7 ms·

Startup vs. Corporate Life

101 points by stevencorcoran 12y ago

pmoods 12y ago
I really like the final line "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?" Very true and something I feel so many people fail to realize.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  If only the choices were that simple. Contributing to a start-up and doing cool work is great if the startup does well and some kind of compensation package materializes. If it doesn't then you might very well lose a bunch of time, opportunities and other advantages (hopefully you'll learn a lot, also worth something). I went through this a whole bunch of times before something finally paid off and there was 0 guarantee that anything ever would pay off. If you have dependents, a mortgage, responsibilities outside of just yourself and little or no savings to fall back on the risks associated with 'doing cool work' may not outweigh the relative security of doing working for some 'name brand'. There are intermediate levels of risk as well, and those should definitely not be ruled out, it's also possible to slowly transition from one situation to another without exposing yourself to risks you can't deal with.
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > I really like the final line "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?" That's really a false dichotomy to suggest you can't do "cool work" at a large ("name brand") corporation. Some of the coolest work in technology has been done at extremely large companies (e.g. Google, Apple, IBM, Facebook).
- mattgreenrocks 12y ago
  Doing cool work? Many startups want fresh grads to be taping together CRUD apps! MegaCorps will often ask the same of you, but have more paths toward getting deeper into both the product and the stack.
  - dk8996 12y ago
    I am always surprised by this point of view. 1) There is nothing wrong with taping together CRUD apps if it achieves a goal or makes a big impact for your startup 2) There is a good amount of grads that can't even tap CRUD apps together, let have CS degrees 3) At MegaCorp people are deeply specialized in their roles, its like a assembly line -- you don't get to design the car you screw the bumper on (if that)
mabbo 12y ago
I chose the corporate path for reasons never mentioned: education. At a fortune 500 company with a high entry bar, i'm surrounded by really damn good developers who mentor me. There are best practices, and explanations behind them. My friend at start ups seem to me to have not had the same further education that I have. Maybe some will figure out all the same things on their own, but it will take longer. Hard to say. Some of them at 27 are the 'senior developer'.
- patrickread 12y ago
  I have to agree with this for the most part, coming from the startup side. I'm on my second startup (started at age 23), both of which I was unfortunately the most senior, and at times, the only developer. There are often times that I wish I had a more established structure around me to facilitate learning the lessons it takes you a while to learn on your own. That said, before I was in a startup, I also found that I sometimes had a habit of asking too many questions of more senior guys at my mid-sized company. The negative side of this is that not going through the paces of learning those things on my own, I started to feel like I was missing out on developing the critical thinking skills that it takes to learn those things on my own. I was skeptical that I wouldn't be able to move into a role with nobody else to lean on all the time. After being the most senior guy at a startup for a few years (except for the occasional times when I've contracted with people who have 5+ years more experience), it's helped me develop the problem solving skills that I'm not sure I would have with a resource working right next to me. The lessons are harder won, but sometimes it can be more satisfying to come up with that continuing education on your own (and, well, with the help of the internet).
- general_failure 12y ago
  If you want to be developer for life, your chosen path is better than a startup. If you are more like technology entrepreneur, start-ups will teach you the other non-tech skill.s
happywolf 12y ago
The article doesn't mention if you join the start-up as a 1) partner (who holds a portion of the company), or 2) as a full-time employee. Even most people will be in #1, but I think it is worth-while to call this out. Personally I have experience in #2, and it was a three-year old start-up. The experience was awful. First, I was all on my own, I was told I would wear a lot of hats and would learn a tonne. The reality was I googled a lot, and just copied and pasted the solutions and code snippets off Internet and hoped those would work well enough to meet my need. Take a look at stackoverflow and you will understand what I meant. To make this really concrete, say setting up a server. Before VMs were more popular, I would need to actually get a Dell (bcos it was cheapest, period), removed the Windows, installed Linux, then the fun began: apache, postfix, mysql, spamassassin, etc etc. Do you have time to thumb through each of the excellent documents? We are not even starting to code!!!! On top of that, I also needed to do powerpoint (we had to use Windows because those VCs we met loved Windows), helped to proof-read the product specs to make sure it wouldn't promised anything that would take even Microsoft 80 years to build, and clear the thrash before I left office. Second, as an employee I didn't have much say on the product design, and technical roadmap, this is especially true if you are someone who is fresh from school, I joined with 6 years of professional experience, but still I didn't have much say on the product features. I was just the guy who did the implementation specified by the biz guy (the CEO), nothing more. I also thought it could be this particular company was fucked up, however talking to engineers from other companies reviewed this phenomena is far from unique. This kind of work is not much fun if you have a tight deadline and changing requirements from the sales (usually the CEO), especially the one who peddles the products doesn't have a technical background. On top of that, you are most probably doing so many things that you will not likely to have time and energy to sit down and run through the work that you have done. Make no mistake, I am not saying corporate life is good (I am now working for a US MNC), it has its own set of shit, that I will leave for other day to bitch about
- seldo 12y ago
  > I also thought it could be this particular company was fucked up, however talking to engineers from other companies revealed this phenomena is far from unique. While it's by no means unique, that doesn't mean it's not fucked up. There are a lot of terribly-run companies out there. Misplaced loyalty keeps them alive longer than it should. You should quit whenever a company sucks; life's too short.
buro9 12y ago
If you're an employee then the differences are not so great and you can spend time debating the minutia. If you're a founder, the risks are real and the costs significant. You'll probably earn little to nothing, for a great expenditure of time, effort and emotional investment, for a very long time, all the while knowing that you could've been earning money/pension/progression elsewhere. There's absolutely no guarantee (in fact the odds are very heavily against) that you'll even come out the other side having much to show. You may have positioned yourself for a career as an employee elsewhere, but whatever monetary benefits follow are unlikely to make up the losses incurred as a founder of a startup. And then there's the dark times along the way...
MrScruff 12y ago
A few straw men in this article. Most people in corporate life are expected to look busy when they aren’t, and put up the appearance of working long hours. There are plenty of larger companies you can work for where this isn't true.
- patrickread 12y ago
  Read more carefully. "Of course, this will vary from company to company. Facetime wasn’t valued at the big company I worked at, for instance."
  - mhurron 12y ago
    And that's different from startups how?
rackoons44 12y ago
The one thing that I like about startups more is the camaraderie you have with your teammates. That plus interesting work makes startups a hands down winner over cubicle life.
qwerta 12y ago
I do not agree that in corporate you make lesser impact. Big company usually produces things used by real people. Also I find most start-ups to be very conservative in employment arrangement. Option to work remotely or part time is usually deal breaker. In corporation it is norm after you establish yourself. But I think best career is to build lifestyle business. Get a few customers, some products and just keep incrementally extending it for decade+.
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > I do not agree that in corporate you make lesser impact. Big company usually produces things used by real people. It really depends on what kind of impact one is looking for. The author touched on this point but think he could have made it clearer that working at a startup gives you the possibility of having a significant impact on a product with limited reach while working at a larger company gives the possibility of having a smaller impact on a product with much greater reach. This is not always the case of course, you could work at a startup that creates an extremely popular product (though it may not be considered a "startup" for very long then) or work for a corporation on a project that will never see the light of day.
