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This is making me seriously reconsider my dream of moving to the US for a dev job in SV. Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent life a

This is making me seriously reconsider my dream of moving to the US for a dev job in SV. Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent life and good pay? It sounds like it's either you take part in the life-consuming startup-founder lottery or you go work in BigCo (possibly not even tech) for a good life until you see a worthy opportunity. Or you start doing freelancing/contract jobs till you have a steady stream of income, which is sort of in-between. Anyone have advice?

bkanber 14y ago
There are lots of good startups to work for; people like talking about the bad ones but rarely praise the good ones. Reading too much HN or Reddit would have you believe that all startups take advantage of talent and that it's not worth it. We have a "no overtime" policy at my company (unless you really want to), and everyone's paid and treated well. We value emotional quality and mental health, and would rather stick to 40 hour weeks than have people burn out. And there are lots of others like us! Edit: however we're neither in the valley nor have we taken VC funds.
ctide 14y ago
I've worked (or, more often, contracted) at probably 10 startups now between San Francisco and Mountain View. I've never regularly worked more than 50 hours / week at a single company. I've never worked at a startup where there expectation was that people were putting in 10+ hour days every day. That's not to say that they don't exist, because I do know people who have worked at the places like that. People who works at normal places (and have worked at normal places) don't have any inclination to write blog posts about how not awful their employment is, only people who have bad experiences.
- adistortedreal 14y ago
  Any advice on finding places like that? I'm going to be looking for jobs soon, and 50 hours per week is more or less my target. Anything more than that and I find my quality of work and life suffer pretty quickly. When interviewing, I'm worried about a)Seeming like a "slacker" for inquiring about expected hours. I want to convey that I don't mind working late for an urgent issue or close to release time, but that I can't sustain >50 hours b)how do I know they're being honest with me about working conditions?
  - smartician 14y ago
    That's a valid concern. My suggestion would be this: Usually you're being interviewed in multiple rounds by multiple people. Absolutely don't ask an HR person about this, and probably don't ask your future manager. Ask an engineer after a technical interview. They'll probably (a) understand why you're asking and where you're coming from, and (b) or more likely to give an honest answer.
  - jes5199 14y ago
    my experience is that places that have the 10+ hour days are the ones where they think that only "slackers" would ask about the work schedule. Places with sane hours think it's a reasonable question.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  As an average, 50 hours per week is way too much-- if you actually work (and don't fill lazy afternoon hours with errands or self-directed learning). The average person of working age can do a stable 60; that means you're imposing psychological monoculture over 83.3% of your available cognitively-intense hours. That burns people out. Spikes to 50-60 happen and, if you're in a position of ownership, you better be prepared to throw down when they do. But no company should ever set the baseline at 50 hours per week. That's counterproductive and it leads to burnout and catastrophe when spikes occur. I actually believe in planning based on a 3-hour work day. A 3-hour block of uninterrupted time to focus on work is an expectation and also an entitlement. The other 5? Spend those catching up, learning about other projects, and building skills.
akurilin 14y ago
What exactly are you hoping to find? As always there are limitless awful positions with either poor pay and/or poor hours and/or no opportunity for learning, and very few positions that have all of above. Even if you stumble upon one, you'll have to potentially fight over it with a really capable group of applicants. As a non-resident you are pretty much at the mercy of whoever is sponsoring your H1B. If you are from the lucky set of countries and have a graduate degree, you can sit in purgatory at a BigCo for 5 years and then finally have the right to quit and start your own gig.
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  Thanks for the reality check. The combination of visa requirements and tight competition for spots at good firms is admittedly more daunting than I'd expected. The H1B is a tough obstacle, and I'm instead looking at the 18-month renewable H1B1 which applies to workers from Singapore and Chile and doesn't lead to permanent residency. I'll have to look for people who've made the jump and get their advice, I guess. And network with people in good companies which might be hiring.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
potatolicious 14y ago
> "Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent life and good pay?" No, author's case is severely overstated. In my experience startup jobs in SF/SV/NYC pay as much as, if not more than most big tech company jobs. The notable exceptions are Google and Facebook, where the compensation and stock is extremely good and generally ahead of the rest of the pack. Which isn't to say that author's complaints about crappy startup jobs are false, but rather that they're really not unique to startups at all - they're common across all tech jobs, regardless of company size. In reality there are three classes of tech jobs: 1 - Near-perfection. Great opportunities for advancement, great pay, great benefits, great work/life balance. 2 - Somewhat a pack of lies. You'll either work too much, get paid too little, get to fight management all day, have little room to grow, or some combination thereof. 3 - Complete pack of lies. Deranged management, just complete rubbish. Most tech companies, even big ones, fall into the second and third categories. I think author is extrapolating a bit from the presence of Google in his seeming belief that most big tech companies are great places to work. They are not. Case in point: > "You can learn more by being in a company that offers reasonable hours while you can have a side project. An open source project, a small app, something your parents can use, anything that you either enjoy, try to make it big, or just make the world a better place." Most big companies aren't like this. In fact, I can count the number of such companies I know on a single hand and have a finger or two left over. Most startups aren't either, so more accurately most software jobs aren't like this. The blog post seems to be a lament about the shitty quality of startup jobs, but really it's more accurately a lament about the shitty quality of software jobs in general. He wants startups to have good compensation, good environments, and reasonable hours - but most big companies can't pull this off either. Big Corporate software jobs are infamous for low compensation, infamous for being middle-management-infested hellholes, and just as willing to bend hacker culture to its own ends.
