> Fuck being an employee for a startup so they can bleed you dry.

Could not agree more, and this is my stance which I will happily share with anyone who cares to listen. I was first employee (and only engineer) at a startup which dangled 'equity' in front of me but didn't deliver. Contract was so full of gotchas that the path to me seeing some sort of actual payoff was astronomically unlikely.

90 day exercise windows upon leaving or even getting sick and being forced to leave. Liquiditation preferences for VC shareholdings. No way to sell your options on a secondary market. Permission of the board required to actually exercise them. Half a dozen clauses that allowed the board to revoke your options at any point in time. Basically, they want you to give your fucking life to them for 5-10 years with only a contract not worth the paper it's written on as an incentive.

Between the shitty equity terms and the fact I was building a damn tech company to make someone other than myself rich, I told them to go fuck themselves and took a job at Google for over 3x times the pay. I have no regrets. Being an early employee at a startup is a complete waste of time and I still beat myself up for being so naive. Sharing this so other people don't make the same mistake.

Well, if the only thing you care about is compensation and work/life balance then of course, you should never work at a startup. There can be benefits though, arguably better personal development, a broader view of the entire tech stack, and potentially more personal satisfaction.

Of course, if the difference is 2.5x then it's a no brainer.. I wouldn't take more than a 20-30% cut to work at a startup.

One thing I absolutely agree with you on is the option exercise window. I think it's pretty common in the startup world, but I can't really understand WHY. I mean your options at a startup are already worth less than stocks at a public company, and they still do this shit ? With all the extra risk you'd imagine they'd have to get rid of the liquidity window just so they can compete a bit better with the big guys.

From your post, it sounds like you value:

1) Safety and predictability in compensation

2) Ownership over your company’s strategy (e.g. mobile) only if you’re paid highly for doing it (not a bad thing, but many other people exist who would willingly take a pay cut for the ability to have an actual impact on company strategy)

3) A highly organized and logical hiring process and qualification evaluation

4) Custom negotiated options contract outside of industry norms OR BigCo stock that has value today

5) 5 weeks of paid vacation

It definitely sounds like you made the correct decision by choosing BigCo over startup.

Sorry that was your experience. Just so everyone else reading this does not get the wrong idea, not all startups are like this. Many are, many are not. 10-year exercise windows are becoming more common. Flexible remote work is also more common (in fact, startup I'm at now as co-founder, we let people work from wherever the hell they want... while my friends at large tech co's have to work out of an office, even if they are allowed to WFH like once or twice a week). And we work hard but let people take as much time off as they need, whether that's vacation or just a day or half day here or there to deal with some family thing.

If you're reading this, please know that not all startups will "bleed you dry". And on the other hand, many big tech co's will!

The startups should have a higher bar for hiring. A bad senior hire is much harder for a startup to absorb.

Number #4 is the law. However it is possible to convert an ISO to a NSO which doesn't have the 90-day restriction but has different tax implications. Some companies have started doing this, but I don't know how common it is.

Is there any way I can contact you? My email is in my profile.

I'm working on something to make the interview process and the offer piece a lot more transparent. I've been part of terrible interview/offer loops too, and the problem aggravates me to no end.

I'd love to speak with you.

You review seems pretty accurate. Very rarely there is some lucrative incentive to join as an employee.

There are definitely startups that offer better equity terms - the last one I was at offered ten years to exercise after leaving. I hope the trend continues.

>watching them get squeezed by big tech companies offering sky high comp fills me with glee.

Enjoy your new life as a corporate drone!

Note to the salty drones in the comments below: I started a business that was passively profitable for years and now pretty much just work on what interests me

That assumes that the person doesn't change in the meantime. You might put your dreams on hold to solve the money problem, only to discover that you no longer have the energy or focus to accomplish what you could have in the past. End state: I wish I had done what I loved back then.

I'm glad all the great artists, musicians, writers, theorists, scientists, teachers, and inventors throughout history didn't read this post.

$1M is not FU money for someone in a major metropolitan US city with kids.

I'd say it's less about the number in the bank account and more about the perceived safety you feel. Similar to the lower two layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you don't think that the worst outcome of pursuing something you truly love is manageable, you're less likely to put yourself up to that risk.