fideloper 12y ago
It's worth noting that there are tons of successful small to medium sized companies which don't fall into either category. I've made a career at them so far, both avoiding the corporate culture and the start-up culture, while gaining the tight-nit teams, stability and learning challenges. Examples include agencies that have developers, smaller development shops, bootstrapped product companies and more that I'm not thinking of at the moment.
edanm 12y ago
This article misses some of the very good reasons to work at a Megacorp in terms of job security. I know, I know, it's one of those things that developers of our generation have been taught not to care about. "No job is secure", right? The truth is, startups are much less secure, have in many cases serious problems in terms of future opportunities. And most importantly - despite saying "the job market is great, you can always find another job", this is just historically false. Please, read what Patrick Mckenzie has to say on the matter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7611848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7611848 And Thomas Ptacek's writing on this as well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612575 "When Sonicity failed in 2001, I had a track record as a lead developer on a successful, well-reviewed enterprise product, the lead engineering role at an ISP that might still have been among Chicago's most popular, and research publications at least one of which has a cite record that a lot of ACM journal submissions would envy. Not to mention, I had cofounded a company that had raised a significant amount of money. I was living in San Francisco at the time. I had to move to Ann Arbor to find my next job."
- tomphoolery 12y ago
  Startups might force you to leave because they die, but giant corporations will make you WANT to leave because they're terrible to work for. This is more of a general note than anything else (as in, not just programmers), but many of my friends who have taken corporate jobs have ended up leaving them for something else, like a startup or consulting shop, because while the pay was great, the work was boring and the culture was just awful. Startups can be like that too, but generally even if they are you have way more power to change things. It's all a trade-off. You trade the fun of constant change for possibly better, but definitely more reliable, compensation. That is, until your company starts downsizing because someone up top bought 1 too many Ferraris.
  - timthorn 12y ago
    > giant corporations will make you WANT to leave because they're terrible to work for Some might be. Some are great fun to work at.
fma 12y ago
I'll comment based on the context of the question submitted. The student is a sophomore. If the student were about to graduate, if newly out of college the answer would require some thinking. If they are a sophomore I would say, startup hands down. As a sophomore I would assume they don't have any experience, or any risk, or any real need for money. It easier to do a startup at that point in life. They will find if they love it or hate it. It's better to test the waters then, instead of after college when they have real risks, a real need for money (house, spouse, kids, etc) Me personally, I founded my first startup my junior year of college, which lead to co-founding a second startup while in grad school. Both startups had little to no profit. There were weeks where I easily put in 40-60 hours+ a week in along with a full time engineering course load. And yes, I still maintained a social life and remained active in campus organizations. Post-graduation, I'm on my 3rd 'corporate' job. My current job and previous employment were with publicly listed, multinational companies who decided to start innovation centers/incubators...not only build their next generation of products, but in-source everything back to the US. I also think it's a fallacy to generalize the work, and people in startup vs corporate life. My first employer, I ran circles around most of the developers, and had to be there 8 hours a day...I rarely worked more than 8. My 2nd job, I was the least senior of all the hires and everyone ran circles around me. My current one, I'm in the middle of the pack as far as experience, and hours are reasonable. tl;dr While in college do a startup.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
seldo 12y ago
> People claim that startups work you hard, I personally don’t see it. From people I’ve talked to, I’d say 50 hour weeks are average. That’s about what you see in corporate America these days. I think only in America would somebody say 50 hour weeks don't count as working you hard. Also, the average US working week is 35 hours, 37 in "information" industries: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm The fact is that past 35 hours most people just aren't very productive, and a startup asking you to work 50 hours is going to get just as much "busy-looking" time as a corporate job asking you to do the same. Don't work at any job that expects you to work 50-60 hour weeks. Those companies are unhappy places.
- overgard 12y ago
  What always bothered me about companies that ask you to work long hours (long term) isn't even the hours, it's more that it's a canary in the coal mine: it makes it obvious management doesn't know what they're doing. (Or alternatively: that appearance of work is more important to them than actual work. Maybe they're angling for a promotion and trying to impress their boss) I worked at a company for a while where the solution to any deadline was either to work longer hours or to throw more people at it. (They called it "swarming"). I'm pretty sure not a single executive there had read the mythical man month, or they would have realized how insane that was. You can't just brute force problems that require creativity.
  - dkrich 12y ago
    Exactly. And I've found that more often than not that the "we MUST complete this by xx/xx/xxxx or ELSE" mentality stems from some arbitrary date promised for no good reason. The company wasn't going to lose any more money or expose themselves to potential liability. It was just an arbitrary date marked in an MS Project file somewhere. In situations where deadlines were missed, it ended up being OKAY and nobody really cared a week later. This then turned into a cycle where every deadline was tight and everybody got burned out because you can be sure that a manager who is bad at managing dates once will be bad at managing dates forever. It seems that a lot of people in management lack good, common sense when managing workloads and deadlines.
pop45 12y ago
I'm just finishing my MSc and I feel so lost and hopeless. I just started to evaluate my options to enter the job market. I'm not sure what is corporate life like for a software engineer in the US but in my country I'm finding out that it has more to do with requirement analysis, evaluating the best COTS (things like Microsoft NAV, SAP, TIBCO seem to be common) for the client and then configuring and deploying it. Maybe with some ABAP in the way and in some cases some J2EE/WSDL/SOAP or C#/.NET webservices to interact with it. It looks like it's almost impossible to escape this kind of work here, the main employers are outsourcing/consulting companies like Accenture, etc. I fear that if I go this way I will never be able to escape because I will be gaining experience in this areas and my career will be stuck in this world. I won't be touching anything like Python, Ruby, Scala, RabbitMQ, Redis or any other technology that might be used by companies were someday I would like to work for, and do real development/engineering. I'm sorry for my ramblings, I just feel so lost and depressed and would like to get it off of my chest before I explode, and maybe find some advice and guidance from you guys.
- lnanek2 12y ago
  Well, even in countries like Belarus, where the largest companies were indeed outsourcing companies, I still saw a lot of gaming companies, particularly war games. Graphics programming is a grueling field where you spend months working on complex tweaks to improve frame rate or implement some effect, but it could feel rewarding to someone who is into it.
- bicx 12y ago
  It may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I would urge you to seek meaning in your life in something more fundamental than your career. Once you find your identity in something more important (God, family, relationships... don't hate, HN ;) ), it's actually easier to make an objective decision about what to do for a living. It makes it easier to take intermediate steps (unfulfilling in the short-term) between what's available and what the future may hold. I would even dare to say that it makes you more adventurous in your career because failure in your career no longer equals failure in life. You are not your code. The perfect job isn't always on your doorstep, and it doesn't define the rest of your future. For my first job after school, I was writing enterprise APIs in old, deprecated languages for a large insurance company, and I had the same fears you do. However, I am now working at a cutting-edge startup writing Android apps. They were smart enough to see potential in me rather than a collection of acronyms and technologies on my resume. Working hard is important no matter where you are. Showing genuine interest in the startup is also huge.
pixelmonkey 12y ago
