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If there are major losers in this game, it'll be young people who moved to the Bay Area, threw 90 hours per week into an overfunded startup for a 0.05% slice, g

If there are major losers in this game, it'll be young people who moved to the Bay Area, threw 90 hours per week into an overfunded startup for a 0.05% slice, got "fired for performance" by a company trying to dodge the press of an honest layoff, realized that they learned no useful skills munching on Scrum tickets and fixing someone else's ball of shitty deadline code, and lost their prime savings years due to Bay Area rent and job instability. If the bubble pops in a way that reduces their earning potential permanently, it's a catastrophe. More likely, it's a blip. Valuations are inflated but salaries aren't. This period, in the VC-funded Valley, will be remembered bitterly but I think the damage will be minimal. Still, I find it jarring that no one wants to speak for the real risk-takers: the engineers actually building the products, who (unlike investors) don't get to diversify and are the first to get hit when things go bad, but get such a small percentage of the upside.

Kalium 12y ago
A lot of Silicon Valley culture and counter-culture alike are built on having no empathy for engineers. The investors see them as useful workers, and the counter-culturalists see them as inhuman invaders. Nobody gives a flip, and when confronted the universal response is a dismissive "Oh, they'll be fine".
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  First Estate: investors and well-connected serial founders who can raise money on a drop and get injected at VP levels in tech giants on a phone call. They dominate SV culture. Second Estate: true technologists. Programmers and designers and makers. Third Estate: everyday people. Often pissed off (justifiably) about the arrogance of the Valley's tech barons. Tend to protest Google buses, making it hard for Second Estaters to get to work (while being slightly amusing to First Estate assholes). They're the "counter-culture" you describe, along with the regular people who are getting annoyed by tech's arrogance. A few of them are the anti-vax NIMBY assholes who are even more execrable than the tech barons, but most of them are just normal people. Silicon Valley is dominated by the First Estate. The Second Estate is misled to think it's in charge by workplaces with ball pits, but has no real power or hope of advancement or financial upside except in extreme long-tail cases. So much of the narrative has been II vs. III. That's because the First Estate doesn't want the Second and Third Estate to get together and realize that they don't need the First. See, the Second Estate has weak organizational and social skills, and has been systematically infantilized ("Agile"/Scrum) to keep it that way. We could learn a lot from Third Estaters (who are often just as smart as we are) in politics, government, law, labor activism, etc. But we've been told by the VC elite to reject such people as parasitic future-averse peons, and they've been told that we're a bunch of socially inept, prematurely affluent assholes. This artificial II/III cleavage works to their benefit, and it hurts us, by making us dependent on the First Estate for funding and approval.
  - raspasov 12y ago
    For someone who hasn't lived in SV you seem to know a lot about it :).
  - Kalium 12y ago
    I've been studying and listening to what you describe as the Third Estate. I'm honestly not convinced they have good lessons to teach about politics, law, or labor activism. They have excellent lessons to teach about how those things worked decades ago, but have failed to update. Their decline in power and affluence is in part a result of applying old models to poorly matched modern scenarios. Some of the ideas are useful, though. But not the ones where you add pain the lives of people and expect it to engender sympathy towards you. The First Estate has more value and utility than your typical Marxist eat-the-rich analysis would suggest. Further, the Second and Third don't have as much in common as a naive analysis might suggest.
rbranson 12y ago
This. Talented young engineers should probably never work for early-stage startups. It's unlikely for them to be able to effectively gauge the quality of an employer, they have little leverage to bargain for equity, and it's highly unusual that these companies provide an environment for young engineers to rapidly grow. The first few years of an engineers career should be seen as apprenticeship. The best way to quickly grow is to go work for a well-regarded, established company that will compensate them well and provide an environment for them to learn and grow rapidly. Engineers right out of school make $200k/yr working for the likes of Google or Facebook. After a few years of that, they can go try to start a company or negotiate a decent amount of equity at an early-stage startup that they believe in, and they'll have had the opportunity to actually save some money to exercise those options when the time comes. Of course, this advice doesn't apply to unicorns which, by definition, most people are not.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  Engineers right out of school make $200k/yr working for the likes of Google or Facebook. This is incredibly rare. Including equity and bonus, the numbers are closer to $140-170k, and that's for Stanford graduates. $200k+ comes later (although it can come quick if you're good at career planning). That's Staff Engineer territory at Google. I agree with everything that you're saying. I just don't want misinformation to be out there.
  - rbranson 12y ago
    I'd agree with these numbers in 2012 or maybe 2013, but engineering comp has gone bonkers in the Bay Area. Uber has published comp for engineers[1] that put them starting at $110K/yr + $410K in equity. Presuming a 4-year cliff that's $212K/yr. The top end of that scale is $170K/yr in cash + $2M in equity, or $670K/yr. My guess is that Uber also pays decent-sized performance-based cash bonuses or has other cash-like benefits (401k matching?) that aren't included. Uber is also not some kind of iffy, fly-by-night startup. Apple, Google, Facebook, and myriad other companies all have to compete in that market for the same talent. [1] https://angel.co/uber/jobs/57827-ios-engineer-uber-multiple-roles-available https://angel.co/uber/jobs/57827-ios-engineer-uber-multiple-...