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  Thanks for the great overview, I really appreciate it. I guess it's all about finding a good company that values its employees. Maybe I'll drop a line to friends at Google after all... (Thanks also to the other kind commenters who replied - ctide, rayiner, smartician, bkanber, prostoalex, avenger123, and akurilin - your answers are valued!)
avenger123 14y ago
Go for your dream. Experience it for yourself. Just don't get into the mindset that you have to stick around if it doesn't work. Have your Plan B and Plan C. In terms of all startups being like this, its a big "it depends". There are many companies doing software development that are across the full range of the spectrum. Don't be assuming that the BigCo or the startup represent the full range. Since it looks like you can be somewhat free in deciding where you live, you have a big advantage. Making a good income doing software development means different quality of life depending where you are in the US. Perhaps your dream of moving to SV might be to overreaching. So break it into steps. Focus on getting some kind of software work in the US in a good place. Once you are here, you might just change your mind about what you want to do.
prostoalex 14y ago
The question you have to ask is why are big companies associated with decent work+life balance. Unlike start-ups, which typically worry about one product, big companies (Cisco and Google are among Valley's largest employers) have hundreds of them. Some reasons for this are: 1) Large companies typically dedicate more attention to code quality and review process to ensure all of the low-hanging gotchas are covered. 2) Larger companies, if not adherents of test-driven development, typically still rely on large suites of unit and integration tests, and continuous deployment, that follows from having all the tests in order. 3) Larger companies typically have processes to analyze failures in dev/staging/production, and resources to throw at mitigating those failures in the future. With all that said, there's nothing to prevent small companies from instituting such practices as well, and it's typically the work of the first few senior engineers the startup hires. When you interview with the companies, remember that interview is a 2-way street - you interview them as much as they interview you. After you're done with obligatory fizzbuzz and binary search questions, ask them about the deploy processes, code review processes, latest fires, and other reasons someone would be in the office at 1 am at night (other than by their own choice).
rayiner 14y ago
I don't know about SV, but there is a huge range of places to work here in the U.S. My first job out of college was at a small tech company where: 1) Compensation was very solid (this was pre-Bubble 2.0 in a very low cost of living city); 2) We got full benefits (zero employee contribution for either health insurance or dental); 3) We got off the entire time between Christmas and New Years independent of our vacation time; 4) Most people worked ~50 hours/week, except before a new release or an important demo (but this wasn't all the time) The company never took VC money, wasn't looking to exit, but generated a good living for the founder (going on 13 years now). If you're looking for a solid job without killing yourself, places like that exist. They usually work in specialized domains with stable sets of clients.
smartician 14y ago
Deciding between soul-leeching BigCos and life-consuming start-ups is a false dichotomy. There are thousands of companies in the valley that fall between these two extremes. Companies with 50-500 employees, most of which you probably never heard of. True, there's no fame and glory working for them. If you're a vain person, not being able to reply "at this hip startup" or "at Google" when people ask you where you work can be a blow to one's ego. But those medium sized companies pay market rate, and most of them put a reasonable workload on you. I'm at one of those companies, and there are times where I feel a bit like a second rate developer, but I work less than 40 hours a week, and I still get my six figure salary, plus 20+ days of vacation that I can actually take.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I'm starting to think that the solution is to let VC-istan rot and focus on the mid-growth space: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... Size isn't the big issue. The reason VC-istan jobs tend to be so rotten is that the companies are red-ocean marketing experiments and technology is a sideshow. It's hard to grow at the 200%/year rate that "ooh, shiny" VCs expect without shitting all over your culture. Mid-growth (10 to 40% per year) is the future. What's the best way to find those 20-100 person mid-growth startups? I'm looking for machine learning and functional programming, but I'm old enough (29) that I don't give a third of a rat's ass about "prestige" or "hipness". Here's my observation: companies tend either to be r-strategic or K-selective (in the evolutionary biology sense). The mid-growth, quality-oriented companies are K-strategists. The get-big-or-die gambits and the MegaCorps are r-stragetists. Now, the major problem in marketing yourself to the mid-growth K-strategists is that they hire slowly, meaning that you need to be an exact match for a role they need right now. There isn't the aspirational "draw in talent and figure out what to do with it later" hiring of r-strategists. I don't think the mid-growth economy is fleshed out enough to provide the job security of VC-istan disposable-company job-hopping.
ucee054 14y ago
There was a lady from China I knew who was working in a company in Silicon Valley. She probably has a Green Card or Citizenship by now, but if I recall correctly she was on an H1 visa at the time. If she lost her job for any reason, she would have had to find another employer pronto or she would have had to leave the country. Her employer did not find it hard to ask her to work from 8am to midnight 7 days a week.