I spent 3 years at one of the name-brand Wall Street firms before starting my own company. This essay rang true to me. It's now 5 years into my "startup" (Aside: can I still call it that? We have 25 employees and millions in revenue.) I have no regrets. My goal is for our employees to have the kind of environment we always wished the large companies we used to work for would have. In fact, many of my early employees were "corporate rescues", bright engineers that had been languishing in comfortable corners of large bureaucratic BigCo's that we convinced to join us, mainly on the promise of actually being able to use Python as part of their day job and work on meaningful/interesting problems. At our "startup", we use the best tool for the job; we only work with bright people; we focus on results; we never stagnate; and, we deliver on an important mission. Also, our engineers get to open source a lot of work that isn't core to the business (see e.g. http://parse.ly/code http://parse.ly/code). The only BigCo's that I've seen that have tried to maintain that engineering-friendly environment are e.g. Google and Facebook, but for those companies, size still becomes a limiting factor on impact. As the essay put it, "Proportionally, you will have a bigger impact on the company's future than you will working for a corporation." Product development also has a different feel when you're trying to create one of the world's next great software companies, rather than when you just happen to work at one that already holds that title.
- dk8996 12y ago
  I command you for building such a culture at your company. This is not a easy task, even at startup.
jader201 12y ago
When does a startup stop being a startup? When they reach a certain age, or reach a certain revenue, or when they go public/get acquired? I know there is probably a more technical definition, but when do they cross that line in real terms as it relates to the risks and pains of working at a startup, like this article mentions?
- analog31 12y ago
  A couple features of start-ups: 1. Many-hat-wearing. People adapt to the jobs that need to get done, and there is little or no supervisory hierarchy. 2. Possibility of exponential growth. I'd say if both of those things vanish, then it's either because the business failed, or stopped being a start-up and is now a mature business.
dylandrop 12y ago
> "I tried to be as objective as possible" > "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?" I did a lot of boring, mundane work during my time at some startups as well as interesting work at others. It's either subjective or not informed by enough experience to say that only startup work is cool work and you can't find cool work at a larger company.
rumcajz 12y ago
One difference that was not mentioned is how much of your time is spent in office politics. For early-stage startups it's close to zero. In corporations you spend most of your time doing politics and dealing with consequences thereof, such as doing work that nobody needs just to placate the management etc.
bane 12y ago
Depending on how you count things, I've been part of 5 startups and 3 megacorps (none smaller than 40,000 employees) (plus a couple regular old mom and pop small businesses when I was young). If I can draw any conclusions, I liked the megacorp work much more while I liked the small business work environment more. I've spent about twice as much time in startups and small businesses despite having significant opportunities in the corporate world. In the small business (startup or mom & pop) everybody is pulling their weight or they're gone. But the work, especially the startup, tends to be lots of "getting set up and doing things for the first time". You want to solve your customer's problems, but first you have to set up this or that server, or get the dev team using some new code profiler, or building up the QA team from scratch. It's a long walk before you can really start attending to customer issues directly because there are so many issues internally to work out. However, your individual contributions can make or break a company, your impact locally can be huge. That's really rewarding. At a corporate job, the problems you get presented with are bigger and often very interesting, you work for a 1,000 pound gorilla who can (in theory) throw lots of weight and maturity behind solving it. The biggest projects I've ever worked on were at these kinds of places. You won't ever really have a big impact on the company, but you might participate in having a big impact on the world. At the end of the day, the single most rewarding things I've ever done have been while getting a paycheck from a megacorp. However, there's tons of dead weight you have to deal with. Bad employees get masked over by the size of the organization and work they aren't doing simply gets shifted onto one of the other nameless drones there. If you want to be rewarded on both levels, don't think of the megacorp as the company you work for, think of the program or project as the "company" and try to get put on lean, thinly staffed, high risk projects. Your impact will be to the project, and it'll be huge, but the corporation will bring huge and interesting problems to you to work on.
- analog31 12y ago
  This is a nice description. For me, working at a mega-corp is like living in a city. There are people who take my garbage away and keep the barbarians out. I don't have to do those things, so I can focus on what I enjoy: Developing new technologies, for which I'm rewarded. I've set myself up as a sort of entrepreneur living in this city, where I can take on more speculative projects, but at no risk to my own money. I make damn sure that what I'm taking away is not only money, but also learning, even if it's at some cost to the efficiency of any particular project. And should I ever get into a start-up, I'll benefit from having observed the inner workings of a business from end to end.
btbuildem 12y ago
A little too rose-coloured, this article. If you want to slog it, really give all you got to someone else's project, a startup is the way to go. You're likely to learn a lot, and your decisions will have direct impact on the well-being of the company. If you want a stable job that you can put out of your mind when you're not at the office, forget about startups.
bigtunacan 12y ago
Most startup vs corporate discussions all come down to a lot of anecdotal evidence that falls on both sides of the spectrum. I have worked for several startups as well as several "big corps". Without naming names; I'm just going to lay things out in a sort of chronological order. <TL;DR>Try to find something you love there are good and bad in both startups and big corporations.</TL;DR> Big Co #1) ----------------- I was brought in as an intern; this was my first exposure to the professional IT world. I learned a lot, the job was secure, benefits were good, nice people all around too. I was groomed for the spot I was interning and when a full time spot opened at one of our locations half way across the country I was asked to take that opening and move. While the job was secure, benefits were good, and the pay going into the full time position was pretty stellar I felt dissatisfied at the time and didn't want to get "stuck" working there the rest of my life, so instead I turned down the offer and jumped to startup #1. Startup #1) ----------------- This was a great environment, we were having a lot of fun. People were working a few extra hours, but nothing too bad. I really enjoyed it there; they really took off and these days they are now a "big corp". Things probably would have been ok if I had stayed there instead of moving on to startup #2 Startup #2) ----------------- Work environment was great; very small close knit team. I loved every minute of it right up until I was layed off unexpectedly and the company closed their doors virtually overnight due to their single largest contract being dropped with no notice due to a change in federal government funding policies. Still not too jaded by things; both startups had been pretty good to me so far I moved on to Startup #3) ----------------- This place was just insane. People constantly were being asked to work more and more hours even while the company appeared to be growing quite quickly. Then the police showed up at the company to arrest the CEO; he subsequently went to prison for some type of loan fraud (I never looked into the exact details). This didn't slow things down though; his equally honest son was there to take over the reins of the company. He demanded even more hours of everyone while trying to slash costs/spending everywhere. We were actually called into a company meeting where he pointed out the window at the parking lot and said, "At 8pm at night this parking lot is virtually empty. That is unacceptable. I expect people stay as long as it takes for our deadlines to be met." Not long after that happened my boss came to me and told me that he was quitting because a sale of the company was imminent and that it was not going to be good for the employees. He advised that I get out early because the job market wasn't going to be able to absorb that many programmers after the sale. Things were pretty bad; I was already unhappy; so I took his advice and moved on to startup #4. Less than 3 months after I left the company was sold in a major acquisition where the purchasing company was after our high profile clientele. Almost the entire development staff was killed; our products were all killed; existing clients were moved to the product of our competitor who had bought us out. Startup #4) ----------------- Tiny little startup; one major investor. I worked way too many hours, but I enjoyed it. We never turned a profit and eventually ran out of money. Eventually they couldn't even make payroll. They were unable to pay me about $10K in salary