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Myths About Working as an Engineer at a Startup

259 points by karlhughes 12y ago

karcass 12y ago
Having done nine startups now, all that rings pretty true to me. :)
- mkoryak 12y ago
  9 startups over the span of how many years? Why do you keep doing it? Do you have kids ;) ?
  - karcass 12y ago
    I started at Apple in 1994. I left to found a startup in 1997. It was an delightful and educational disaster; I learned that I loved startups but didn't have the constitution to lead them. My tenures at these startups were anywhere from 18 months (acquired for modest payout) to 8 years (IPO for modest payout). I keep doing it because of the reasons listed in the article. Flexibility, ability to have significant influence, get to work on cutting-edge stuff, have to furiously learn new stuff. Plus I enjoy the recruiting and team building -- I am an extrovert. :) Yes, I have one kid. I tutor math at her elementary school. (See 'flexibility', above.)
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - rayiner 12y ago
        Apple IPO'ed in 1980, at a $1.8 billion ($5.2 billion inflation-adjusted) valuation. 1994 was fourteen years after that, when the organization was in decline.
        karcass 12y ago
        I have worked at nine startups since leaving Apple. I did not say that Apple was a startup.
        rayiner 12y ago
        I know. There was a (now deleted) comment between yours and mine that said "wow, you were an early Apple employee, what was it like?" I figured that poster didn't realize how old Apple is.
        karcass 12y ago
        Ahhhhh sorry.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    I've done about half that many. Start-ups can be nice in many ways. I'd still love everyone considering a start-up to read the linked essay, because a flood of over-optimistic employees can drive down wages and working conditions. Demand good wages, demand good working conditions, don't let "we are a start-up" be an excuse for someone getting you to eat a shit sandwich.
ehurrell 12y ago
I'd agree with almost all of those, the biggest thing I'd say is, as with all startup jobs, risk is a factor you shouldn't ignore, the last point I kinda disagree with for that.
jacquesm 12y ago
I miss: profit sharing is just as good as equity. And: don't worry, you will get your shares.
- glimcat 12y ago
  "Okay, how do you determine what portion of revenues are profit?" (crickets) Seriously, I've heard this one waaaay too many times. It's right up there with "you'll work for equity right, and maybe we can throw in a bit of cash if you put in enough hours?"
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
- Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
  > And: don't worry, you will get your shares. Can't promise you what they'll be worth though.
- danielweber 12y ago
  don't worry, you will get your shares As a partially mitigating effect, the places too incompetent to get you your shares are usually the places too incompetent to succeed enough that your shares matter. I once told this to a boss. "If you can't get my share paperwork, it won't matter because you won't enough of your stuff together to succeed." I never got that paperwork. As practical advice, you should still follow-up and demand all the paperwork and not accept excuses for it. The company fulfilling its contractual obligations to its employees is not a distraction from their real work. If they can't find the time to do this, start looking elsewhere immediately.
quarterwave 12y ago
Well written, tallies with my start-up experiences.
hox 12y ago
Things not addressed that I think are important: 1. Salary. Startups always seem to offer lower salary in return for said equity. 2. Career development. Startups demand that you build somewhat hacks solutions for the sake of time. In many instances you might not get the opportunity to learn how to do things right. Too much of this and you get used to building hacks products. 3. 80-hour work weeks might not be the norm, but what about 60 hour work weeks? that's a deal bresker for some. 4. Diversity. Startups are notorious for hiring people just like the founders.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >Startups demand that you build somewhat hacks solutions for the sake of time. So do large corporations. This is not a factor of how large your company is, it's a factor of how forward thinking your technology leadership is. If they're not thinking further than the next three months, it's pretty much always going to be a hack.
  - hox 12y ago
    True of course, but with startups this is more of a necessary evil; for larger organizations it is a sign of engineering dysfunction.
  - wastedhours 12y ago
    IME large corps always go for the "quick wins". They get external companies in to tell them the things their employees already told them about, and then it's a box ticking exercise to race through that list before their next progress meeting...
- mkoryak 12y ago
  > Salary. Startups always seem to offer lower salary in return for said equity. Not necessarily "always", if the startup is well funded, they will pay you well, AND give you equity.
- onion2k 12y ago
  Salary. Startups always seem to offer lower salary in return for said equity. If you're the first engineer, sure. As the second or third engineer it's a lot more likely that you won't get any equity (or nothing that won't be diluted in to oblivion by the time an exit comes along), and you'll be on a lower salary with a promise of a decent raise when the business gets traction. But that might never happen... Also, if you do get equity, it'll probably be as a number of shares ("We'll give you 10,000 shares!") and no one will tell how many shares have been issued. So in reality you're getting 0.001%.
silverbax88 12y ago
FTA: “Rock star” engineers sometimes work at startups, but usually they work for big companies who can pay them twice the salary and have multiple indoor water polo pools and racquetball courts. THIS is something the 'startup world' and a lot of people on HN are not aware of. Really, really bad-ass programmers usually work for big corporations for good salaries. Not always, but usually. The reason I mention it is because there is a myth that startups are built with the latest, greatest tech by the brightest minds. Often this just isn't true...many startups are hacked together by inexperienced programmers fresh out of college. Sometimes this works, but often it means that nobody on staff is really a master coder, nobody on staff has ever had to fend off Russian hackers attempting to take down your code at 3 am, nobody on staff has had to deal with thousands of users who wake up one morning, can't log in and no money is coming into the company. These are the battles that most programmers learn in the trenches of big companies, fighting tough battles, fixing complex problems under fire. It's not ideal, but I'm not sure if you can really become battle-hardened without going through real battles with real jobs on the line. This is what happened at Twitter - when the government came after them because they were getting hacked too often, Twitter went out and hired 'real' programmers and got things working. That's something that gets missed a lot in the 'startup story'.
- pptr1 12y ago
  "This is what happened at Twitter - when the government came after them because they were getting hacked too often, Twitter went out and hired 'real' programmers and got things working. That's something that gets missed a lot in the 'startup story'." That is interesting. Did you work at twitter or was this in the news?
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    I learned this at an OWASP conference, where several Twitter programmers revealed this and what they did to resolve it. The guys who were presenting never said 'they brought us in to fix things', but that's exactly what they were. None of the guys who were building the 'hardened' Twitter were originally with the company - they were seasoned pros brought in from other companies. And yes, they did some bad-ass things to fix it. But the presentation was more about OWASP level coders wanting to see what issues Twitter had to face. Nothing was Earth-shattering at that level, but it was excellent to see the amount of data they were working with and where their breaches were happening. I don't want to speak for them, but it was obvious that one of their biggest issues was people writing insecure code and checking it in without any review. They have automated code review tools in place now.