Kalium 12y ago

A lot of Silicon Valley culture and counter-culture alike are built on having no empathy for engineers. The investors see them as useful workers, and the counter-culturalists see them as inhuman invaders. Nobody gives a flip, and when confronted the universal response is a dismissive "Oh, they'll be fine".

michaelochurch 12y ago
First Estate: investors and well-connected serial founders who can raise money on a drop and get injected at VP levels in tech giants on a phone call. They dominate SV culture. Second Estate: true technologists. Programmers and designers and makers. Third Estate: everyday people. Often pissed off (justifiably) about the arrogance of the Valley's tech barons. Tend to protest Google buses, making it hard for Second Estaters to get to work (while being slightly amusing to First Estate assholes). They're the "counter-culture" you describe, along with the regular people who are getting annoyed by tech's arrogance. A few of them are the anti-vax NIMBY assholes who are even more execrable than the tech barons, but most of them are just normal people. Silicon Valley is dominated by the First Estate. The Second Estate is misled to think it's in charge by workplaces with ball pits, but has no real power or hope of advancement or financial upside except in extreme long-tail cases. So much of the narrative has been II vs. III. That's because the First Estate doesn't want the Second and Third Estate to get together and realize that they don't need the First. See, the Second Estate has weak organizational and social skills, and has been systematically infantilized ("Agile"/Scrum) to keep it that way. We could learn a lot from Third Estaters (who are often just as smart as we are) in politics, government, law, labor activism, etc. But we've been told by the VC elite to reject such people as parasitic future-averse peons, and they've been told that we're a bunch of socially inept, prematurely affluent assholes. This artificial II/III cleavage works to their benefit, and it hurts us, by making us dependent on the First Estate for funding and approval.
- raspasov 12y ago
  For someone who hasn't lived in SV you seem to know a lot about it :).
- Kalium 12y ago
  I've been studying and listening to what you describe as the Third Estate. I'm honestly not convinced they have good lessons to teach about politics, law, or labor activism. They have excellent lessons to teach about how those things worked decades ago, but have failed to update. Their decline in power and affluence is in part a result of applying old models to poorly matched modern scenarios. Some of the ideas are useful, though. But not the ones where you add pain the lives of people and expect it to engender sympathy towards you. The First Estate has more value and utility than your typical Marxist eat-the-rich analysis would suggest. Further, the Second and Third don't have as much in common as a naive analysis might suggest.

rbranson 12y ago

This. Talented young engineers should probably never work for early-stage startups. It's unlikely for them to be able to effectively gauge the quality of an employer, they have little leverage to bargain for equity, and it's highly unusual that these companies provide an environment for young engineers to rapidly grow. The first few years of an engineers career should be seen as apprenticeship. The best way to quickly grow is to go work for a well-regarded, established company that will compensate them well and provide an environment for them to learn and grow rapidly. Engineers right out of school make $200k/yr working for the likes of Google or Facebook. After a few years of that, they can go try to start a company or negotiate a decent amount of equity at an early-stage startup that they believe in, and they'll have had the opportunity to actually save some money to exercise those options when the time comes. Of course, this advice doesn't apply to unicorns which, by definition, most people are not.

michaelochurch 12y ago
Engineers right out of school make $200k/yr working for the likes of Google or Facebook. This is incredibly rare. Including equity and bonus, the numbers are closer to $140-170k, and that's for Stanford graduates. $200k+ comes later (although it can come quick if you're good at career planning). That's Staff Engineer territory at Google. I agree with everything that you're saying. I just don't want misinformation to be out there.
- rbranson 12y ago
  I'd agree with these numbers in 2012 or maybe 2013, but engineering comp has gone bonkers in the Bay Area. Uber has published comp for engineers[1] that put them starting at $110K/yr + $410K in equity. Presuming a 4-year cliff that's $212K/yr. The top end of that scale is $170K/yr in cash + $2M in equity, or $670K/yr. My guess is that Uber also pays decent-sized performance-based cash bonuses or has other cash-like benefits (401k matching?) that aren't included. Uber is also not some kind of iffy, fly-by-night startup. Apple, Google, Facebook, and myriad other companies all have to compete in that market for the same talent. [1] https://angel.co/uber/jobs/57827-ios-engineer-uber-multiple-roles-available https://angel.co/uber/jobs/57827-ios-engineer-uber-multiple-...