that I was owed due to there being no money left. The end. Startup #5) ----------------- Holy dear god and anything that is holy; this place was a living hell on earth. Unfortunately, the job market at this point had turned really sour so I couldn't find a job to save my life. So I accepted a position with this terrible startup. I was working 60+ hours a week, every week. I was getting calls when I wasn't at the office to come in and put out fires even at 2 and 3am. It was incredibly terrible and awful. I was finally fed up with startups. So I decided it was time to move on to big co #2 Big Co #2) ----------------- This place was so good to me. The time off was great; I was used to working my ass off from startup culture so I was able to put in half as much effort as I normally had to and was still getting more done than the people around me. Meanwhile most of the development team was just coasting by and doing the bare minimum while complaining that they had too much to do. Despite what experiences other people had; this worked out great for me. 3 years in a row I was promoted and given stellar raises for my outstanding contributions. I was traveling on the companies dime frequently; which I really enjoyed as well. All in all I really loved this place. I also did not feel like a "cog" here; I was making major contributions to key projects at this place. Startup #6) ----------------- So it was with some real hesitation that I left Big Co #2. At this point I was actively recruited, not by some recruiter, but by a former colleague to come and join startup #6. I out right refused to entertain the idea, but this colleague was very persistent and kept talking about better pay, fat stocks, etc... He promised me a wonderful company culture, etc... and as he said, "It can't hurt to at least come in and talk to the VP." So I had a sit down with the VP at this very new, but very well funded, startup. I was offered a ridiculously huge pay increase as well as stock that would vest in 3 years. It turned out that the cost was my life. I was working 7 days a week including holidays; usually from 8 am until 1 or 2am. Despite what everyone says; yes more hours can me more work gets done. But at what cost; my health was on a steep decline due to lack of sleep primarily. I was feeling burned out as hell at the 2 1/2 year mark but pushed on since that stock vest was so close. The CEO though was a complete megalomaniac asshole (and this is being nice) that never liked me from the beginning. Despite the fact that I personally implemented more projects and delivered on more customers than any other developer in the group; he fucked me out of my stocks by firing me 1 month prior to them vesting. I got zero out of that. The VP called me an personally apologized and told me how unfair it was and that he even he couldn't believe that the CEO would be that big of an asshole especially considering how much it was going to hurt the company to have me gone. Big Co #3) ----------------- At this point; as one might imagine I was rather jaded by the whole startup scene. So I went to another big co. I said going in; "I'm done. I'm taking a job at this big co and I'm going to stay there until I retire." Most people sat around here pretending to be busy when they really didn't have enough work for all of the employees. There were no opportunities for me to advance because there really wasn't enough work to go around; and people who had work to do sure weren't going to share. They were going to hold on for dear life in case layoffs came they wouldn't be the ones to get hit. And those layoffs sure came. In my 3 years there 3 rounds of layoffs hit. Each time I was sweating that the executioner was going to come for each time. And each time I was granted a stay of execution. I was bored out of my mind and worried that it was only a matter of time before I got cut. I started interviewing at other places; I considered several startups, but due to my past experiences I turned them down. I was really selective and focused on trying to find a position that valued my time, my knowledge, presented challenges, and had stability. Eventually I found a small team within another big co that really seemed to fit with what I was looking for. Big Co #4) ----------------- That brings us to today. I work on a small team within a huge organization. We create products that make a big difference. We value creativity, productivity, and personal life. This is a team, more than any that I've worked with in the past, where we like and respect each other and I like to see these people outside of work. Will I stay here until I retire? I can't answer that, but I can say I love my job. It is challenging and rewarding, but it allows me to have a personal life as well.
h1karu 12y ago
> People claim that startups work you hard, I personally don’t see it. From people I’ve talked to, I’d say 50 hour weeks are average. That’s about what you see in corporate America these days. If you're working at an early stage startup then in general nobody should "work you" at all, rather you'll work yourself 60+hours a week because you ACTUALLY HAVE SIGNIFICANT EQUITY in the company and therefor you want to see it grow quickly. In a corporate environment you don't have any "skin in the game" so to speak so there's no incentive to push yourself. If you're working at an early stage startup and you don't have significant equity then you're doing it wrong.
- ulfw 12y ago
  'significant equity'. Who outside the founders and maybe five first employees really have that in a startup? If owning 0.1% which gets diluted to 0.01% before the startup sells for say 40MM bucks four years later is significant to you...
  - h1karu 12y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "startup" I suppose. I've worked for three and in each I've been one of the first dozen or so employees. You don't have to be a founder but I think that being a core "early employee" with a fair equity stake is the right way to get the real "startup experience". Anything else is like.. well working for an established company, and doesn't have the same vibe, or excitement.
badman_ting 12y ago
I have my reservations about the startup world, but the question about risk management is strange. Young people shouldn't necessarily be worrying about that just yet. Hell, worry about the risk of getting stuck in a situation where 50 hour weeks are "normal" and not a serious failure mode. Companies of all sizes know that young people a) have a lot of energy, and b) are easier to screw over salary-wise.
romanovcode 12y ago
I see startups as mirage to fool young professionals into thinking they are working less when the exact opposite happens.
bquinlan 12y ago
I graduated in 1997 and, since then, have worked at: - 2 big companies - 2 small steady-state businesses (<100 people) - 4 startups (one as a founder) So far my best experience has been at Google, where I work now. Here are some of my reasons: - I have a lot of opportunities to learn because there are so many people with diverse skills and expertise and Google has the resources and motivation to let people investigate novel technologies. - I work with amazing technology. Google has the resources to devote many engineers to internal development tools and production technologies. - I don't have to work with (many) crazy people. At startups and small businesses, I found that one crazy founder or manager (who is probably related to the CEO) can completely ruin the experience. Google has processes to avoid hiring such people or to deal with them post-hire. - The work I do effects a lot of people. My Mom has commented on features that I've implemented. And, since we usually work in small teams, my impact isn't usually diluted by a lot of people. - There is a lot of project diversity and ability to relocate (if you want). So far I've worked on Google's support systems (Dublin), search (Dublin), App Engine (Sydney) and Chromecast (Mountain View). - I get paid well without a lot of risk. At Google my base salary is pretty high and I can treat my bonus and equity awards as extras that I don't need to count on. And the bank can count on Google too so I can get a reasonable mortgage. Not everything is perfect, of course. Two months ago a bunch of work I did was thrown away because my manager's manager's manager's manager didn't like it (his reasoning was sound but...) [1]. And bigger companies are under increased scrutiny so you have to be more careful about privacy, regulatory compliance, etc. A lot of things that you would just do at a startup require consultation with lawyers at a big company. And my other big company experience really really sucked. I won't go into the details here but I ended up quitting in about 3 months. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/22n3uv/squirrels_possibly_coming_to_chromecast/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/22n3uv/squirrels...
- was_hellbanned 12y ago
  I don't have to work with (many) crazy people. At startups and small businesses, I found that one crazy founder or manager (who is probably related to the CEO) can completely ruin the experience. Google has processes to avoid hiring such people or to deal with them post-hire. That really hit home for me. Part of the severe burnout I'm experiencing is from years of dealing with people from a pill-popping, paranoid nutcase founder to plain old manchildren who thrive on creating drama. (This was in the SV/SF "startup" scene, though most of the "startups" were actually just small, privately held companies who seemed to use that label when they were in the red, didn't have a clear direction, and wanted people to work more hours.)