squidmccactus 12y ago
So will I get a big payday from company shares even if my startup isn't very successful?
- bradfa 12y ago
  Go read up on the order that money is paid out to shareholders when the selling/IPO price isn't much greater than the total investment to date. The short version is that usually preferred shareholders (the investors) get paid first and will get at least their investment back and then what's left is split among the common shareholders. Also note that if the preferred shareholders are "participating" or not matters, as they may get to be common shareholders as well as preferred, meaning normal common shareholders get even less in these kinds of situations. If your startup isn't wildly successful and you're not a founder or investor, don't expect to have a life-changing payday. The odds are against it.
porter 12y ago
how much equity does the average early employee get? How about the average late employee? What about for a company like twitch, that just exited?
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  This varies greatly from startup to startup, but if you are not a founder it will be very very small. Early in my career I was a very early employee (think sub 10 employees) of a startup and was compensated with about 0.2% of the company. Later in my career I joined a very late stage startup (think sub 500 employees) and was compensated with about 0.007% of the company. Also note, that when I say compensated, that was with a standard 4 year vesting agreement.
  - gkmoyn 12y ago
    This I just don't understand. The founders have the idea, leave their jobs first, and raise the money. Fantastic. Then they bring in two engineers a couple of weeks later, who quit their jobs for a nascent idea with no proof it'll work. The founders have maybe 65-80% of the company between then (then the investors and option pool), and the two engineers have 1% each. Everyone works shoulder to shoulder and the early first employees contribute critically, but the payouts on exit are off by orders of magnitude. Why do people sign up for such lopsided payoffs? Has any company tried a more gradual equity falloff? Say, with two founders and two employees, instead of an equity distribution of: F1=34 F2=32 E1=1 E2=1 you might have: F1=20 F2=19 E1=15 E2=14
    - kasey_junk 12y ago
      Typically the founders don't have 65-80% of the company, some future investor does.
      - gkmoyn 12y ago
        I'm talking about the equity on day 1, not on exit day. But even on exit, the ratio is the same between founders and employees.
rayiner 12y ago
From the perspective of someone who worked for a startup as his first real job: > You are also likely to get some input on the way future engineers are hired and the way your technology team interacts with the business team. This is true, and not entirely a good thing. I was interviewing new technical hires within a year or two at the organization. I asked stupid nerd questions (if you knew C++ like you claimed, you'd know the ins and outs of this template expansion), instead of important ones like: if you're stuck, will you ask for help, or just silently beat your head against the wall and not have anything to show weeks later? > An environment that encourages learning and experimentation keeps engineers more motivated than one that stifles its technical talent. It's also an environment that encourages reinvention of the wheel, especially by younger engineers with little supervision that don't necessarily realize that a particular wheel already exists and is ready to use. > One of the best skills you can learn if you intend to work for a startup is the ability to figure out things on your own. This is an existential issue at a startup, and particularly important if you're fresh out of college, because you don't know anything and thus must learn everything. This is both good and bad. On one hand, I learned a lot more in a short time than my friends that went to work for big organizations. On the other hand, I always felt like I never really learned how to do things "right" because a startup is a setting where you don't necessarily have the time to dot your I's and cross your T's. > It seems like startups move faster and create solutions to difficult problems more efficiently than large companies, but the truth is that they normally have a lower quality threshold than their corporate counterparts. This rings true to me. It was really a revelation to me when I joined a large organization for the first time. It was a well oiled machine, with roles for everyone and someone whose job it was to do anything that needed to be done. Startups have many advantages, but they're not necessarily productive or efficient places.[1] You can spend a lot of time yak shaving at a startup. Anyway, I'd do it over again in a heartbeat, but I'm not sure if I'd advise someone to go to a startup straight out of school.[2] Maybe one of those well-funded, well-established ones where they're far enough along to have real internal processes and real management, but I'd save the "three guys in a basement" stuff for later, when you know what you're doing. Again, YMMV. [1] Of course, I imagine they can be if we're talking about a shop run mostly by highly experienced engineers. But in general, I think big organizations are better at getting more output from less-skilled labor. [2] At least if you intend to make programming a long-term career. If your intention is to jump over to the business side relatively soon, that advice would change. You'll get far more exposure to the business side at a startup than you will at a large company.
deleted 12y ago
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rokhayakebe 12y ago
Would you rather work for a startup (vs. established co.) that pays you 130% market salary without equity or take 90% with the possibility of great upside? Edit: I am asking because I think startups should be paying more than established companies because of many reasons: 1) the work environment is usually shitty (nice, clean offices are nice), 2) no financial security because they are not established, 3) no one outside the startup world wants to hire someone who failed numerous times before, 4) it is much easier to go from Big Co to Small/Tiny Co, then the opposite. (4) is particular true and quite dangerous for recent grads. Young recent grads are better off founding their own company or joining Big co instead joining fresh startups.
- gaius 12y ago
  130% every time. A stock option cert is a lottery ticket.
- tbrownaw 12y ago
  That would be an interesting cultural change. Maybe startups would fare better if they exchanged "passion" and sleep-deprivation for competence, even with having to pay extra for said competence? What prevents them from doing this (or do we just not hear about it here)? Do VCs not approve of the shape risk would be distributed in (even if their share ends up smaller in absolute terms)? Would it never work because of a culture clash with the sort of people who found startups (if you've convinced yourself you've "got religion" over some business idea, will you want to work with people who are openly just in it for the money)?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Your criteria discuss the demand-side of the equation as a prospective employee, but not the supply-side as the employer, which can't pay a higher salary due to a highly-constrained or non-existant budget.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Such an employer might do well to reconsider whether his product is worth what he thinks it is, then, if he can't muster the budget to pay employees a market (or above market, given the risks) rate.
cik 12y ago
