrated loyalty, and have loads of business context that the shiny exec hire won't have.
  - neilv 2y ago
    Good points about roles not being prizes (unless that was the deal, which it sometimes is), but I'll devil's advocate this anyway. > Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where If you hire smart people who learn, and who believe in the mission and team... that programmer might well be in the running to lead engineering. Knowing tech industry a bit, I'd be at least as skeptical of directors from outside. Of course I'd have to consider them, at times. But I expect at least half of the outside candidates for leadership roles will be disingenuous halfwits. Meanwhile, if you've got people who had the grit to help get you to that point, and demonstrated alignment and loyalty when it mattered, and who foster that trust in your company culture, then you'd be an idiot not to try to find a way to get rare goodness like that in your leadership.
jollyllama 2y ago
It depends on the investors. Sometimes they will insist on bringing in their own people who will skip ahead. This can happen if bigger investors are brought on late or if the business is not developing according to plan and equity has to be sold.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by itake 2y ago

kijin 2y ago

Yeah, this is often overlooked in all the talk of $300k FAANG salaries. Few people get those senior salaries, and those who do get it because of their unusual skills and experiences. A stint at a startup is still a pretty good way to get those skills and experiences, compared to spending the same amount of time as a junior developer somewhere else. If you can make capital gains equivalent to FAANG senior salaries while doing so, even better! But if not, at least you'll have come out with a more interesting resume.

KaiserPro 2y ago
levels.fyi will give you some confidence in the wage. Google, Meta, Amazon & microsoft all do banding, so the base wages is mostly public (hence why its all bollocks about wage negotiation, there isn't any.) The first level of senior for most of these orgs will tip the scales at around $300k Having worked at both startup and FAANG, I don;t think startups actually give you the skills to flourish here in corp land. Sure, you might be a good coder, but most of the time its navigating politics that actually gets you promotion (that or good luck with a successful project) You really don't need to be a good coder to be at a FAANG. Sure there are specialisms as you point out. but most of the time its just entry level CRUD, followed by manic debugging with shitty non-documented tools.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Wage negotiation means getting to the top of the band sooner. Other people might have to perform well at the level to get to the band, but a wage negotiator might just get there on their first day.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Most of the time the wage is not up for negotiation. Forget about it, you can't change it. HR and your future boss are tied up with company policy which says you start at X and you can't change that. Spend your time instead on getting more vacation from the start. If instead you ask for 25 days of vacation per year instead of the default 10 you have a deal (or maybe they bring you down to 20 days). You can't get 50 days of vacation (there is a company max they can't go beyond), but you can get a lot more time.
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
      I haven’t experienced what you claim. I’ve succeeded to the 99th percentile with wage negotiation the last 2 times I job hopped (both FAANG). The trick is you really do need to do the work to collect a poker-hand of competing offers with which to have leverage. You can then say “I won’t take your offer unless you make it (top of band, L+1, remote)” etc. This has not backfired on me. It just takes 8 times more effort than getting hired at one place. I figured the benefit would compound.
      - KaiserPro 2y ago
        Wait so you got an offer at a FAANG for one level, and you negotiated to go up a level in pay, but not actually go up a level?
      - bluGill 2y ago
        Every company is different. Congratulations for pulling that off. It won't work everywhere though. The real trick is figuring out where they can negotiate - there is always something.
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      I know multiple successful wage negotiators at FAANG. Before their promotion their annual salary increase is on the order of hundreds to low thousands because they are already at the top salary for their level.
- cdavid 2y ago
  negotiation is very much a thing even at FAANG. If anything, it can help you being at the top of your assigned band. Other things can be negotiated. Source: I am no great negotiator, but I've always negotiated my salary and got 10-15 % more than what I would have had w/o asking anything. This compounds after a few stints. And I've been a manager in startup/mid size/big tech: always negotiate.
  - compiler-guy 2y ago
    There is also the signing bonus, which is usually available for a recruiter to sweeten things if the first offer is marginal. Google-recruiters for years claimed it was non-negotiable, all the while negotiating it for people who were willing to play the game.
- liontwist 2y ago
  Funny, my experience is engineers (at ICT level) at big companies are also really bad at politics - all they do in public setting is ask for more perks and benefits.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    I see this too. An incredible amount of griping about the Wednesday cookies. Not much about how the shop across the street is giving an extra $100,000 for the same work profile.
- kijin 2y ago
  Being successful at a startup isn't about being a good coder, either. Especially if you're a founding member or an early hire, it often has much more to do with having good insights about where technology meets business, knowing how to tackle difficult problems using limited resources (IRL, not just in a computer), and even a sprinkle of politics if your startup happens to "disrupt" the wrong kind of industry. If your startup has a management team that can abstract away all of that stuff so that you can just code in peace, I agree that your tenure there will probably not be worth the hassle in a resume.
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
That doesn't really address that the burnout/startup/hustle culture is part of the risk/reward valuation employees make to work at a startup. If I can get the same compensation working at a FAANG with less stress, better hours and more balance/control over my life, and the resume entry may be 'more interesting' in some ways, but its hard to argue with FAANG on a resume either why wouldn't I? the choice to risk all of that for only a chance at reaching that compensation is a hard sell. The possibility of pouring your hard work into a company from the start/early on with others equally dedicated, and if it blows up you all blow up is the selling factor. On top of that, how many startups came from employees of previous successes that turned that wealth into more innovation? Restricting that path to wealth for many and concentrating the profits to a smaller and smaller group doesn't seem to me the best economic bet to make long-term.
- kijin 2y ago
  Some people just like the hustle culture. They can't seem to stand the boredom of a sustainable company with years of runway. So it obviously depends on your personality. For some, the thrill is worth the risk. For others, it's a huge bag of nope. I for one am clearly moving toward the latter group as I get older.
  - hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
    >I for one am clearly moving toward the latter group as I get older. For me, I'm strongly moving towards the mentality that a startup I care about would at least give me outcomes I care about and an environment I can enjoy without the BS of big tech corporate and the need to prioritize stability, but its largely because I can increasingly afford to consider risks and lower income positions because my current job and income that isn't a startup. The time/stress trade offs at big tech are increasingly diminishing vs startups (hussle culture taking over there now too), so if I'm going to have to deal with it it might as well have the least amount of BS possible... Its interesting how I prioritized stability early on in my career, and now consider less stable/risky roles that are more interesting or exciting, while you seem to be going the other direction. There are certainly a lot of different journeys through life.
- 2y ago