101 points by stevencorcoran 12y ago

I really like the final line "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?" Very true and something I feel so many people fail to realize.

jacquesm 12y ago
If only the choices were that simple. Contributing to a start-up and doing cool work is great if the startup does well and some kind of compensation package materializes. If it doesn't then you might very well lose a bunch of time, opportunities and other advantages (hopefully you'll learn a lot, also worth something). I went through this a whole bunch of times before something finally paid off and there was 0 guarantee that anything ever would pay off. If you have dependents, a mortgage, responsibilities outside of just yourself and little or no savings to fall back on the risks associated with 'doing cool work' may not outweigh the relative security of doing working for some 'name brand'. There are intermediate levels of risk as well, and those should definitely not be ruled out, it's also possible to slowly transition from one situation to another without exposing yourself to risks you can't deal with.
frostmatthew 12y ago
> I really like the final line "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?" That's really a false dichotomy to suggest you can't do "cool work" at a large ("name brand") corporation. Some of the coolest work in technology has been done at extremely large companies (e.g. Google, Apple, IBM, Facebook).
mattgreenrocks 12y ago
Doing cool work? Many startups want fresh grads to be taping together CRUD apps! MegaCorps will often ask the same of you, but have more paths toward getting deeper into both the product and the stack.
- dk8996 12y ago
  I am always surprised by this point of view. 1) There is nothing wrong with taping together CRUD apps if it achieves a goal or makes a big impact for your startup 2) There is a good amount of grads that can't even tap CRUD apps together, let have CS degrees 3) At MegaCorp people are deeply specialized in their roles, its like a assembly line -- you don't get to design the car you screw the bumper on (if that)

mabbo 12y ago

I chose the corporate path for reasons never mentioned: education. At a fortune 500 company with a high entry bar, i'm surrounded by really damn good developers who mentor me. There are best practices, and explanations behind them. My friend at start ups seem to me to have not had the same further education that I have. Maybe some will figure out all the same things on their own, but it will take longer. Hard to say. Some of them at 27 are the 'senior developer'.

patrickread 12y ago
I have to agree with this for the most part, coming from the startup side. I'm on my second startup (started at age 23), both of which I was unfortunately the most senior, and at times, the only developer. There are often times that I wish I had a more established structure around me to facilitate learning the lessons it takes you a while to learn on your own. That said, before I was in a startup, I also found that I sometimes had a habit of asking too many questions of more senior guys at my mid-sized company. The negative side of this is that not going through the paces of learning those things on my own, I started to feel like I was missing out on developing the critical thinking skills that it takes to learn those things on my own. I was skeptical that I wouldn't be able to move into a role with nobody else to lean on all the time. After being the most senior guy at a startup for a few years (except for the occasional times when I've contracted with people who have 5+ years more experience), it's helped me develop the problem solving skills that I'm not sure I would have with a resource working right next to me. The lessons are harder won, but sometimes it can be more satisfying to come up with that continuing education on your own (and, well, with the help of the internet).
general_failure 12y ago
If you want to be developer for life, your chosen path is better than a startup. If you are more like technology entrepreneur, start-ups will teach you the other non-tech skill.s

happywolf 12y ago

The article doesn't mention if you join the start-up as a 1) partner (who holds a portion of the company), or 2) as a full-time employee. Even most people will be in #1, but I think it is worth-while to call this out. Personally I have experience in #2, and it was a three-year old start-up. The experience was awful. First, I was all on my own, I was told I would wear a lot of hats and would learn a tonne. The reality was I googled a lot, and just copied and pasted the solutions and code snippets off Internet and hoped those would work well enough to meet my need. Take a look at stackoverflow and you will understand what I meant. To make this really concrete, say setting up a server. Before VMs were more popular, I would need to actually get a Dell (bcos it was cheapest, period), removed the Windows, installed Linux, then the fun began: apache, postfix, mysql, spamassassin, etc etc. Do you have time to thumb through each of the excellent documents? We are not even starting to code!!!! On top of that, I also needed to do powerpoint (we had to use Windows because those VCs we met loved Windows), helped to proof-read the product specs to make sure it wouldn't promised anything that would take even Microsoft 80 years to build, and clear the thrash before I left office. Second, as an employee I didn't have much say on the product design, and technical roadmap, this is especially true if you are someone who is fresh from school, I joined with 6 years of professional experience, but still I didn't have much say on the product features. I was just the guy who did the implementation specified by the biz guy (the CEO), nothing more. I also thought it could be this particular company was fucked up, however talking to engineers from other companies reviewed this phenomena is far from unique. This kind of work is not much fun if you have a tight deadline and changing requirements from the sales (usually the CEO), especially the one who peddles the products doesn't have a technical background. On top of that, you are most probably doing so many things that you will not likely to have time and energy to sit down and run through the work that you have done. Make no mistake, I am not saying corporate life is good (I am now working for a US MNC), it has its own set of shit, that I will leave for other day to bitch about

seldo 12y ago
> I also thought it could be this particular company was fucked up, however talking to engineers from other companies revealed this phenomena is far from unique. While it's by no means unique, that doesn't mean it's not fucked up. There are a lot of terribly-run companies out there. Misplaced loyalty keeps them alive longer than it should. You should quit whenever a company sucks; life's too short.

buro9 12y ago

If you're an employee then the differences are not so great and you can spend time debating the minutia. If you're a founder, the risks are real and the costs significant. You'll probably earn little to nothing, for a great expenditure of time, effort and emotional investment, for a very long time, all the while knowing that you could've been earning money/pension/progression elsewhere. There's absolutely no guarantee (in fact the odds are very heavily against) that you'll even come out the other side having much to show. You may have positioned yourself for a career as an employee elsewhere, but whatever monetary benefits follow are unlikely to make up the losses incurred as a founder of a startup. And then there's the dark times along the way...

MrScruff 12y ago

A few straw men in this article. Most people in corporate life are expected to look busy when they aren’t, and put up the appearance of working long hours. There are plenty of larger companies you can work for where this isn't true.

patrickread 12y ago
Read more carefully. "Of course, this will vary from company to company. Facetime wasn’t valued at the big company I worked at, for instance."
- mhurron 12y ago
  And that's different from startups how?

rackoons44 12y ago

The one thing that I like about startups more is the camaraderie you have with your teammates. That plus interesting work makes startups a hands down winner over cubicle life.

qwerta 12y ago

I do not agree that in corporate you make lesser impact. Big company usually produces things used by real people. Also I find most start-ups to be very conservative in employment arrangement. Option to work remotely or part time is usually deal breaker. In corporation it is norm after you establish yourself. But I think best career is to build lifestyle business. Get a few customers, some products and just keep incrementally extending it for decade+.

frostmatthew 12y ago
> I do not agree that in corporate you make lesser impact. Big company usually produces things used by real people. It really depends on what kind of impact one is looking for. The author touched on this point but think he could have made it clearer that working at a startup gives you the possibility of having a significant impact on a product with limited reach while working at a larger company gives the possibility of having a smaller impact on a product with much greater reach. This is not always the case of course, you could work at a startup that creates an extremely popular product (though it may not be considered a "startup" for very long then) or work for a corporation on a project that will never see the light of day.