Trading stock for equity is almost never worth it - as a basic reality. Clearly it is occasionally, or the system would collapse. Let's say you receive $40k in salary a year (versus equity), for 5 years (let's call that $200k, just for fun). Assuming you're diligent, that salary difference can be invested, even in something as simple a preferred shares, yield a compounded return of +/- 5%, or ~$232k. So, we're not really talking about high levels of risk. Assuming your startup, like most others has 6 funding rounds before an exit, and that insiders hold the traditional 4% at exit - we'd be looking at someone who started with a full 1% (of the initial, pre-dilution point) of the company, yielding ~$341k over the same period. Given that 1% holdings are rather high - 0.5% or less would be well expected. That in turn means that unless your company exits for ~275M (over this 5 year period), and you hold 0.5% then FINANCIALLY it's not worth being part of that endeavour. That being said there are several other great reasons to enjoy startups.
computerjunkie 12y ago
As a recent graduate who is actively looking for a job, this is an eye opener. Many thanks to the author for explaining what really happens in "Start-up life". What really struck me was the "full-stack rock star hacker" part. As someone who has little to no experience in commercial software engineering and then sees this phrase on many start up roles (includes ninjas and gurus), it really sets an image that start up work is only for the incredibly bright individuals who know it all. I also believe some of the unrealistic expectations start ups have are one of the major reasons why they fail. [0] "Rome wasn't built in a day". Working long hours goes with the kind of person you are. 80 hour work weeks may be productive for some people whilst others perform better with 37 hour work weeks (or less). We are all different. Some athletes are born marathon runners, whilst others are natural short distance sprinters. I think this is where most start-ups also get it wrong and its also something that contributes to their failures. Long hours once in a while is fine as long as you are compensated for it. Media is also a major contributor to what start ups should be like. As mentioned in the article, you only hear about major acquisitions, huge crowd funding campaign success, and crazy company valuations. But its a lot less common to hear about the failures of start-ups, people burning out before their first product release. Why does media never cover these failures? As much as I would like to join a start-up or even start one, I will continue looking for work at small-medium companies and big companies first, get good experience first and still a personal life outside work. I guess its different for other people, but I value work/life balance and I also think its the key to having a successful career, be it entrepreneurial or employee based. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_wasn%27t_built_in_a_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_wasn%27t_built_in_a_day
- tbrownaw 12y ago
  Working long hours goes with the kind of person you are. 80 hour work weeks may be productive for some people whilst others perform better with 37 hour work weeks (or less). We are all different. Something to keep in mind for this, is that people tend to be fairly lousy at detecting how what they do affects their productivity. Even if you think you do well with long weeks (or multitasking, or whatever), you can't know that without keeping a log of how much you actually got done under which conditions.
- 12y ago
gaius 12y ago
3 times I have worked for a small company that had a liquidity event, as an early employee. That already makes me incredibly lucky, that those companies didn't sink without trace. In each case, my stock was worth between 3-6 months of my then salary. Which was a nice chunk o'change to be sure, but not FU money, not by a long shot. Now I work for big companies for a good salary. I put in the hours to get the work done, but I'll never do 80+ hour weeks again unless I own a ton of equity in the venture. The truth is that startups, like the music biz, like video games, like PR require a steady stream of young people with unrealistic ideas who can be exploited. Don't let yourself be played, is my advice now to young engineers. Especially don't take career advice from a VC or a founder...
- danielweber 12y ago
  Don't let yourself be played, is my advice now to young engineers Now how do we get them to listen? When I was a young engineer, I don't think I would have listened to what you're saying here, although I now know I'm in complete agreement with it.
  - gaius 12y ago
    Yes the hype in the press makes it hard to convince the inexperienced that stock options just aren't worth that much money. Really, startup millionaires are lottery winners. You wouldn't take lottery tickets in lieu of pay, would you?
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    > Now how do we get them to listen? We don't. No generation was able to do that. But that's not completely a bad thing. When the newer generations repeat the same old mistakes, sometimes they find out that a few of those mistakes aren't anymore.
    - gaius 12y ago
      It will always be a mistake to overestimate the value of your stock or stock options. I'm not saying don't do startups. I'm saying don't be exploited. Take my 6-months-pay payout as a yardstick. Then ask if it's worth taking half the going wage, for 3 years, in return even for the guarantee of it, when it is by no means guaranteed. If I were to go to a startup again, I would expect to be paid a premium over the market rate, and I would see equity as a bonus. Otherwise why should I bust my ass to make a rich VC even richer?
bane 12y ago
I bounce back and forth between startups (5), small companies (2) and mega corps (3) and so might some unique perspectives. The truth is that for most of the world, bigco's are the default and startups have to sell their employment in order to get employees. They have to find some way to offset the inherent employment instability that working for a startup entails. This has created many of the myths in this article that continue to be perpetuated. Some observations: Like a few other comments, I've noticed that the absolute best-of-the-best work for "real companies" and not startups. The reason working for a bigco doesn't get the reputation of having the best engineering talent is simple, talent is like any other thing with a group of people, it follows a pyramid distribution. Most of the people are terrible and at the bottom of the pyramid, and as you move up the pyramid you end up with smaller and smaller populations of very good people. Except you can't have fractions of a person, so in bigco, where the projects might involve 100 engineers. That top-notch engineer accounts for only 1% of the staff. Sure maybe 80% of the staff may not be any good, but that still leaves you with 20% who are at least decent work-a-day engineers. In a startup, your entire engineering staff might be 10 people, and your top-notch engineer now accounts for 10% of all the staff time spent on a project. It's almost like having 10 top engineers instead (if you try to scale the numbers to match). It's easier to find 3-4 above average folks to round out the top of the pyramid and the rest are just there to fill in the mortar and won't last long. This means that your individual contribution is magnified in a startup. Everything is magnified in a startup. Decision making power, individual contribution, etc. But so are negative aspects of working in a company. When things go bad, they go bad really fast in a startup. The worst political dramas I've ever seen were all in startups. Points of failure are enormous in small startups. One of the thing that happens as companies mature and grow is they learn they can no longer tolerate so much magnified failure, so they build in controls to spread around responsibility so they can better survive what would be a catastrophic failure in a startup (founder leaving, tech decision turns out to be wrong 18 months in etc.). The side effect is of course that in order to turn down this magnified negativity, the magnified good stuff also gets squashed.
Ragnarork 12y ago