high_na_euv 2y ago

What skills precisely you think about when it comes to an early engineer, but not founder/business person?

aqme28 2y ago
Scaling up a business, for one. By the time "scaling up" is actually computationally relevant, the founders are no longer coding. Also general coding practices for large teams or multiple intersecting teams.

ragnot 2y ago

You'll find that outside the startup, the director/vp/cto title doesn't translate. Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position". Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.

taylodl 2y ago
The corporate world is simply a different environment with a different set of rules and a different set of engagements and thus requiring a different set of skills. A director or VP at a startup and a director or VP at a Fortune 500 company are two totally different things.
- gnkyfrg 2y ago
  [dead]
ecshafer 2y ago
A CTO of a startup might be coding day to day, making technology decisions, and have a team or two underneath them. In F500 or Corpro world, this is more like a engineering manager or tech lead. In most big companies a manager does zero coding and rarely makes a tech decision, you go up to a director level, they might have 100-200 people under them, direct reports are almost all managers, and they never touch tech. Go higher up to VP or CTO levels and they are just so divorced from code that it doesn't make sense why a CTO in a startup would translate.
mattlutze 2y ago
> Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position". It's not about age, it's about what you actually had to do. Company size, company age and political complexity are strongly correlated. A successful large company engineering director spends their day mostly doing politics across the org, while a successful small company engineering director spends a lot of their day writing code, being an architect, filling in for product management. > Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part. Big companies want you to know how to play the long game.

aqme28 2y ago

Unfortunately, the company preferred to hire experienced ex-FAANG managers for those roles.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
Everyone: Big Tech ruins news/social media/small businesses/democracy! Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else!
- p_j_w 2y ago
  I dont think FAANG employees are better than everyone else, but these two things don’t sound mutually exclusive.
  - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    Agree. Just an inflammatory observation that we are prone to both villainize and glorify the institutions that be without much cognitive dissonance. :) On second thought, "irrationally preferred during hiring" gets at that idea better.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else! Rather: FAANG employees are pushed into startups by VCs.
  - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    How so? They get paraded around as tokens of competence by VCs?
    - mjmsmith 2y ago
      I've always found it amusing that FAANG pedigree is considered a plus for startup founders when the skill set is not only different but sometimes detrimental.

meritage31 2y ago

>> I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career. Startups hire those people when they are risky and the future is unclear. Once there is traction, the VCs and insiders bring in friends for cush Director/VC posts. Quite often the people who took the real risks get left out.

kridsdale1 2y ago
And that seems like safe capital preserving thing to do. A director role isn’t a prize for loyalty, it’s a job with a skill set. Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gnkyfrg 2y ago
  [dead]
- timr 2y ago
  Sorta. A very common pattern is for startups to make abysmal hires for these "executive" roles, because the people in those roles in big tech bring loads of politics and a very narrow type of experience. They bring in their friends, and it isn't terribly long before the people who got the company to the place of initial success are gone. I've seen this play out many times. Not to say that the early employee is necessarily guaranteed to be better, but at least they're a known quantity, have demonstrated loyalty, and have loads of business context that the shiny exec hire won't have.
- neilv 2y ago
  Good points about roles not being prizes (unless that was the deal, which it sometimes is), but I'll devil's advocate this anyway. > Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where If you hire smart people who learn, and who believe in the mission and team... that programmer might well be in the running to lead engineering. Knowing tech industry a bit, I'd be at least as skeptical of directors from outside. Of course I'd have to consider them, at times. But I expect at least half of the outside candidates for leadership roles will be disingenuous halfwits. Meanwhile, if you've got people who had the grit to help get you to that point, and demonstrated alignment and loyalty when it mattered, and who foster that trust in your company culture, then you'd be an idiot not to try to find a way to get rare goodness like that in your leadership.

jollyllama 2y ago

It depends on the investors. Sometimes they will insist on bringing in their own people who will skip ahead. This can happen if bigger investors are brought on late or if the business is not developing according to plan and equity has to be sold.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]