In US this might correlate more strongly to the numbers of zeros in the bank account or the salary difference to similar workers at FAANG. But feeling of safety is subjective and depend a lot on the environment you're in so I don't think that's universally the case.

> I feel like it is hard for people to say what they truly love before they have at least $1M in their bank account.

[edited to protect your feelings]

Are you saying that simple introspection is hard? I completely disagree, because separating extrinsic motivation (I do this for money) from intrinsic motivation (I do this for fun) really isn't that hard.

I've had a related discussion with a few VCs in recent months. Some kinds of startups are effectively impossible to build given current structural constraints on financing them, creating an adverse selection for startups that fit the classic model rather than startups with the highest expected ROI.

Broadly speaking, engineers will work at a discount to market-clearing wages of maybe 20% if they really like the startup. This is not necessarily an issue if you are well-funded and require ordinary levels of skill from your engineering team, which is most startups. Some types of software startups can't be built without a team of engineers where the market-clearing wages are typically more like $500k-1M. Even at a 20% discount to market, the amount of capital involved just for headcount is far too large for early stage investors, and startups that try to fit within the capital they can raise by getting by with less qualified engineers always fail at technical execution. Consequently, startups that have this property are effectively un-investable because there is not enough capital available in the early stages to achieve technical viability even though they may be great investments in the abstract. This wasn't a serious issue a decade ago, but it is spreading to a larger set of startups as wages rapidly escalate.

Given a long-term glut of capital, this could be addressed in principle by designing a model that modifies the distribution of capital/equity over time to accommodate startups that have difficulty financing the initial wage gap. As the startups grow, one would expect the average wages to start reverting toward the mean, but these startups won't get out of the gate without that initial investment in capable and very expensive engineers.

I've had interesting and productive discussions around this, it is seen as a way to bring fresh blood into an early stage pipeline that is drying up. It is obvious to almost everyone that the classic model of how you finance and build a startup team is breaking down in the current market environment, with an adverse impact on expected returns.

My experience: engineering at Startup #1 for 2 years, then Google for 3 years, then Startup #2 for 4 years, and now I've been working with seed stage companies as a VC for the last 7 years. The amount I earned as an engineer was highest at Startup #1 (got lucky!), significantly lower at Google, and a little lower than that at Startup #2. Startup #2 is still chugging along, which could eventually make it on par with or a little superior to working at Google.

But money isn't everything. Startup #2 was the place where I learned the most. I was senior enough to be single-handedly responsible for large projects like a distributed search engine and a logging and analytics service. Sure, my search engine was a POS compared to Google's, but at Google I would've worked on a part of a feature of a component of the search engine whereas at a startup I got to build the whole thing from scratch. I'm almost 40 now, and that search engine is still by far the most fun and educational engineering project I've ever worked on.

Aside from learning potential and financial comp, there are other factors like team camaraderie, independence, etc. I keep in touch with way more people from the two small startups than I do with Google colleagues. Google had a good culture, but the startups were much tighter knit.

Finally, I think articles advocating for startups vs. big companies are a little like trying to convert someone to atheism or Christianity with a blog post. It doesn't really work that way. Some people are wired for startups: they love them and spend their careers at small companies and don't understand why big companies are attractive. Other people are more drawn to big companies where the company itself has a huge impact, the teams are well-staffed and have lots of resources, and the employees get higher salaries and lots of other benefits. When these people try working at a startup, they often hate it and quickly go back to another large company.

Neither big nor small companies are objectively the best, but if you factor in personal happiness then often one type of company is the best for you.

Here's where I've been:

- worked at a startup out of college for 85k max plus significant equity (never amounted to anything). Stayed too long.

- worked at a later-stage startup starting at 120k, peaking at 130k. Got some stock options there (haven't amounted to anything yet)

- took a job at FAANG starting at 400k, plus some stock options. Currently at this job for > 600k base. Plus stock options.

While at FAANG, I created a tool that we open-sourced. I've had several VCs contact me to see if I want to try turning that into a company, but by my math it would be a lot of work for no gain over what my salary already is. I already get paid to work on this OSS thing, but I also get to work on other things - and on the OSS thing it's pretty clear cut what I need to prioritize, since my priority user base works with me at FAANG.