As someone who's currently in his second ever job, which is in a startup (first one was in a startup as well), I find most of it is quite accurate, but then there'll always be edge cases. The startup world is really heterogeneous and it's hard to draw conclusion about it that won't be really vague. Just a small point I'd like to comment: > Truth: you’ll get to set the culture, standards, and technologies used This is quite funny because both startup I worked for were completely different on this point. In the first one I was the only developer, working on an application I created completely from scratch. I could decide entirely on my own which technologies/tools I could use (heh, being able to start a project in c++11 was really sweet). On the other hand, the startup I'm in currently is rather resistant to change with regards to what we use, even though we tried to push these change with arguments as to how it could speed up work and eliminate some recurrent pain in the development process.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  I guess the only ones who really set the technologies are the first hires, so it's a big fat myth. Otherwise why is every start-up putting some technology in the job ad title (just look at HN job postings)?
cheery 12y ago
Reading this blog post was bit like falling from a tree. Every branch shaves off a bit of credibility from the writer, until the reader passes out.
breaksyourheart 12y ago
What about the myth that you're doing something important?
- BrianEatWorld 12y ago
  How do you gauge what is important? If you consider what your role is in creating wealth, then arguably you are doing something more important than most regular employees. How often can an engineer at Google say that their specific input caused the company to grow by 500%? Yet, even employees at modest startups with modest exits can say they had a significant hand in that level of growth. If you are commenting on the "making the world a better place" trope, then that may be a different story.
  - newaccountfool 12y ago
    Working at a startup and making a considerable change is all fine and dandy, but when they exit and your only getting 0.01% even though you were the first group of devs, then its a bit crappy.
  - RogerL 12y ago
    I can create 100% growth by changing my customer base from 1 to 2. Google can create 0.001% growth by adding another 100,000 customers (made up percentage, you get the idea). Is 100% > 0.001%? Not by my math. You know who is changing the world? Some engineer working on optimizing the cache lines on some Intel processor. Her work will, over the life of the chip, save millions to perhaps billions of hours, with similar effects on watts used, time wasted, and so on. Can that Intel engineer give #s to quantify her impact on the world? Not likely. It doesn't mean that it isn't there, nor that a rational person cannot recognize it.
yeahsathish 12y ago
I Agree! Totally!
steven2012 12y ago
I disagree with the assertion that most "rock star" engineers work at big companies. The only big companies that have true "rock stars" are Google and Facebook and probably Microsoft too. All other "big" companies in the valley started with rock stars, who probably got rich from options/IPOs, who then got bored and left for another smaller company. Most companies have a huge brain drain after the 4 years vesting period after the IPO. And this happens more especially if the nature of the business changes, if management comes in that ladens the company with process, slows down innovation, etc, basically make the company less fun to work at.
- krschultz 12y ago
  A lot of the best engineers work at companies with ~50-100 engineers and lots of revenue. It's not a big company, but it's also not a startup.
- Balgair 12y ago
  One thing that is very discounted in the OP is the government. Many very good programmers work in the DOE, DOD, and other 4 to 3 letter named departments. Programmers, like the rest of us, are very diverse people. SOme like the 'fun' you talk of, some really value the stability of a mega corp or the CIA. Some are there only for the problems and their personal interest in them, some are there for their kids and kiss off the desk at 5pm exactly. Some like to paint, some like to go to Burning Man. Programming talent and 'rockstar' status is independent from motivations to do a job I think. Also, the assertion that most top talent work at mega corps is a statistics issue, as other comments mention. More jobs, as a percentage, are at mega corps and the government. But more companies are under 100 to 50 employees. So, if you look at it from a percent of programmers, you see many more at mega corps. But as a percent of top talent, you see more at small businesses, simply because you can determine the top talent easier at a start-up as there is less debate who the top people are. Other commenters explain this better, sorry.
- emgeee 12y ago
  From what I've heard, pretty much every big company that does software is supported in someway by "rockstars." The difference with larger companies is that the ratio of bad to good tends to be much higher so that even if you work for one of these companies, you might never actually encounter them.
legohead 12y ago
as for culture.. it's great in the beginning, but as the company grows to medium and large, communication begins to break down, and bureaucracy creeps in, poisoning the old culture. with more people being brought in (usually at a rapid pace as you hit your growth spurts), you have to adapt to more personality types, and company culture&feel will suffer as a result
swayvil 12y ago
Engineering school : Work em like mules. Weed out the misfits. Engineering job : Work em like mules.
Apocryphon 12y ago
"Big companies put junior engineers through training programs, send them to advanced classes, and make them sit through certification tests, but I’ve never seen any of those at a scrappy startup." They do? Is employee training (outside of on-the-job learning) even a thing in engineering anymore?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Facebook has an infamous 2-week "boot camp" for new hires.
  - Apocryphon 12y ago
    Infamous in what sense?
  - nbm 12y ago
    It is a six-week program, although the last week or so is a bunch of teams pitching themselves to the new hires, and the new hires meeting with the teams they're choosing between.
- numo16 12y ago
  The company I work for puts every engineering hire through "the U", a 3-9 month training program (depending on developer aptitude), geared towards bringing all engineering hires up to a relative even ground, with regards to the necessary skills to be a software engineer here. The training is always in flux and adapting based on feedback, and has pretty consistently turned out developers that are able to jump in and start developing in any given team. Developers then gain further domain specific knowledge through mentorships and regular 1-on-1 meetings with team leaders and mentors about goals and progress. Overall, it works pretty well based on my interactions with other developers here.
  - Apocryphon 12y ago
    Sounds amazing. Where you're at? :p I thought usually it was only IT consulting firms that provided such training.
mrbird 12y ago
Andy Rachleff has great advice on people looking to start a career in startups: Don't make a brand-new startup your first job--rather, look for a mid-sized, growing company, where you'll learn some valuable skills and set yourself up for better opportunities in the future. https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-companies/ https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-com... The list is getting a bit out of date, and he's writing for business students, but I think the advice is very sound for engineers as well. If I could do it over again, I would have tried to find a similar path.
frobozz 12y ago
>Truth: you’ll have more freedom to choose the projects you work on and how you do them This is contrary to my experience. In startups, any time you're not spending developing the core product in the quickest way possible (i.e. the currently established way, don't go exploring whether a new way might be quicker) is seen as time ticking away on the death clock. In a large corporate environment, I've been much freer, because we can afford to play the long game. I've been able to choose projects, define completely novel ones, choose different technologies to use, rather than the established stack (and indeed, change what the "established stack" is).