fideloper 12y ago

It's worth noting that there are tons of successful small to medium sized companies which don't fall into either category. I've made a career at them so far, both avoiding the corporate culture and the start-up culture, while gaining the tight-nit teams, stability and learning challenges. Examples include agencies that have developers, smaller development shops, bootstrapped product companies and more that I'm not thinking of at the moment.

edanm 12y ago

This article misses some of the very good reasons to work at a Megacorp in terms of job security. I know, I know, it's one of those things that developers of our generation have been taught not to care about. "No job is secure", right? The truth is, startups are much less secure, have in many cases serious problems in terms of future opportunities. And most importantly - despite saying "the job market is great, you can always find another job", this is just historically false. Please, read what Patrick Mckenzie has to say on the matter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7611848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7611848 And Thomas Ptacek's writing on this as well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612575 "When Sonicity failed in 2001, I had a track record as a lead developer on a successful, well-reviewed enterprise product, the lead engineering role at an ISP that might still have been among Chicago's most popular, and research publications at least one of which has a cite record that a lot of ACM journal submissions would envy. Not to mention, I had cofounded a company that had raised a significant amount of money. I was living in San Francisco at the time. I had to move to Ann Arbor to find my next job."

tomphoolery 12y ago
Startups might force you to leave because they die, but giant corporations will make you WANT to leave because they're terrible to work for. This is more of a general note than anything else (as in, not just programmers), but many of my friends who have taken corporate jobs have ended up leaving them for something else, like a startup or consulting shop, because while the pay was great, the work was boring and the culture was just awful. Startups can be like that too, but generally even if they are you have way more power to change things. It's all a trade-off. You trade the fun of constant change for possibly better, but definitely more reliable, compensation. That is, until your company starts downsizing because someone up top bought 1 too many Ferraris.
- timthorn 12y ago
  > giant corporations will make you WANT to leave because they're terrible to work for Some might be. Some are great fun to work at.

fma 12y ago

I'll comment based on the context of the question submitted. The student is a sophomore. If the student were about to graduate, if newly out of college the answer would require some thinking. If they are a sophomore I would say, startup hands down. As a sophomore I would assume they don't have any experience, or any risk, or any real need for money. It easier to do a startup at that point in life. They will find if they love it or hate it. It's better to test the waters then, instead of after college when they have real risks, a real need for money (house, spouse, kids, etc) Me personally, I founded my first startup my junior year of college, which lead to co-founding a second startup while in grad school. Both startups had little to no profit. There were weeks where I easily put in 40-60 hours+ a week in along with a full time engineering course load. And yes, I still maintained a social life and remained active in campus organizations. Post-graduation, I'm on my 3rd 'corporate' job. My current job and previous employment were with publicly listed, multinational companies who decided to start innovation centers/incubators...not only build their next generation of products, but in-source everything back to the US. I also think it's a fallacy to generalize the work, and people in startup vs corporate life. My first employer, I ran circles around most of the developers, and had to be there 8 hours a day...I rarely worked more than 8. My 2nd job, I was the least senior of all the hires and everyone ran circles around me. My current one, I'm in the middle of the pack as far as experience, and hours are reasonable. tl;dr While in college do a startup.

deleted 12y ago

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seldo 12y ago

> People claim that startups work you hard, I personally don’t see it. From people I’ve talked to, I’d say 50 hour weeks are average. That’s about what you see in corporate America these days. I think only in America would somebody say 50 hour weeks don't count as working you hard. Also, the average US working week is 35 hours, 37 in "information" industries: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm The fact is that past 35 hours most people just aren't very productive, and a startup asking you to work 50 hours is going to get just as much "busy-looking" time as a corporate job asking you to do the same. Don't work at any job that expects you to work 50-60 hour weeks. Those companies are unhappy places.

overgard 12y ago
What always bothered me about companies that ask you to work long hours (long term) isn't even the hours, it's more that it's a canary in the coal mine: it makes it obvious management doesn't know what they're doing. (Or alternatively: that appearance of work is more important to them than actual work. Maybe they're angling for a promotion and trying to impress their boss) I worked at a company for a while where the solution to any deadline was either to work longer hours or to throw more people at it. (They called it "swarming"). I'm pretty sure not a single executive there had read the mythical man month, or they would have realized how insane that was. You can't just brute force problems that require creativity.
- dkrich 12y ago
  Exactly. And I've found that more often than not that the "we MUST complete this by xx/xx/xxxx or ELSE" mentality stems from some arbitrary date promised for no good reason. The company wasn't going to lose any more money or expose themselves to potential liability. It was just an arbitrary date marked in an MS Project file somewhere. In situations where deadlines were missed, it ended up being OKAY and nobody really cared a week later. This then turned into a cycle where every deadline was tight and everybody got burned out because you can be sure that a manager who is bad at managing dates once will be bad at managing dates forever. It seems that a lot of people in management lack good, common sense when managing workloads and deadlines.

pop45 12y ago

I'm just finishing my MSc and I feel so lost and hopeless. I just started to evaluate my options to enter the job market. I'm not sure what is corporate life like for a software engineer in the US but in my country I'm finding out that it has more to do with requirement analysis, evaluating the best COTS (things like Microsoft NAV, SAP, TIBCO seem to be common) for the client and then configuring and deploying it. Maybe with some ABAP in the way and in some cases some J2EE/WSDL/SOAP or C#/.NET webservices to interact with it. It looks like it's almost impossible to escape this kind of work here, the main employers are outsourcing/consulting companies like Accenture, etc. I fear that if I go this way I will never be able to escape because I will be gaining experience in this areas and my career will be stuck in this world. I won't be touching anything like Python, Ruby, Scala, RabbitMQ, Redis or any other technology that might be used by companies were someday I would like to work for, and do real development/engineering. I'm sorry for my ramblings, I just feel so lost and depressed and would like to get it off of my chest before I explode, and maybe find some advice and guidance from you guys.

lnanek2 12y ago
Well, even in countries like Belarus, where the largest companies were indeed outsourcing companies, I still saw a lot of gaming companies, particularly war games. Graphics programming is a grueling field where you spend months working on complex tweaks to improve frame rate or implement some effect, but it could feel rewarding to someone who is into it.
bicx 12y ago
It may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I would urge you to seek meaning in your life in something more fundamental than your career. Once you find your identity in something more important (God, family, relationships... don't hate, HN ;) ), it's actually easier to make an objective decision about what to do for a living. It makes it easier to take intermediate steps (unfulfilling in the short-term) between what's available and what the future may hold. I would even dare to say that it makes you more adventurous in your career because failure in your career no longer equals failure in life. You are not your code. The perfect job isn't always on your doorstep, and it doesn't define the rest of your future. For my first job after school, I was writing enterprise APIs in old, deprecated languages for a large insurance company, and I had the same fears you do. However, I am now working at a cutting-edge startup writing Android apps. They were smart enough to see potential in me rather than a collection of acronyms and technologies on my resume. Working hard is important no matter where you are. Showing genuine interest in the startup is also huge.