For me, startups have a 0/2 track record of delivering value. Being able to net more than I make as an IC seems pretty unlikely, and trying would be a whole lot of pain and sacrifice. The "faster growth as a founder" idea seems to be conditioned on the assumption that you'll succeed enough to pay yourself more than you make now, and/or be able to exit at an amount that will make up for the opportunity cost of getting paid well in the meantime while having a sane work/life balance. YMMV.

Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup.

I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent convincing people that the service is needed in the first place. Direct exposure to customers also is really interesting and changes you as an engineer.

It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.

I've been out of startups for a few years now, but it always struck me that there is plenty of room in the cap table for employees, if founders and VCs realize they have to cut back.

If founders and VCs gave a third to half of their companies to employees, instead of crushingly small option pools, this math would almost certainly shift. And the returns wouldn't be much worse for founders or VCs.

I worked at software startups in the Boston area from 1988 through 2013, so perhaps my comments are not relevant to this day and age. But what I read in that note sounded awfully familiar.

In the mid 90s, Microsoft was buying up talent left and right, in whatever area they wanted to go into. My field is databases, and I developed expertise in the integration of query languages with programming languages. I got an obscenely lucrative offer from Microsoft, and decided to turn it down. It was a dumb decision, financially, but actually worked out fine on that front. However, I'm sure that Microsoft enticed many promising software developers to work for them instead of startups. (A few names do come to mind.)

This problem was completely solvable then, and the same technique would work now. The problem is that VCs don't want to solve it. They want software developers cheap. They give miniscule amounts of equity, and bias the terms so that those tiny stock option grants almost never pay off very well, (e.g. liquidation preferences). Except, perhaps, for the chief architect, and one or two very senior developers, we are viewed as disposable, interchangeable cogs.

There are great reasons to work for a startup, other than equity. I am very happy with my 25 years doing just that. But equity is definitely a factor. Contrary to what they would have you believe, VCs are extremely risk-averse, certainly compared to the developers who are sacrificing the best years of their lives for their companies and the chance of a financial win.

It has always been mindboggling to me that startups are still so all in on the Bay Area. Most problems mentioned in the article go away if/when you are willing to staff developers in an area that is not as ridiculous in terms of cost of living as the Bay area. According to StackExchange data, the 50th percentile pay for a Full Stack Developer with a Bachelors degree and 3 years experience (a profile that would seem reasonable for a startup hire) in the Bay area is $140k, whereas in the St Louis and Minneapolis it is $89k. Not sure why for many startups Bay area seems to be the only option. If they staffed their developers in a place like St Louis they'd be able to avoid the SF salaries and still pay in the 75th percentile for the market and the developers would have more purchasing power making $115k in the midwest or Raleigh than they do in the bay area making $145k.

There is a lot of capital out there, what needs to happen is the number of startups shrink and the well funded ones pay more money - even more than google or FB pay. Simple as that! If you are sad that you can’t get a professional team on a $1mil seed, I have absolutely no empathy for you because I’m an employee and this is the free market.

Now, if you really want to make it more enticing, some things that would move the needle for me other than comparable salaries (although more cash is #1):

- Larger equity that automatically ups if it will be diluted, and the moment any shares vest I can sell them in the private market.

- Transparent cap table.

- If the founders take cash off the table, I can as well, and no preference for founders.

- 10 years after leaving to exercise my shares. I don’t want to have a 3 month trigger that handcuffs me to prevent a giant cap gains bill on “paper money” when the fair market value is way higher.

- Reasonable working hours.

- Flexible work from home policy.

But overall, go raise more and start offering more cash, because I assume 95% of startups are total failures.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. Never accept a lower salary in exchange for equity. Salary is your market rate for providing labor. Equity is what you get for taking on the risk of being out of a job sooner than later.

So with that in mind, if the equity and bonuses in BigTechCo are a sure deal, then it may be worth negotiating for more when you join a startup.

Don't sell yourself short.