259 points by karlhughes 12y ago

karcass 12y ago

Having done nine startups now, all that rings pretty true to me. :)

mkoryak 12y ago
9 startups over the span of how many years? Why do you keep doing it? Do you have kids ;) ?
- karcass 12y ago
  I started at Apple in 1994. I left to found a startup in 1997. It was an delightful and educational disaster; I learned that I loved startups but didn't have the constitution to lead them. My tenures at these startups were anywhere from 18 months (acquired for modest payout) to 8 years (IPO for modest payout). I keep doing it because of the reasons listed in the article. Flexibility, ability to have significant influence, get to work on cutting-edge stuff, have to furiously learn new stuff. Plus I enjoy the recruiting and team building -- I am an extrovert. :) Yes, I have one kid. I tutor math at her elementary school. (See 'flexibility', above.)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - rayiner 12y ago
      Apple IPO'ed in 1980, at a $1.8 billion ($5.2 billion inflation-adjusted) valuation. 1994 was fourteen years after that, when the organization was in decline.
      - karcass 12y ago
        I have worked at nine startups since leaving Apple. I did not say that Apple was a startup.
        rayiner 12y ago
        I know. There was a (now deleted) comment between yours and mine that said "wow, you were an early Apple employee, what was it like?" I figured that poster didn't realize how old Apple is.
        karcass 12y ago
        Ahhhhh sorry.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I've done about half that many. Start-ups can be nice in many ways. I'd still love everyone considering a start-up to read the linked essay, because a flood of over-optimistic employees can drive down wages and working conditions. Demand good wages, demand good working conditions, don't let "we are a start-up" be an excuse for someone getting you to eat a shit sandwich.

ehurrell 12y ago

I'd agree with almost all of those, the biggest thing I'd say is, as with all startup jobs, risk is a factor you shouldn't ignore, the last point I kinda disagree with for that.

jacquesm 12y ago

I miss: profit sharing is just as good as equity. And: don't worry, you will get your shares.

glimcat 12y ago
"Okay, how do you determine what portion of revenues are profit?" (crickets) Seriously, I've heard this one waaaay too many times. It's right up there with "you'll work for equity right, and maybe we can throw in a bit of cash if you put in enough hours?"
- jacquesm 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
> And: don't worry, you will get your shares. Can't promise you what they'll be worth though.
danielweber 12y ago
don't worry, you will get your shares As a partially mitigating effect, the places too incompetent to get you your shares are usually the places too incompetent to succeed enough that your shares matter. I once told this to a boss. "If you can't get my share paperwork, it won't matter because you won't enough of your stuff together to succeed." I never got that paperwork. As practical advice, you should still follow-up and demand all the paperwork and not accept excuses for it. The company fulfilling its contractual obligations to its employees is not a distraction from their real work. If they can't find the time to do this, start looking elsewhere immediately.

quarterwave 12y ago

Well written, tallies with my start-up experiences.

hox 12y ago

Things not addressed that I think are important: 1. Salary. Startups always seem to offer lower salary in return for said equity. 2. Career development. Startups demand that you build somewhat hacks solutions for the sake of time. In many instances you might not get the opportunity to learn how to do things right. Too much of this and you get used to building hacks products. 3. 80-hour work weeks might not be the norm, but what about 60 hour work weeks? that's a deal bresker for some. 4. Diversity. Startups are notorious for hiring people just like the founders.

crdoconnor 12y ago
>Startups demand that you build somewhat hacks solutions for the sake of time. So do large corporations. This is not a factor of how large your company is, it's a factor of how forward thinking your technology leadership is. If they're not thinking further than the next three months, it's pretty much always going to be a hack.
- hox 12y ago
  True of course, but with startups this is more of a necessary evil; for larger organizations it is a sign of engineering dysfunction.
- wastedhours 12y ago
  IME large corps always go for the "quick wins". They get external companies in to tell them the things their employees already told them about, and then it's a box ticking exercise to race through that list before their next progress meeting...
mkoryak 12y ago
> Salary. Startups always seem to offer lower salary in return for said equity. Not necessarily "always", if the startup is well funded, they will pay you well, AND give you equity.
onion2k 12y ago
Salary. Startups always seem to offer lower salary in return for said equity. If you're the first engineer, sure. As the second or third engineer it's a lot more likely that you won't get any equity (or nothing that won't be diluted in to oblivion by the time an exit comes along), and you'll be on a lower salary with a promise of a decent raise when the business gets traction. But that might never happen... Also, if you do get equity, it'll probably be as a number of shares ("We'll give you 10,000 shares!") and no one will tell how many shares have been issued. So in reality you're getting 0.001%.

silverbax88 12y ago

FTA: “Rock star” engineers sometimes work at startups, but usually they work for big companies who can pay them twice the salary and have multiple indoor water polo pools and racquetball courts. THIS is something the 'startup world' and a lot of people on HN are not aware of. Really, really bad-ass programmers usually work for big corporations for good salaries. Not always, but usually. The reason I mention it is because there is a myth that startups are built with the latest, greatest tech by the brightest minds. Often this just isn't true...many startups are hacked together by inexperienced programmers fresh out of college. Sometimes this works, but often it means that nobody on staff is really a master coder, nobody on staff has ever had to fend off Russian hackers attempting to take down your code at 3 am, nobody on staff has had to deal with thousands of users who wake up one morning, can't log in and no money is coming into the company. These are the battles that most programmers learn in the trenches of big companies, fighting tough battles, fixing complex problems under fire. It's not ideal, but I'm not sure if you can really become battle-hardened without going through real battles with real jobs on the line. This is what happened at Twitter - when the government came after them because they were getting hacked too often, Twitter went out and hired 'real' programmers and got things working. That's something that gets missed a lot in the 'startup story'.

pptr1 12y ago
"This is what happened at Twitter - when the government came after them because they were getting hacked too often, Twitter went out and hired 'real' programmers and got things working. That's something that gets missed a lot in the 'startup story'." That is interesting. Did you work at twitter or was this in the news?
- silverbax88 12y ago
  I learned this at an OWASP conference, where several Twitter programmers revealed this and what they did to resolve it. The guys who were presenting never said 'they brought us in to fix things', but that's exactly what they were. None of the guys who were building the 'hardened' Twitter were originally with the company - they were seasoned pros brought in from other companies. And yes, they did some bad-ass things to fix it. But the presentation was more about OWASP level coders wanting to see what issues Twitter had to face. Nothing was Earth-shattering at that level, but it was excellent to see the amount of data they were working with and where their breaches were happening. I don't want to speak for them, but it was obvious that one of their biggest issues was people writing insecure code and checking it in without any review. They have automated code review tools in place now.