pixelmonkey 12y ago

I spent 3 years at one of the name-brand Wall Street firms before starting my own company. This essay rang true to me. It's now 5 years into my "startup" (Aside: can I still call it that? We have 25 employees and millions in revenue.) I have no regrets. My goal is for our employees to have the kind of environment we always wished the large companies we used to work for would have. In fact, many of my early employees were "corporate rescues", bright engineers that had been languishing in comfortable corners of large bureaucratic BigCo's that we convinced to join us, mainly on the promise of actually being able to use Python as part of their day job and work on meaningful/interesting problems. At our "startup", we use the best tool for the job; we only work with bright people; we focus on results; we never stagnate; and, we deliver on an important mission. Also, our engineers get to open source a lot of work that isn't core to the business (see e.g. http://parse.ly/code http://parse.ly/code). The only BigCo's that I've seen that have tried to maintain that engineering-friendly environment are e.g. Google and Facebook, but for those companies, size still becomes a limiting factor on impact. As the essay put it, "Proportionally, you will have a bigger impact on the company's future than you will working for a corporation." Product development also has a different feel when you're trying to create one of the world's next great software companies, rather than when you just happen to work at one that already holds that title.

dk8996 12y ago
I command you for building such a culture at your company. This is not a easy task, even at startup.

jader201 12y ago

When does a startup stop being a startup? When they reach a certain age, or reach a certain revenue, or when they go public/get acquired? I know there is probably a more technical definition, but when do they cross that line in real terms as it relates to the risks and pains of working at a startup, like this article mentions?

analog31 12y ago
A couple features of start-ups: 1. Many-hat-wearing. People adapt to the jobs that need to get done, and there is little or no supervisory hierarchy. 2. Possibility of exponential growth. I'd say if both of those things vanish, then it's either because the business failed, or stopped being a start-up and is now a mature business.

dylandrop 12y ago

> "I tried to be as objective as possible" > "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?" I did a lot of boring, mundane work during my time at some startups as well as interesting work at others. It's either subjective or not informed by enough experience to say that only startup work is cool work and you can't find cool work at a larger company.

rumcajz 12y ago

One difference that was not mentioned is how much of your time is spent in office politics. For early-stage startups it's close to zero. In corporations you spend most of your time doing politics and dealing with consequences thereof, such as doing work that nobody needs just to placate the management etc.

bane 12y ago

Depending on how you count things, I've been part of 5 startups and 3 megacorps (none smaller than 40,000 employees) (plus a couple regular old mom and pop small businesses when I was young). If I can draw any conclusions, I liked the megacorp work much more while I liked the small business work environment more. I've spent about twice as much time in startups and small businesses despite having significant opportunities in the corporate world. In the small business (startup or mom & pop) everybody is pulling their weight or they're gone. But the work, especially the startup, tends to be lots of "getting set up and doing things for the first time". You want to solve your customer's problems, but first you have to set up this or that server, or get the dev team using some new code profiler, or building up the QA team from scratch. It's a long walk before you can really start attending to customer issues directly because there are so many issues internally to work out. However, your individual contributions can make or break a company, your impact locally can be huge. That's really rewarding. At a corporate job, the problems you get presented with are bigger and often very interesting, you work for a 1,000 pound gorilla who can (in theory) throw lots of weight and maturity behind solving it. The biggest projects I've ever worked on were at these kinds of places. You won't ever really have a big impact on the company, but you might participate in having a big impact on the world. At the end of the day, the single most rewarding things I've ever done have been while getting a paycheck from a megacorp. However, there's tons of dead weight you have to deal with. Bad employees get masked over by the size of the organization and work they aren't doing simply gets shifted onto one of the other nameless drones there. If you want to be rewarded on both levels, don't think of the megacorp as the company you work for, think of the program or project as the "company" and try to get put on lean, thinly staffed, high risk projects. Your impact will be to the project, and it'll be huge, but the corporation will bring huge and interesting problems to you to work on.

analog31 12y ago
This is a nice description. For me, working at a mega-corp is like living in a city. There are people who take my garbage away and keep the barbarians out. I don't have to do those things, so I can focus on what I enjoy: Developing new technologies, for which I'm rewarded. I've set myself up as a sort of entrepreneur living in this city, where I can take on more speculative projects, but at no risk to my own money. I make damn sure that what I'm taking away is not only money, but also learning, even if it's at some cost to the efficiency of any particular project. And should I ever get into a start-up, I'll benefit from having observed the inner workings of a business from end to end.

btbuildem 12y ago

A little too rose-coloured, this article. If you want to slog it, really give all you got to someone else's project, a startup is the way to go. You're likely to learn a lot, and your decisions will have direct impact on the well-being of the company. If you want a stable job that you can put out of your mind when you're not at the office, forget about startups.

