4 ms·

>Bootstrapping is a different conversation, but in VC-istan you take more risk as an engineer (who might be fired w/out severance and have his career ruined by

by lsc 13y ago

>Bootstrapping is a different conversation, but in VC-istan you take more risk as an engineer (who might be fired w/out severance and have his career ruined by a short-tempered 23-year-old founder) than as a founder (who might have to pay himself "only" an engineer salary for a few years). Huh. I thought that companies with the 23-year-old CTOs (and startups that don't just hire the founder's buddies in general) tend to hire young and inexperienced. Generally speaking, it's considered fair to pay the inexperienced less. I thought all this talk of "rockstar ninja" was for the inexperienced. I mean, sure, experienced folks do have a tendancy to act like primadonnas, they usually are not proud of it. It's something we all fight. Note, I'm not insulting the companies that just hire the founder's buddies... those companies tend to be where you see the top talent. That's the thing, it's almost impossible to get good people "cold" if you just hire a recruiter. But if your founder is a mid-career industry notable? they will not only know who is good, but they will be able to attract those good people.

minimaxir 13y ago
New college graduates in CS that startups love to hire aren't necessarily inexperienced: many people I know who recently graduated from CMU worked at Facebook and/or Google for internships.
- lsc 13y ago
  >New college graduates in CS that startups love to hire aren't necessarily inexperienced: many people I know who recently graduated from CMU worked at Facebook and/or Google for internships. Generally, for me to call you 'experienced' you've got to have 5-10 years of experience. Not just a summer internship. Don't get me wrong, certainly the internships are valuable. A company is almost always going to choose the kid out of college who has worked at google during the summer over the kid out of college who took summers off. You might even play them into counting month-for-month as experience, but having a summer job while in college is vastly different from having half a decade in the trenches.
jes5199 13y ago
In the Bay Area, it's not unusual for 22-year-olds CS graduates to be making more than $80k/year, even at VC-funded places. Maybe that's "less" than what experienced developers can make, but it's just crazy-high for the country on average.
- lsc 13y ago
  >In the Bay Area, it's not unusual for 22-year-olds CS graduates to be making more than $80k/year, even at VC-funded places. Maybe that's "less" than what experienced developers can make, but it's just crazy-high for the country on average. Yup. The bay area, in general, is pretty crazy wage-wise. in '07, I think Yahoo was paying it's interns like $24/hr. Now, our housing is crazy, too... you see shared bedrooms going for $1000/person in mountain view. It's different here. Median per-capita income in Santa Clara is somewhere around $100K/yr. The thing is, if those kids got an entry level gig at a large corporation, they wouldn't make that much more, but they'd get dramatically better benefits. I mean, you want grants not options - but you can get those, and that's not the half of it. Also, you have dramatically more stability at a large place, and quite often get severance if you are laid off... something unheard of at a startup, and that is cherished by folks with families. Edit: Also note, you said "even at VC funded places" as if VC backed companies paid less. They only pay less, for a person without a lot of experience, in comparison to corporate behemoths. And even then, only if you factor in the better benefits and stability offered by the behemoth. If you want to find a place that pays less... there is a whole 'shadow IT industry' that pays barely above service wages. On the corporate side, you have places like geeksquad. You also have a lot of small ISPs, like, say, my company. It's a place for people who can't get into a VC-backed startup (or an internship at a large corporation) to get a toehold. People move up from 'shadow IT' to 'real IT' whenever they can. That is the path I took, in fact.
  - jes5199 13y ago
    I actually worked in shadow IT for a while, too - once I had the skills, I made the switch, and my salary doubled. But now what? Did I top out already? No meaningful advancement until I retire?

by lsc 13y ago

minimaxir 13y ago

New college graduates in CS that startups love to hire aren't necessarily inexperienced: many people I know who recently graduated from CMU worked at Facebook and/or Google for internships.

lsc 13y ago
>New college graduates in CS that startups love to hire aren't necessarily inexperienced: many people I know who recently graduated from CMU worked at Facebook and/or Google for internships. Generally, for me to call you 'experienced' you've got to have 5-10 years of experience. Not just a summer internship. Don't get me wrong, certainly the internships are valuable. A company is almost always going to choose the kid out of college who has worked at google during the summer over the kid out of college who took summers off. You might even play them into counting month-for-month as experience, but having a summer job while in college is vastly different from having half a decade in the trenches.

jes5199 13y ago

In the Bay Area, it's not unusual for 22-year-olds CS graduates to be making more than $80k/year, even at VC-funded places. Maybe that's "less" than what experienced developers can make, but it's just crazy-high for the country on average.

lsc 13y ago
>In the Bay Area, it's not unusual for 22-year-olds CS graduates to be making more than $80k/year, even at VC-funded places. Maybe that's "less" than what experienced developers can make, but it's just crazy-high for the country on average. Yup. The bay area, in general, is pretty crazy wage-wise. in '07, I think Yahoo was paying it's interns like $24/hr. Now, our housing is crazy, too... you see shared bedrooms going for $1000/person in mountain view. It's different here. Median per-capita income in Santa Clara is somewhere around $100K/yr. The thing is, if those kids got an entry level gig at a large corporation, they wouldn't make that much more, but they'd get dramatically better benefits. I mean, you want grants not options - but you can get those, and that's not the half of it. Also, you have dramatically more stability at a large place, and quite often get severance if you are laid off... something unheard of at a startup, and that is cherished by folks with families. Edit: Also note, you said "even at VC funded places" as if VC backed companies paid less. They only pay less, for a person without a lot of experience, in comparison to corporate behemoths. And even then, only if you factor in the better benefits and stability offered by the behemoth. If you want to find a place that pays less... there is a whole 'shadow IT industry' that pays barely above service wages. On the corporate side, you have places like geeksquad. You also have a lot of small ISPs, like, say, my company. It's a place for people who can't get into a VC-backed startup (or an internship at a large corporation) to get a toehold. People move up from 'shadow IT' to 'real IT' whenever they can. That is the path I took, in fact.
- jes5199 13y ago
  I actually worked in shadow IT for a while, too - once I had the skills, I made the switch, and my salary doubled. But now what? Did I top out already? No meaningful advancement until I retire?