squidmccactus 12y ago

So will I get a big payday from company shares even if my startup isn't very successful?

bradfa 12y ago
Go read up on the order that money is paid out to shareholders when the selling/IPO price isn't much greater than the total investment to date. The short version is that usually preferred shareholders (the investors) get paid first and will get at least their investment back and then what's left is split among the common shareholders. Also note that if the preferred shareholders are "participating" or not matters, as they may get to be common shareholders as well as preferred, meaning normal common shareholders get even less in these kinds of situations. If your startup isn't wildly successful and you're not a founder or investor, don't expect to have a life-changing payday. The odds are against it.

porter 12y ago

how much equity does the average early employee get? How about the average late employee? What about for a company like twitch, that just exited?

kasey_junk 12y ago
This varies greatly from startup to startup, but if you are not a founder it will be very very small. Early in my career I was a very early employee (think sub 10 employees) of a startup and was compensated with about 0.2% of the company. Later in my career I joined a very late stage startup (think sub 500 employees) and was compensated with about 0.007% of the company. Also note, that when I say compensated, that was with a standard 4 year vesting agreement.
- gkmoyn 12y ago
  This I just don't understand. The founders have the idea, leave their jobs first, and raise the money. Fantastic. Then they bring in two engineers a couple of weeks later, who quit their jobs for a nascent idea with no proof it'll work. The founders have maybe 65-80% of the company between then (then the investors and option pool), and the two engineers have 1% each. Everyone works shoulder to shoulder and the early first employees contribute critically, but the payouts on exit are off by orders of magnitude. Why do people sign up for such lopsided payoffs? Has any company tried a more gradual equity falloff? Say, with two founders and two employees, instead of an equity distribution of: F1=34 F2=32 E1=1 E2=1 you might have: F1=20 F2=19 E1=15 E2=14
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    Typically the founders don't have 65-80% of the company, some future investor does.
    - gkmoyn 12y ago
      I'm talking about the equity on day 1, not on exit day. But even on exit, the ratio is the same between founders and employees.

rayiner 12y ago

From the perspective of someone who worked for a startup as his first real job: > You are also likely to get some input on the way future engineers are hired and the way your technology team interacts with the business team. This is true, and not entirely a good thing. I was interviewing new technical hires within a year or two at the organization. I asked stupid nerd questions (if you knew C++ like you claimed, you'd know the ins and outs of this template expansion), instead of important ones like: if you're stuck, will you ask for help, or just silently beat your head against the wall and not have anything to show weeks later? > An environment that encourages learning and experimentation keeps engineers more motivated than one that stifles its technical talent. It's also an environment that encourages reinvention of the wheel, especially by younger engineers with little supervision that don't necessarily realize that a particular wheel already exists and is ready to use. > One of the best skills you can learn if you intend to work for a startup is the ability to figure out things on your own. This is an existential issue at a startup, and particularly important if you're fresh out of college, because you don't know anything and thus must learn everything. This is both good and bad. On one hand, I learned a lot more in a short time than my friends that went to work for big organizations. On the other hand, I always felt like I never really learned how to do things "right" because a startup is a setting where you don't necessarily have the time to dot your I's and cross your T's. > It seems like startups move faster and create solutions to difficult problems more efficiently than large companies, but the truth is that they normally have a lower quality threshold than their corporate counterparts. This rings true to me. It was really a revelation to me when I joined a large organization for the first time. It was a well oiled machine, with roles for everyone and someone whose job it was to do anything that needed to be done. Startups have many advantages, but they're not necessarily productive or efficient places.[1] You can spend a lot of time yak shaving at a startup. Anyway, I'd do it over again in a heartbeat, but I'm not sure if I'd advise someone to go to a startup straight out of school.[2] Maybe one of those well-funded, well-established ones where they're far enough along to have real internal processes and real management, but I'd save the "three guys in a basement" stuff for later, when you know what you're doing. Again, YMMV. [1] Of course, I imagine they can be if we're talking about a shop run mostly by highly experienced engineers. But in general, I think big organizations are better at getting more output from less-skilled labor. [2] At least if you intend to make programming a long-term career. If your intention is to jump over to the business side relatively soon, that advice would change. You'll get far more exposure to the business side at a startup than you will at a large company.

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rokhayakebe 12y ago

Would you rather work for a startup (vs. established co.) that pays you 130% market salary without equity or take 90% with the possibility of great upside? Edit: I am asking because I think startups should be paying more than established companies because of many reasons: 1) the work environment is usually shitty (nice, clean offices are nice), 2) no financial security because they are not established, 3) no one outside the startup world wants to hire someone who failed numerous times before, 4) it is much easier to go from Big Co to Small/Tiny Co, then the opposite. (4) is particular true and quite dangerous for recent grads. Young recent grads are better off founding their own company or joining Big co instead joining fresh startups.

gaius 12y ago
130% every time. A stock option cert is a lottery ticket.
tbrownaw 12y ago
That would be an interesting cultural change. Maybe startups would fare better if they exchanged "passion" and sleep-deprivation for competence, even with having to pay extra for said competence? What prevents them from doing this (or do we just not hear about it here)? Do VCs not approve of the shape risk would be distributed in (even if their share ends up smaller in absolute terms)? Would it never work because of a culture clash with the sort of people who found startups (if you've convinced yourself you've "got religion" over some business idea, will you want to work with people who are openly just in it for the money)?
minimaxir 12y ago
Your criteria discuss the demand-side of the equation as a prospective employee, but not the supply-side as the employer, which can't pay a higher salary due to a highly-constrained or non-existant budget.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  Such an employer might do well to reconsider whether his product is worth what he thinks it is, then, if he can't muster the budget to pay employees a market (or above market, given the risks) rate.