I believe this post does a very good job of bringing the elephant in the room into the discussion. The current structure of equity compensation for early-stage startup companies is simply not enticing enough to get people to choose that over the salary and predictable path of BigTechCos. I love working in startups and even I, when presented with the choice, pad the salary knowing that throughout the funding rounds, if the startup is lucky, any fractional percent that I have will be so diluted that I'm likely to walk away with nothing to show for the work I put in beside the cash I opted for, hopefully, some new connections and some learnings. While some of the more successful startups can compete with those companies on base salary it is just not enough necessarily to convince the top talent that you are the right move for their career. That said there are ways to improve this such as the increased transparency OP wrote about in their post. We should also give more equity to early employees and have favorable terms around vesting for these employees and better timing around the loss of options after leaving a company. Of course this negatively impacts founder equity and potentially investors as well. But to me, worrying about that negative impact to founders and investors comes off as short sighted on part of the investors and founders. Ensuring your early employees will be taken care of means they'll work harder for your company and this will increase the chance you'll survive long enough to see an event that makes anyone a return on their investment. The numbers are so overwhelmingly stacked against startups that worrying about the couple million less you'll have because you gave out 1-1.5% equity to your early employees is really silly, very much chicken before the egg. Instead we currently have the weird known but unspoken fact that your early employees will likely get nothing in a liquidity event while still asking them to put their all into your company which is unethical at best and downright manipulative and harmful at worst. So yeah startups are in a weird place. This doesn't even touch on companies that just stay private forever which is another issue all together.

The tricks that companies have used to dilute engineers' equity and to have different classes of stock are coming back to bite those companies.

1) People say you learn a lot more in a startup than in a BigTechCo. I don't think this is true: I've gotten far more skills during BigTechCo stints than at startups. YMMV.

2) A new grad at a startup gets, what, $100k in salary and some equity? If we're talking a three year stint at a startup, you're effectively asking a worker to invest ~$500k in exchange for that hypothetical equity. In the broadest strokes (obviously everything depends on the deal), what kind of equity does an angel get for half a million dollars, and how does it compare to the amount of equity the new grad gets? And it bears pointing out that that new grad equity is subject to all kinds of games and deception. Of course, the usual response is "you just have to be smart enough not to be scammed!" Perhaps, but I know tons of people (including myself) who are apparently just too dumb not to be scammed but are still smart enough to be gainfully employed at a safe job.

You can be compensated in other ways, but often I've found much of the work at startups can be no more interesting than their Big N counterparts. It might not even be faster paced. Your career growth might also be similar. In theory, for startups, you sacrifice pay for other facets. The reality is quite different.

The work might be similar but you're paid 50-75% of your peers. That was my experience in startup land, at least. Few good challenges or career growth and half of what I felt like I was worth. Completely personal anecdote, but I felt I was sold some half truth, where I was promised career growth, interesting problems and flexibility, but got nothing that I couldn't have found at many Big N companies.

> I think startups’ best bet is to make the most of the variables they can control outside of money and perks (if you lack the appropriate resources). This means being transparent and honest with candidates about all risks involved when joining a startup and factoring all this into the amount of equity they offer which should be something considerable.

Even if the original founders have the best intentions, large equity up front is unlikely to give you a big payday.

Since, in the traditional VC model the drive is to move toward bigger rounds (A, B, C, etc) and investors get paid back first.

So even if you do start with 10%, you'll probably only end up with a low % percent after 3-4 rounds.

The important thing to note is that this whole thing bamboozles our brains because of unicorn survivor bias. We feel like unicorns and $100m dollar companies are the norm but nothing could be further from the truth.

The chance of being part of unicorn is about 0.006% last I checked. The chance of being part of a $100m+ company is in low single digits (of all startups).

If it ends up just making a few million revenue investors will drop it (because not 10x enough) and you're 2-3% will be worth very little.

If ends up stagnating at $5m for a few years investors will drop it (because not 10x enough).

The overwhelmingly most likely outcome of you getting a large chunk like 10% up front is, when all is said and done, after 5-7 years you'll walk away with a few hundred thousand (before tax) if you are lucky.

In my case I was on founding team. Started out with 10% equity. Co. is now 7 years old. After a merger (diluted by 40%), $10m investment (diluted more), $4m strategic investment (diluted more), then investors taking money off the table first for an exit event - I stand to make $100k if we sell at $20m and $600k if we sell at $40m (currently valued at $20mish and has been for 2 years). That's pre tax.