bigtunacan 12y ago

Most startup vs corporate discussions all come down to a lot of anecdotal evidence that falls on both sides of the spectrum. I have worked for several startups as well as several "big corps". Without naming names; I'm just going to lay things out in a sort of chronological order. <TL;DR>Try to find something you love there are good and bad in both startups and big corporations.</TL;DR> Big Co #1) ----------------- I was brought in as an intern; this was my first exposure to the professional IT world. I learned a lot, the job was secure, benefits were good, nice people all around too. I was groomed for the spot I was interning and when a full time spot opened at one of our locations half way across the country I was asked to take that opening and move. While the job was secure, benefits were good, and the pay going into the full time position was pretty stellar I felt dissatisfied at the time and didn't want to get "stuck" working there the rest of my life, so instead I turned down the offer and jumped to startup #1. Startup #1) ----------------- This was a great environment, we were having a lot of fun. People were working a few extra hours, but nothing too bad. I really enjoyed it there; they really took off and these days they are now a "big corp". Things probably would have been ok if I had stayed there instead of moving on to startup #2 Startup #2) ----------------- Work environment was great; very small close knit team. I loved every minute of it right up until I was layed off unexpectedly and the company closed their doors virtually overnight due to their single largest contract being dropped with no notice due to a change in federal government funding policies. Still not too jaded by things; both startups had been pretty good to me so far I moved on to Startup #3) ----------------- This place was just insane. People constantly were being asked to work more and more hours even while the company appeared to be growing quite quickly. Then the police showed up at the company to arrest the CEO; he subsequently went to prison for some type of loan fraud (I never looked into the exact details). This didn't slow things down though; his equally honest son was there to take over the reins of the company. He demanded even more hours of everyone while trying to slash costs/spending everywhere. We were actually called into a company meeting where he pointed out the window at the parking lot and said, "At 8pm at night this parking lot is virtually empty. That is unacceptable. I expect people stay as long as it takes for our deadlines to be met." Not long after that happened my boss came to me and told me that he was quitting because a sale of the company was imminent and that it was not going to be good for the employees. He advised that I get out early because the job market wasn't going to be able to absorb that many programmers after the sale. Things were pretty bad; I was already unhappy; so I took his advice and moved on to startup #4. Less than 3 months after I left the company was sold in a major acquisition where the purchasing company was after our high profile clientele. Almost the entire development staff was killed; our products were all killed; existing clients were moved to the product of our competitor who had bought us out. Startup #4) ----------------- Tiny little startup; one major investor. I worked way too many hours, but I enjoyed it. We never turned a profit and eventually ran out of money. Eventually they couldn't even make payroll. They were unable to pay me about $10K in salary that I was owed due to there being no money left. The end. Startup #5) ----------------- Holy dear god and anything that is holy; this place was a living hell on earth. Unfortunately, the job market at this point had turned really sour so I couldn't find a job to save my life. So I accepted a position with this terrible startup. I was working 60+ hours a week, every week. I was getting calls when I wasn't at the office to come in and put out fires even at 2 and 3am. It was incredibly terrible and awful. I was finally fed up with startups. So I decided it was time to move on to big co #2 Big Co #2) ----------------- This place was so good to me. The time off was great; I was used to working my ass off from startup culture so I was able to put in half as much effort as I normally had to and was still getting more done than the people around me. Meanwhile most of the development team was just coasting by and doing the bare minimum while complaining that they had too much to do. Despite what experiences other people had; this worked out great for me. 3 years in a row I was promoted and given stellar raises for my outstanding contributions. I was traveling on the companies dime frequently; which I really enjoyed as well. All in all I really loved this place. I also did not feel like a "cog" here; I was making major contributions to key projects at this place. Startup #6) ----------------- So it was with some real hesitation that I left Big Co #2. At this point I was actively recruited, not by some recruiter, but by a former colleague to come and join startup #6. I out right refused to entertain the idea, but this colleague was very persistent and kept talking about better pay, fat stocks, etc... He promised me a wonderful company culture, etc... and as he said, "It can't hurt to at least come in and talk to the VP." So I had a sit down with the VP at this very new, but very well funded, startup. I was offered a ridiculously huge pay increase as well as stock that would vest in 3 years. It turned out that the cost was my life. I was working 7 days a week including holidays; usually from 8 am until 1 or 2am. Despite what everyone says; yes more hours can me more work gets done. But at what cost; my health was on a steep decline due to lack of sleep primarily. I was feeling burned out as hell at the 2 1/2 year mark but pushed on since that stock vest was so close. The CEO though was a complete megalomaniac asshole (and this is being nice) that never liked me from the beginning. Despite the fact that I personally implemented more projects and delivered on more customers than any other developer in the group; he fucked me out of my stocks by firing me 1 month prior to them vesting. I got zero out of that. The VP called me an personally apologized and told me how unfair it was and that he even he couldn't believe that the CEO would be that big of an asshole especially considering how much it was going to hurt the company to have me gone. Big Co #3) ----------------- At this point; as one might imagine I was rather jaded by the whole startup scene. So I went to another big co. I said going in; "I'm done. I'm taking a job at this big co and I'm going to stay there until I retire." Most people sat around here pretending to be busy when they really didn't have enough work for all of the employees. There were no opportunities for me to advance because there really wasn't enough work to go around; and people who had work to do sure weren't going to share. They were going to hold on for dear life in case layoffs came they wouldn't be the ones to get hit. And those layoffs sure came. In my 3 years there 3 rounds of layoffs hit. Each time I was sweating that the executioner was going to come for each time. And each time I was granted a stay of execution. I was bored out of my mind and worried that it was only a matter of time before I got cut. I started interviewing at other places; I considered several startups, but due to my past experiences I turned them down. I was really selective and focused on trying to find a position that valued my time, my knowledge, presented challenges, and had stability. Eventually I found a small team within another big co that really seemed to fit with what I was looking for. Big Co #4) ----------------- That brings us to today. I work on a small team within a huge organization. We create products that make a big difference. We value creativity, productivity, and personal life. This is a team, more than any that I've worked with in the past, where we like and respect each other and I like to see these people outside of work. Will I stay here until I retire? I can't answer that, but I can say I love my job. It is challenging and rewarding, but it allows me to have a personal life as well.

h1karu 12y ago

> People claim that startups work you hard, I personally don’t see it. From people I’ve talked to, I’d say 50 hour weeks are average. That’s about what you see in corporate America these days. If you're working at an early stage startup then in general nobody should "work you" at all, rather you'll work yourself 60+hours a week because you ACTUALLY HAVE SIGNIFICANT EQUITY in the company and therefor you want to see it grow quickly. In a corporate environment you don't have any "skin in the game" so to speak so there's no incentive to push yourself. If you're working at an early stage startup and you don't have significant equity then you're doing it wrong.

ulfw 12y ago
'significant equity'. Who outside the founders and maybe five first employees really have that in a startup? If owning 0.1% which gets diluted to 0.01% before the startup sells for say 40MM bucks four years later is significant to you...
- h1karu 12y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "startup" I suppose. I've worked for three and in each I've been one of the first dozen or so employees. You don't have to be a founder but I think that being a core "early employee" with a fair equity stake is the right way to get the real "startup experience". Anything else is like.. well working for an established company, and doesn't have the same vibe, or excitement.

badman_ting 12y ago

I have my reservations about the startup world, but the question about risk management is strange. Young people shouldn't necessarily be worrying about that just yet. Hell, worry about the risk of getting stuck in a situation where 50 hour weeks are "normal" and not a serious failure mode. Companies of all sizes know that young people a) have a lot of energy, and b) are easier to screw over salary-wise.

romanovcode 12y ago

I see startups as mirage to fool young professionals into thinking they are working less when the exact opposite happens.

bquinlan 12y ago

I graduated in 1997 and, since then, have worked at: - 2 big companies - 2 small steady-state businesses (<100 people) - 4 startups (one as a founder) So far my best experience has been at Google, where I work now. Here are some of my reasons: - I have a lot of opportunities to learn because there are so many people with diverse skills and expertise and Google has the resources and motivation to let people investigate novel technologies. - I work with amazing technology. Google has the resources to devote many engineers to internal development tools and production technologies. - I don't have to work with (many) crazy people. At startups and small businesses, I found that one crazy founder or manager (who is probably related to the CEO) can completely ruin the experience. Google has processes to avoid hiring such people or to deal with them post-hire. - The work I do effects a lot of people. My Mom has commented on features that I've implemented. And, since we usually work in small teams, my impact isn't usually diluted by a lot of people. - There is a lot of project diversity and ability to relocate (if you want). So far I've worked on Google's support systems (Dublin), search (Dublin), App Engine (Sydney) and Chromecast (Mountain View). - I get paid well without a lot of risk. At Google my base salary is pretty high and I can treat my bonus and equity awards as extras that I don't need to count on. And the bank can count on Google too so I can get a reasonable mortgage. Not everything is perfect, of course. Two months ago a bunch of work I did was thrown away because my manager's manager's manager's manager didn't like it (his reasoning was sound but...) [1]. And bigger companies are under increased scrutiny so you have to be more careful about privacy, regulatory compliance, etc. A lot of things that you would just do at a startup require consultation with lawyers at a big company. And my other big company experience really really sucked. I won't go into the details here but I ended up quitting in about 3 months. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/22n3uv/squirrels_possibly_coming_to_chromecast/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/22n3uv/squirrels...

was_hellbanned 12y ago
I don't have to work with (many) crazy people. At startups and small businesses, I found that one crazy founder or manager (who is probably related to the CEO) can completely ruin the experience. Google has processes to avoid hiring such people or to deal with them post-hire. That really hit home for me. Part of the severe burnout I'm experiencing is from years of dealing with people from a pill-popping, paranoid nutcase founder to plain old manchildren who thrive on creating drama. (This was in the SV/SF "startup" scene, though most of the "startups" were actually just small, privately held companies who seemed to use that label when they were in the red, didn't have a clear direction, and wanted people to work more hours.)