cik 12y ago

Trading stock for equity is almost never worth it - as a basic reality. Clearly it is occasionally, or the system would collapse. Let's say you receive $40k in salary a year (versus equity), for 5 years (let's call that $200k, just for fun). Assuming you're diligent, that salary difference can be invested, even in something as simple a preferred shares, yield a compounded return of +/- 5%, or ~$232k. So, we're not really talking about high levels of risk. Assuming your startup, like most others has 6 funding rounds before an exit, and that insiders hold the traditional 4% at exit - we'd be looking at someone who started with a full 1% (of the initial, pre-dilution point) of the company, yielding ~$341k over the same period. Given that 1% holdings are rather high - 0.5% or less would be well expected. That in turn means that unless your company exits for ~275M (over this 5 year period), and you hold 0.5% then FINANCIALLY it's not worth being part of that endeavour. That being said there are several other great reasons to enjoy startups.

computerjunkie 12y ago

As a recent graduate who is actively looking for a job, this is an eye opener. Many thanks to the author for explaining what really happens in "Start-up life". What really struck me was the "full-stack rock star hacker" part. As someone who has little to no experience in commercial software engineering and then sees this phrase on many start up roles (includes ninjas and gurus), it really sets an image that start up work is only for the incredibly bright individuals who know it all. I also believe some of the unrealistic expectations start ups have are one of the major reasons why they fail. [0] "Rome wasn't built in a day". Working long hours goes with the kind of person you are. 80 hour work weeks may be productive for some people whilst others perform better with 37 hour work weeks (or less). We are all different. Some athletes are born marathon runners, whilst others are natural short distance sprinters. I think this is where most start-ups also get it wrong and its also something that contributes to their failures. Long hours once in a while is fine as long as you are compensated for it. Media is also a major contributor to what start ups should be like. As mentioned in the article, you only hear about major acquisitions, huge crowd funding campaign success, and crazy company valuations. But its a lot less common to hear about the failures of start-ups, people burning out before their first product release. Why does media never cover these failures? As much as I would like to join a start-up or even start one, I will continue looking for work at small-medium companies and big companies first, get good experience first and still a personal life outside work. I guess its different for other people, but I value work/life balance and I also think its the key to having a successful career, be it entrepreneurial or employee based. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_wasn%27t_built_in_a_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_wasn%27t_built_in_a_day

tbrownaw 12y ago
Working long hours goes with the kind of person you are. 80 hour work weeks may be productive for some people whilst others perform better with 37 hour work weeks (or less). We are all different. Something to keep in mind for this, is that people tend to be fairly lousy at detecting how what they do affects their productivity. Even if you think you do well with long weeks (or multitasking, or whatever), you can't know that without keeping a log of how much you actually got done under which conditions.
12y ago

gaius 12y ago

3 times I have worked for a small company that had a liquidity event, as an early employee. That already makes me incredibly lucky, that those companies didn't sink without trace. In each case, my stock was worth between 3-6 months of my then salary. Which was a nice chunk o'change to be sure, but not FU money, not by a long shot. Now I work for big companies for a good salary. I put in the hours to get the work done, but I'll never do 80+ hour weeks again unless I own a ton of equity in the venture. The truth is that startups, like the music biz, like video games, like PR require a steady stream of young people with unrealistic ideas who can be exploited. Don't let yourself be played, is my advice now to young engineers. Especially don't take career advice from a VC or a founder...

danielweber 12y ago
Don't let yourself be played, is my advice now to young engineers Now how do we get them to listen? When I was a young engineer, I don't think I would have listened to what you're saying here, although I now know I'm in complete agreement with it.
- gaius 12y ago
  Yes the hype in the press makes it hard to convince the inexperienced that stock options just aren't worth that much money. Really, startup millionaires are lottery winners. You wouldn't take lottery tickets in lieu of pay, would you?
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  > Now how do we get them to listen? We don't. No generation was able to do that. But that's not completely a bad thing. When the newer generations repeat the same old mistakes, sometimes they find out that a few of those mistakes aren't anymore.
  - gaius 12y ago
    It will always be a mistake to overestimate the value of your stock or stock options. I'm not saying don't do startups. I'm saying don't be exploited. Take my 6-months-pay payout as a yardstick. Then ask if it's worth taking half the going wage, for 3 years, in return even for the guarantee of it, when it is by no means guaranteed. If I were to go to a startup again, I would expect to be paid a premium over the market rate, and I would see equity as a bonus. Otherwise why should I bust my ass to make a rich VC even richer?

bane 12y ago

I bounce back and forth between startups (5), small companies (2) and mega corps (3) and so might some unique perspectives. The truth is that for most of the world, bigco's are the default and startups have to sell their employment in order to get employees. They have to find some way to offset the inherent employment instability that working for a startup entails. This has created many of the myths in this article that continue to be perpetuated. Some observations: Like a few other comments, I've noticed that the absolute best-of-the-best work for "real companies" and not startups. The reason working for a bigco doesn't get the reputation of having the best engineering talent is simple, talent is like any other thing with a group of people, it follows a pyramid distribution. Most of the people are terrible and at the bottom of the pyramid, and as you move up the pyramid you end up with smaller and smaller populations of very good people. Except you can't have fractions of a person, so in bigco, where the projects might involve 100 engineers. That top-notch engineer accounts for only 1% of the staff. Sure maybe 80% of the staff may not be any good, but that still leaves you with 20% who are at least decent work-a-day engineers. In a startup, your entire engineering staff might be 10 people, and your top-notch engineer now accounts for 10% of all the staff time spent on a project. It's almost like having 10 top engineers instead (if you try to scale the numbers to match). It's easier to find 3-4 above average folks to round out the top of the pyramid and the rest are just there to fill in the mortar and won't last long. This means that your individual contribution is magnified in a startup. Everything is magnified in a startup. Decision making power, individual contribution, etc. But so are negative aspects of working in a company. When things go bad, they go bad really fast in a startup. The worst political dramas I've ever seen were all in startups. Points of failure are enormous in small startups. One of the thing that happens as companies mature and grow is they learn they can no longer tolerate so much magnified failure, so they build in controls to spread around responsibility so they can better survive what would be a catastrophic failure in a startup (founder leaving, tech decision turns out to be wrong 18 months in etc.). The side effect is of course that in order to turn down this magnified negativity, the magnified good stuff also gets squashed.