"To make the situation worse, the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down."

Ok I have seen this written every now and then.

What does this person look like and how do I become one given a willing to sacrifice everything else?

I can not find a good answer to this question. Everybody seems to have their own opinion.

I love how the article ranked right above this one is titled "Downsides to working at a tech giant".

> Equity agreements should not be intentionally confusing or designed to screw over employees.

Totally agree with this. Unfortunately I think there might be about 5 startups left if this idea were widely implemented.

There were a few recent Ask HNs on the subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709724

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21641864

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21645117

a larger question is : why can't startups make money

It seems like start-ups could catch up, at least somewhat, by offering more stock. Right now founders are still ending up with an order of magnitude or more stock than the first few employees.

There are certainly situations where that makes sense but if the founders are adding extreme value compared to the first few employees perhaps they should only end up with twice as much stock. That would free up a lot of equity for early employees.

I think another reason that people are wary of joining start ups, is they've realised that:

a) The market is now incredibly saturated, and being an early equity owner in a start up that will be worth billions is very rare now. Gone are the days of a unicorn every month or two.

b) People have noticed the trend of FAANG companies buying up start ups, and that this is the goal of many (most?) start ups today. Reach critical mass, get a good valuation and customer reviews, get bought out by tech giant. If you want to work on the most viable new products, just join a tech giant and work on one of the projects they've acquired. (Or wait till the company is bought and join them if they are still independantly run at which point they're not really a start up anymore)

The problem is getting paid in common stock. A pay cut is money that, instead of making, the employee is investing in the early-stage startup. That's no different than the money the investor is putting in.

Employees should get preferred stock in the amount of their pay cut.

I think the questions/issues around this topic don’t really make sense:

A. Why are we comparing an employee situation at a FAANG company with what should be a co-founder situation? If someone is an engineer that can make something happen at a startup, they should probably be a co-founder rather than an employee.

B. Why are tech center startups trying to hire coders of a certain skill level that will be incredibly expensive due to local competition? If a startup is looking for skilled coders to implement the vision of the co-founding engineers that can make things happen, then there are plenty of remote coders in non-tech-center areas that will do a bang up job for a reasonable price. Note that many of these remote coders don’t want to or cannot come to a tech center. I assume that this is an issue because many/most startups are not good at hiring, on-boarding, managing people, managing remote workers, etc.

C. Related to issue B, why play the micro-equity game with coders at all when they should either be co-founders or they (as remote workers) can be paid a satisfactory wage without equity bait?

D. Why is this conversation comparing a job with (relatively speaking) a lot of hierarchy and politics at a FAANG with a job that should have a flat structure and a great deal of autonomy? These jobs cater to two different groups of people — the ones who like the former probably won’t like the latter, and the opposite is true as well. There are subtle sides to this (e.g., do your time at a FAANG to develop a network), but many people who succeed at startups are not folks you want working at a large company — they will go nuts, and they will drive the people around them crazy.

This whole conversation is bizarre to me. I think there are three relatively simple choices:

1. Take a company job if you’re a company person — that is, someone who likes structure and hierarchy. It might not be trendy to admit it, but many/most elite school grads fall into this category.

2. If you prefer things like autonomy, being close to the customer, and being a generalist, then go to a startup. Plan on leaving once it hits a certain size.

3. If you have a plan for an alternate path that includes both, then go for it — specialist work at FAANG, FAANG then startup founder, startup employee then startup founder, etc. Just know what you’re getting into, because it can be awfully tough to walk away from $300k annual comp as a 25 yo.

Most people I’ve known clearly fall into one of these categories barring some sort of life-changing event.

My career path has been startup, public tech, startup, public tech, startup.

I got lucky that the public techs both had the largest stock growth in their history while I worked there.

All the money I ever made was at the public companies. I also learned a lot of cool, very specialized skills and got to do a lot of “ohhh so cool” type stuff.

Almost all of the knowledge I learned that allowed me to be successful at the big companies I learned at the startups, and most of the friends I made at work that I still talk to were at startups.

Both environments offer something unique.