bkanber 14y ago

There are lots of good startups to work for; people like talking about the bad ones but rarely praise the good ones. Reading too much HN or Reddit would have you believe that all startups take advantage of talent and that it's not worth it. We have a "no overtime" policy at my company (unless you really want to), and everyone's paid and treated well. We value emotional quality and mental health, and would rather stick to 40 hour weeks than have people burn out. And there are lots of others like us! Edit: however we're neither in the valley nor have we taken VC funds.

ctide 14y ago

I've worked (or, more often, contracted) at probably 10 startups now between San Francisco and Mountain View. I've never regularly worked more than 50 hours / week at a single company. I've never worked at a startup where there expectation was that people were putting in 10+ hour days every day. That's not to say that they don't exist, because I do know people who have worked at the places like that. People who works at normal places (and have worked at normal places) don't have any inclination to write blog posts about how not awful their employment is, only people who have bad experiences.

adistortedreal 14y ago
Any advice on finding places like that? I'm going to be looking for jobs soon, and 50 hours per week is more or less my target. Anything more than that and I find my quality of work and life suffer pretty quickly. When interviewing, I'm worried about a)Seeming like a "slacker" for inquiring about expected hours. I want to convey that I don't mind working late for an urgent issue or close to release time, but that I can't sustain >50 hours b)how do I know they're being honest with me about working conditions?
- smartician 14y ago
  That's a valid concern. My suggestion would be this: Usually you're being interviewed in multiple rounds by multiple people. Absolutely don't ask an HR person about this, and probably don't ask your future manager. Ask an engineer after a technical interview. They'll probably (a) understand why you're asking and where you're coming from, and (b) or more likely to give an honest answer.
- jes5199 14y ago
  my experience is that places that have the 10+ hour days are the ones where they think that only "slackers" would ask about the work schedule. Places with sane hours think it's a reasonable question.
michaelochurch 14y ago
As an average, 50 hours per week is way too much-- if you actually work (and don't fill lazy afternoon hours with errands or self-directed learning). The average person of working age can do a stable 60; that means you're imposing psychological monoculture over 83.3% of your available cognitively-intense hours. That burns people out. Spikes to 50-60 happen and, if you're in a position of ownership, you better be prepared to throw down when they do. But no company should ever set the baseline at 50 hours per week. That's counterproductive and it leads to burnout and catastrophe when spikes occur. I actually believe in planning based on a 3-hour work day. A 3-hour block of uninterrupted time to focus on work is an expectation and also an entitlement. The other 5? Spend those catching up, learning about other projects, and building skills.