Ragnarork 12y ago

As someone who's currently in his second ever job, which is in a startup (first one was in a startup as well), I find most of it is quite accurate, but then there'll always be edge cases. The startup world is really heterogeneous and it's hard to draw conclusion about it that won't be really vague. Just a small point I'd like to comment: > Truth: you’ll get to set the culture, standards, and technologies used This is quite funny because both startup I worked for were completely different on this point. In the first one I was the only developer, working on an application I created completely from scratch. I could decide entirely on my own which technologies/tools I could use (heh, being able to start a project in c++11 was really sweet). On the other hand, the startup I'm in currently is rather resistant to change with regards to what we use, even though we tried to push these change with arguments as to how it could speed up work and eliminate some recurrent pain in the development process.

CmonDev 12y ago
I guess the only ones who really set the technologies are the first hires, so it's a big fat myth. Otherwise why is every start-up putting some technology in the job ad title (just look at HN job postings)?

cheery 12y ago

Reading this blog post was bit like falling from a tree. Every branch shaves off a bit of credibility from the writer, until the reader passes out.

breaksyourheart 12y ago

What about the myth that you're doing something important?

BrianEatWorld 12y ago
How do you gauge what is important? If you consider what your role is in creating wealth, then arguably you are doing something more important than most regular employees. How often can an engineer at Google say that their specific input caused the company to grow by 500%? Yet, even employees at modest startups with modest exits can say they had a significant hand in that level of growth. If you are commenting on the "making the world a better place" trope, then that may be a different story.
- newaccountfool 12y ago
  Working at a startup and making a considerable change is all fine and dandy, but when they exit and your only getting 0.01% even though you were the first group of devs, then its a bit crappy.
- RogerL 12y ago
  I can create 100% growth by changing my customer base from 1 to 2. Google can create 0.001% growth by adding another 100,000 customers (made up percentage, you get the idea). Is 100% > 0.001%? Not by my math. You know who is changing the world? Some engineer working on optimizing the cache lines on some Intel processor. Her work will, over the life of the chip, save millions to perhaps billions of hours, with similar effects on watts used, time wasted, and so on. Can that Intel engineer give #s to quantify her impact on the world? Not likely. It doesn't mean that it isn't there, nor that a rational person cannot recognize it.

yeahsathish 12y ago

I Agree! Totally!

steven2012 12y ago

I disagree with the assertion that most "rock star" engineers work at big companies. The only big companies that have true "rock stars" are Google and Facebook and probably Microsoft too. All other "big" companies in the valley started with rock stars, who probably got rich from options/IPOs, who then got bored and left for another smaller company. Most companies have a huge brain drain after the 4 years vesting period after the IPO. And this happens more especially if the nature of the business changes, if management comes in that ladens the company with process, slows down innovation, etc, basically make the company less fun to work at.

krschultz 12y ago
A lot of the best engineers work at companies with ~50-100 engineers and lots of revenue. It's not a big company, but it's also not a startup.
Balgair 12y ago
One thing that is very discounted in the OP is the government. Many very good programmers work in the DOE, DOD, and other 4 to 3 letter named departments. Programmers, like the rest of us, are very diverse people. SOme like the 'fun' you talk of, some really value the stability of a mega corp or the CIA. Some are there only for the problems and their personal interest in them, some are there for their kids and kiss off the desk at 5pm exactly. Some like to paint, some like to go to Burning Man. Programming talent and 'rockstar' status is independent from motivations to do a job I think. Also, the assertion that most top talent work at mega corps is a statistics issue, as other comments mention. More jobs, as a percentage, are at mega corps and the government. But more companies are under 100 to 50 employees. So, if you look at it from a percent of programmers, you see many more at mega corps. But as a percent of top talent, you see more at small businesses, simply because you can determine the top talent easier at a start-up as there is less debate who the top people are. Other commenters explain this better, sorry.
emgeee 12y ago
From what I've heard, pretty much every big company that does software is supported in someway by "rockstars." The difference with larger companies is that the ratio of bad to good tends to be much higher so that even if you work for one of these companies, you might never actually encounter them.

legohead 12y ago

as for culture.. it's great in the beginning, but as the company grows to medium and large, communication begins to break down, and bureaucracy creeps in, poisoning the old culture. with more people being brought in (usually at a rapid pace as you hit your growth spurts), you have to adapt to more personality types, and company culture&feel will suffer as a result

swayvil 12y ago

Engineering school : Work em like mules. Weed out the misfits. Engineering job : Work em like mules.

Apocryphon 12y ago

"Big companies put junior engineers through training programs, send them to advanced classes, and make them sit through certification tests, but I’ve never seen any of those at a scrappy startup." They do? Is employee training (outside of on-the-job learning) even a thing in engineering anymore?

minimaxir 12y ago
Facebook has an infamous 2-week "boot camp" for new hires.
- Apocryphon 12y ago
  Infamous in what sense?
- nbm 12y ago
  It is a six-week program, although the last week or so is a bunch of teams pitching themselves to the new hires, and the new hires meeting with the teams they're choosing between.
numo16 12y ago
The company I work for puts every engineering hire through "the U", a 3-9 month training program (depending on developer aptitude), geared towards bringing all engineering hires up to a relative even ground, with regards to the necessary skills to be a software engineer here. The training is always in flux and adapting based on feedback, and has pretty consistently turned out developers that are able to jump in and start developing in any given team. Developers then gain further domain specific knowledge through mentorships and regular 1-on-1 meetings with team leaders and mentors about goals and progress. Overall, it works pretty well based on my interactions with other developers here.
- Apocryphon 12y ago
  Sounds amazing. Where you're at? :p I thought usually it was only IT consulting firms that provided such training.

mrbird 12y ago

Andy Rachleff has great advice on people looking to start a career in startups: Don't make a brand-new startup your first job--rather, look for a mid-sized, growing company, where you'll learn some valuable skills and set yourself up for better opportunities in the future. https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-companies/ https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-com... The list is getting a bit out of date, and he's writing for business students, but I think the advice is very sound for engineers as well. If I could do it over again, I would have tried to find a similar path.

frobozz 12y ago

>Truth: you’ll have more freedom to choose the projects you work on and how you do them This is contrary to my experience. In startups, any time you're not spending developing the core product in the quickest way possible (i.e. the currently established way, don't go exploring whether a new way might be quicker) is seen as time ticking away on the death clock. In a large corporate environment, I've been much freer, because we can afford to play the long game. I've been able to choose projects, define completely novel ones, choose different technologies to use, rather than the established stack (and indeed, change what the "established stack" is).