I usually tell young people to start at a big company with a well known mentorship program and then quickly move to a startup to learn a bunch of practical skills.

But YMMV.

I have a very straightforward suggestion for startups: Focus on the engineers who've put in a decade or more at the big companies.

They are, given the exorbitant salaries, financially set enough to afford the startup risk, and there's a good chance they'd like to see some more agility again.

But 1) you'll need to stop lowballing equity for hires, and 2) you need to get used to the idea that it's not going to be an extension of university life - these people have all better things in their spare time than playing beer pong.

Bonus points: Offer an office instead of cubicle mania. Bonus bonus points: Make sure you hire a diverse workforce from the get-go.

I've worked at 3 big tech companies and 3 startups. 2 got bought out, the other is going strong. I made more money off 1 year of bonus at Google than I did with any of the successful startups. It's not because I did anything wrong (I was Eng #1 at one, First iOS Lead at another and Lead for the 3rd) It's because I was building someone else's vision for the promise that that my stock will be worth something. When a company gets bought even if you have a high % when it gets funding, it will be diluted. If the company doesn't do refreshers often enough you will be working long hours for close to free. The charming CEOs will talk about how they plan to change the world, the sleazy ones will tell you they are a sure thing (and what will you do with your millions). That makes no difference, it's just a lottery ticket. You have to decide how much of your career to put on that ticket.

Startups are a wild ride, and a thrill to join, you'll learn a lot, and have a great chance of coming out learning more than you'd learn as a entry level at a big company. Don't for a second think you have the winning lottery ticket, because if your number doesn't come up you'll left with memories and the paper it wasn't written on.

PS I'd argue if you have a group / team, build your own vision. Go big, we have enough insta-wecha-snapple sauce out there. Build something that will have real impact. And if you don't have the Team / Vision / Risk tolerance go somewhere they'll pay you what you are worth. Maybe you'll be even meet some of those you want to build a team for whats next.

Learning has a way of increasing job satisfaction and giving you opportunities for larger scope in the future. You can get that in big tech too: my first four years out of college, I was fortunate enough to have some incredible teammates who seemed like gods, and they taught and showed me things it would’ve taken me years to learn on my own, if I ever did.

But then I switched teams and stuck around for 5 more years before leaving out of boredom. I joined a startup, and learned far more in that first year than the last five years in Big Tech. In the span of two years I went from not really knowing how SSL worked to being the architect and primary coder for a couple kubernetes deployments with a few dozen services.

The thing about big tech is that you become super specialized. Sometimes that’s fine, like if you’re a kernel hacker earning $$$, but if you join the wrong team then your world just shrinks.

I don’t ever want to go back to working on a tiny piece of something, even if that something has millions of users. Even if nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, and everybody’s gonna die, I still like the feeling that the work I do somehow matters to the people using the product.

So a dev team of less than 10 is probably the sweet spot for me.

I've noticed the same thing in biotech startups. Some people are meant to be part of smaller, bootstrapping companies and others are meant to be part of more established, good business corporations. The most interesting people are the ones who get in early and stick with it, growing along with the company.

Here to second the learning opportunities.

One very salient explanation of this that has stuck with me goes something like this:

A fast growing early stage startup is great for learning because you'll often end up with tasks that you're not qualified to do, which forces you to go out of your comfort zone and learn from the inevitable mistakes you'll make along the way, whereas in a large company they usually have plenty of more senior people to take care of the more challenging tasks outside of your current pay grade.

>But money isn't everything.

That's a very good point. Money isn't everything. Pretending that money is the ultimate goal of life can be off-putting in the startup world and in the American lifestyle in general.

Obsession with money is an easy way to envy, burnout, depression, and loneliness.

> I was senior enough to be single-handedly responsible for large projects like a distributed search engine and a logging and analytics service.

I'm going to be honest, I don't think this is the norm. I worked at a start up for years and never experienced that level of ownership or challenge. We basically built a glorified CRUD with VC money. Good for you! But I don't think this is the case for many? Or maybe it was just me.

This is soooo true!

I've had kind of the opposite experience. At the startup we were really sluggish it was hard to learn anything because we were jumping into any possible business opportunity before even thinking about ROI because money was always tight. 80% of the time was wasted supporting clients and fixing bugs that were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early.