akurilin 14y ago

What exactly are you hoping to find? As always there are limitless awful positions with either poor pay and/or poor hours and/or no opportunity for learning, and very few positions that have all of above. Even if you stumble upon one, you'll have to potentially fight over it with a really capable group of applicants. As a non-resident you are pretty much at the mercy of whoever is sponsoring your H1B. If you are from the lucky set of countries and have a graduate degree, you can sit in purgatory at a BigCo for 5 years and then finally have the right to quit and start your own gig.

creamyhorror 14y ago
Thanks for the reality check. The combination of visa requirements and tight competition for spots at good firms is admittedly more daunting than I'd expected. The H1B is a tough obstacle, and I'm instead looking at the 18-month renewable H1B1 which applies to workers from Singapore and Chile and doesn't lead to permanent residency. I'll have to look for people who've made the jump and get their advice, I guess. And network with people in good companies which might be hiring.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

potatolicious 14y ago

> "Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent life and good pay?" No, author's case is severely overstated. In my experience startup jobs in SF/SV/NYC pay as much as, if not more than most big tech company jobs. The notable exceptions are Google and Facebook, where the compensation and stock is extremely good and generally ahead of the rest of the pack. Which isn't to say that author's complaints about crappy startup jobs are false, but rather that they're really not unique to startups at all - they're common across all tech jobs, regardless of company size. In reality there are three classes of tech jobs: 1 - Near-perfection. Great opportunities for advancement, great pay, great benefits, great work/life balance. 2 - Somewhat a pack of lies. You'll either work too much, get paid too little, get to fight management all day, have little room to grow, or some combination thereof. 3 - Complete pack of lies. Deranged management, just complete rubbish. Most tech companies, even big ones, fall into the second and third categories. I think author is extrapolating a bit from the presence of Google in his seeming belief that most big tech companies are great places to work. They are not. Case in point: > "You can learn more by being in a company that offers reasonable hours while you can have a side project. An open source project, a small app, something your parents can use, anything that you either enjoy, try to make it big, or just make the world a better place." Most big companies aren't like this. In fact, I can count the number of such companies I know on a single hand and have a finger or two left over. Most startups aren't either, so more accurately most software jobs aren't like this. The blog post seems to be a lament about the shitty quality of startup jobs, but really it's more accurately a lament about the shitty quality of software jobs in general. He wants startups to have good compensation, good environments, and reasonable hours - but most big companies can't pull this off either. Big Corporate software jobs are infamous for low compensation, infamous for being middle-management-infested hellholes, and just as willing to bend hacker culture to its own ends.

creamyhorror 14y ago
Thanks for the great overview, I really appreciate it. I guess it's all about finding a good company that values its employees. Maybe I'll drop a line to friends at Google after all... (Thanks also to the other kind commenters who replied - ctide, rayiner, smartician, bkanber, prostoalex, avenger123, and akurilin - your answers are valued!)

avenger123 14y ago

Go for your dream. Experience it for yourself. Just don't get into the mindset that you have to stick around if it doesn't work. Have your Plan B and Plan C. In terms of all startups being like this, its a big "it depends". There are many companies doing software development that are across the full range of the spectrum. Don't be assuming that the BigCo or the startup represent the full range. Since it looks like you can be somewhat free in deciding where you live, you have a big advantage. Making a good income doing software development means different quality of life depending where you are in the US. Perhaps your dream of moving to SV might be to overreaching. So break it into steps. Focus on getting some kind of software work in the US in a good place. Once you are here, you might just change your mind about what you want to do.