I think the biggest difference is money. A well funded startup might be a boon but a struggling one will be a bane.

I worked at big companies for the first 15yrs of my career. And startups for the past 5yrs.

Firstly, startups have been an absolute delight. I very carefully chose the company and hence my boss and my co-workers and love working with every engineer on the team. It is a pleasure coming into work each day and I often cant leave because I'm excited about my work.

I have a lot of authority over what I build a much of it is "close to the metal" rather than some side system. I get to see the whole slice of cake from conception all the way to sales and client implementations and participate in all of it. At small companies, as an Engineer, I learned how to build a successful product and learned all the steps from inception to sales and production.

At every big company I was at, there was more specialization and lots of process. Process was necessary at that size. There was also a great deal of inter-departmental politics and incentives were usually not aligned at big companies, sometimes incentives across departments were even orthogonal. I spent 30% of my time on process and communication at big companies and it went to 80%+ once I was a senior executive. I made a lot of money there, but I think it was to compensate for having to deal with the inner workings of a big company (and being able to be effective at it.)

At big companies, I learned how to turn the gears of organizations and learn how to make globe-spanning change effectively.

To be fair, I took a big pay-cut to come to a startup as an Engineer. I'm happy with the choice. I dont think there is any silver bullet out there, but it is important to understand what you get with each choice. It is also important to make that choice with full intent and not be fooled or brow-beaten by anyone.

Too bad I work for a living and paying bills, I don't work so I can "growth". That is just good old self-improvement brainwash to exploit labor

I have hobbies, I have a family, I invest in culture, I enjoy free time, that is actual growth.

Yes, I think it's possible that you learn faster at startup. But it is ridiculous to say that you "learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company."

This just makes me think that either you are exaggerating a lot, or you were highly unproductive at the big company than most people.

In either cases, I end up not being able to take your comment seriously.

Briefly to begin, I'm going to read the above extremely uncharitably, not in an effort to besmirch aeternum but instead to try and tear down some terrible guidelines about life choices that I've seen going around.

Here follows my translation of the advice above:

> Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup.

You'd personally benefit more from working at an established company, but if you work for a startup you'll be trained on the cheap and then an established company can reap more profits from you.

> I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company.

The comfort of a large tech company is nothing compared to the stress filled life of working at a startup, having to constantly innovate on your toes and learn your own ways will push you to develop faster - but if you hit a wall you're truly hooped.

> I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent convincing people that the service is needed in the first place.

I saw a need and dedicated some days of labour to filling that need, because it was a valid need I was praised, if it hadn't sold I'd be chewed out for wasting time - and there is no guidance on which needs might be helpful or not... Within a startup you'll be expected to do user surveys and then market your new product even though no time is formally afforded for either.

> Direct exposure to customers also is really interesting and changes you as an engineer.

I assume when you decided to become a software dev you really meant UX designer? If your perfect world is being given a task to do and doing it accurately to a high level of perfection then have fun trying to quickly adapt your highly designed system to literally contradictory client requests coming from the same customer.

> It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.

Losing your shirt trying to make your day job not collapse and then being excluded from any of the benefits when your company goes public is character building.

"No guardrail environment" is a great way to put it.

I've worked in a large corp IT department and for start ups.

I'd say the most value in working for a start up comes from being in the core group of founders and first employees. After that point, my perception is that it's more of a toss up - if you're going to be a rank and file junior developer on the periphery of the decisions that shape the company, an established company could in many cases be a better choice.

I think it depends on the big company. With aws or on-prem cloud native tech, there is a lot of freedom and responsibility given to individual engineers to build services and applications in an autonomous fashion. This goes for everyone, including folks with a year of two out of college.

I have seen no limit to what an individual engineer can accomplish at my big company as long as they have the desire and ambition.

I'd even take the position that if you are able/willing to work hard and grow fast, a start-up (or more precisely a high paying, high growth unicorn) will likely pay more than an established company - because you can grow faster and become more valuable (and thus compensated) in a higher-growth environment where the only limit is yourself.

> It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.

There's a thin line between growth through mistakes and learning bad habits (because of lack of training and no colleagues with experience).

Being a developer in St. Louis, the median developer that makes 85k here is not really the kind you’d find at a good Bay Area company. When you look for the good ones, they often have competing remote offers with salaries not that different from the bay: The biggest difference is that nobody gives real, useful, valuable RSUs the way FAANG does. Barring one of those jobs, the trade off is pretty appealing for developers.

The problem for a startup here is money and customers. There is some local money, but in practice, you will be raising from firms in SF or Boston. To do that well, you will be sending a founder on trips a high percentage of their time: Our CEO was out 50 percent of the time this year. It’s OK with three founders or a small team already, but the seed stage is very rough, especially for a solo founder.

There is also the matter of customers. If you are doing B2B for startups, or straight sales to developers, the market isn’t here. Consumer? Any physical bits are not going to grow the fastest here. Do you want to start selling to large masses of people with little time and loss of disposable income? Not the best test market. So you better be doing something that is better done from here. An agriculture startup, with farms across the river, for instance. Still, it will be rare for this to be your ideal location there.

Still, I wish for more startups here, but the negatives are very visible, and we have very few success stories that tell people it’s worth trying.

The Bay Area offers software engineers a career growth trajectory that other places simply don't.

That $140k number might be a reasonable 50th percentile for what a junior engineer would make at a startup in the Bay Area, but compensation can increase quite a bit after several years in the industry, especially for engineers who move to large companies which give stock compensation. They will far outpace the earnings growth of engineers elsewhere.

It's much easier to achieve that kind of career trajectory in places with high concentrations of tech companies, e.g. the Bay Area and Seattle.

Well, this assumes that the x %ile in smaller markets is interchangeable with the x %ile in the more expensive ones like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston. But I know lots of people from cities like St. Louis who live in these much bigger tech cities because if you’re in the higher range in comp. for your years of experience, it’s just a much better deal being in the more expensive city. So I would guess that in these smaller cities, you will miss a lot of the top 10-20% developers

From the perspective of a potential employee, taking a job in a lower paid part of the country seems like a bad idea. You would generally be giving up some quality of life and neither debt nor savings care about cost of living.

Although maybe it would work if some of the second tier cities agreed to pay off the debt and contribute to the savings of people that agree to work there.

First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions.

Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline.

Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers.

Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such).

That's generally speaking, of course. Exceptions exist.

Ignoring all the indicators that's been mentioned (acing all interviews, right pedigree, etc.)

- Solid results too show - Fantastic references

I know a lot of younger guys have these pipe dreams of sacrificing their youth, going to the best university, studying years for interviews, and looking / being the "perfect" candidate come interview time, without actually having built anything of substance.

Sure - you will probably land some sweet positions, but there's no way in hell you'll get hired as a CTO without anything real to show - unless it's a 3-piece student startup.

Yes, there are exceptions. There are young people that land very nice positions, but they're almost always both smart and experienced.

I think the roadmap look pretty boring, but it's what it is. Read, build, analyze, and understand. Have vision, and get good. If someones gonna hire you to design / build / develop their product, then you need to be able to lead and deliver. Hard work, experience, and good networking skills.

I don't know if it's universal, but everyone I know that gets offers like this tend to solve the higher level problem.

The people I've seen that fit the bill, tend to have a really strong knowledge base and are quickly able to understand the relevant code base/systems.

They're then able to easily debug/optimize the system and know how to implement features in the best/simplest/most scalable way almost immediately.

Thank you for your detailed take here. I'd like to nuance this a bit to a more general rule.

Every person taking equity needs to justify their value now

This means that a setup with two "business people" founders need to justify their worth immediately. Not with promises of future sales. Not with vague research.

Worthy ways to prove their worth could be raising a giant amount of funding, or putting their own money into the startup as a sign of skin-in-the-game, or purchase orders standing ready to purchase the product once it is complete, or paid PoCs. Or serious track record of delivery/wins.

If you find a setup where engineers are taking all the initial risk while "business founders" stay on the sidelines waiting for a product to be built until they start to work -- run away. Think about it this way -- they have all the upside (they can choose later to work or to flee) while you have all the risk (you invested your pay-cut for vague promises of future work.)