prostoalex 14y ago

The question you have to ask is why are big companies associated with decent work+life balance. Unlike start-ups, which typically worry about one product, big companies (Cisco and Google are among Valley's largest employers) have hundreds of them. Some reasons for this are: 1) Large companies typically dedicate more attention to code quality and review process to ensure all of the low-hanging gotchas are covered. 2) Larger companies, if not adherents of test-driven development, typically still rely on large suites of unit and integration tests, and continuous deployment, that follows from having all the tests in order. 3) Larger companies typically have processes to analyze failures in dev/staging/production, and resources to throw at mitigating those failures in the future. With all that said, there's nothing to prevent small companies from instituting such practices as well, and it's typically the work of the first few senior engineers the startup hires. When you interview with the companies, remember that interview is a 2-way street - you interview them as much as they interview you. After you're done with obligatory fizzbuzz and binary search questions, ask them about the deploy processes, code review processes, latest fires, and other reasons someone would be in the office at 1 am at night (other than by their own choice).

rayiner 14y ago

I don't know about SV, but there is a huge range of places to work here in the U.S. My first job out of college was at a small tech company where: 1) Compensation was very solid (this was pre-Bubble 2.0 in a very low cost of living city); 2) We got full benefits (zero employee contribution for either health insurance or dental); 3) We got off the entire time between Christmas and New Years independent of our vacation time; 4) Most people worked ~50 hours/week, except before a new release or an important demo (but this wasn't all the time) The company never took VC money, wasn't looking to exit, but generated a good living for the founder (going on 13 years now). If you're looking for a solid job without killing yourself, places like that exist. They usually work in specialized domains with stable sets of clients.

smartician 14y ago

Deciding between soul-leeching BigCos and life-consuming start-ups is a false dichotomy. There are thousands of companies in the valley that fall between these two extremes. Companies with 50-500 employees, most of which you probably never heard of. True, there's no fame and glory working for them. If you're a vain person, not being able to reply "at this hip startup" or "at Google" when people ask you where you work can be a blow to one's ego. But those medium sized companies pay market rate, and most of them put a reasonable workload on you. I'm at one of those companies, and there are times where I feel a bit like a second rate developer, but I work less than 40 hours a week, and I still get my six figure salary, plus 20+ days of vacation that I can actually take.

michaelochurch 14y ago
I'm starting to think that the solution is to let VC-istan rot and focus on the mid-growth space: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... Size isn't the big issue. The reason VC-istan jobs tend to be so rotten is that the companies are red-ocean marketing experiments and technology is a sideshow. It's hard to grow at the 200%/year rate that "ooh, shiny" VCs expect without shitting all over your culture. Mid-growth (10 to 40% per year) is the future. What's the best way to find those 20-100 person mid-growth startups? I'm looking for machine learning and functional programming, but I'm old enough (29) that I don't give a third of a rat's ass about "prestige" or "hipness". Here's my observation: companies tend either to be r-strategic or K-selective (in the evolutionary biology sense). The mid-growth, quality-oriented companies are K-strategists. The get-big-or-die gambits and the MegaCorps are r-stragetists. Now, the major problem in marketing yourself to the mid-growth K-strategists is that they hire slowly, meaning that you need to be an exact match for a role they need right now. There isn't the aspirational "draw in talent and figure out what to do with it later" hiring of r-strategists. I don't think the mid-growth economy is fleshed out enough to provide the job security of VC-istan disposable-company job-hopping.

ucee054 14y ago

There was a lady from China I knew who was working in a company in Silicon Valley. She probably has a Green Card or Citizenship by now, but if I recall correctly she was on an H1 visa at the time. If she lost her job for any reason, she would have had to find another employer pronto or she would have had to leave the country. Her employer did not find it hard to ask her to work from 8am to midnight 7 days a week.