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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

I seem to learn the same lesson again and again from all the press about startups and my own experience (both as an employee in many and CEO/Founder in another). If you join the startup for the money (doesn't matter if you mean salary or equity), you're going to have a bad time. But if you expect to get experience, career and professional growth out of it, you can get pretty awesome results regardless of how successful startup turns out to be.

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Reading Hacker News, I get the impression that tech startups are the only sector of our capitalist economy that has transcended the profit motive and is apparently serving a higher cause.

I think there's always been naive people in the labor force. See also: unpaid interns working at national magazines.

In the magazine industry, those are the only "jobs" at all. There are very few paying jobs (and those that do pay a non-livable wage) so you have people with degrees and a year plus experience still working for nothing (or next to nothing).

Employees are very rarely motivated by profit/salary. See Herzberg's two-factor theory. This is not unique to our sector.

Employees are very rarely motivated EXCLUSIVELY by profit/salary.

Fixed it for you :-)

Have you read the theory? Salary is not even a motivational factor. Salary is among the hygiene factors, that (quoting wikipedia) do not give positive satisfaction or lead to higher motivation, though dissatisfaction results from their absence.

It is just an academic theory, not holy gospel (with a long "Validity and criticisms" section in Wikipedia).

I think salary IS a motivational factor in real life, as for many humans it is a yardstick of superiority compared to other humans (whether it is right or wrong is another matter).

I agree. Salary is a motivational factor - at least indirectly. It's a status symbol. It shows the company values you.

I can only imagine a world without monetary payment, in some form, for the extremes of far too little and more than enough.

Thinking about the brighter side of things I suppose that in the more than enough side of things you would be paid with happiness. That to be wealthy would be to have something you enjoy doing all of the time. Success however, would be measured in a currency that is more difficult to track, respect.

Its more than just a yardstick for comparison. I know I want to be able to buy the things I want (whether that be going out to dinner more often, buying a new car at 5 years instead of 10, etc). If my salary isn't enough to do those things without major sacrifices elsewhere, then its at least as important a motivator to me as other things.

This seems to be a theory based on the assumption that the person(s) are already having more than their base needs met: (decent housing, food, entertainment, retirement). Salary is one hell of a motivator if you're struggling to meet these things. It's all good and academic but antithetical to why a good portion of people obtain higher education.

Have you ever asked someone if they would still be working at their job if they weren't getting paid? Or even the weaker version, if they didn't need the money?

I have asked many people this and only two people have said yes to this. One was someone who already sold his startup so probably didn't have to work ever again. The other was someone who could have retired but he was afraid if he shut down his company his employees would struggle to find new jobs.

How come?

Maybe you're completely naive.

Or sarcastic.

I love this, but at the same time I have to be wary.

I'm torn between thinking of Hacker News as benevolent or delusional and self-righteous.

I get the benevolent vibes when I see comments like golergka's. I get the delusional, self-righteous vibes when I see founders and VCs comparing themselves to JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller, saying "Hey! Look! I'm just as important as those guys!" "Silicon Valley is important!"

That said, Silicon Valley may very well be an important part of history. But the self-centeredness makes me wary.

I don't see golergka's comment as falling into some sort of SV "VC-istan" delusional thinking. Joining a small, expanding company is an excellent way to build experience and career growth. It's just in SV we call those small businesses "startups" and accord them some sort of inherent moral superiority.

I said

>I get the benevolent vibes when I see comments like golergka's

I think his comment is benevolent, not delusional.

Yeah, I think there's one thing the startup world does offer: more freedom+respect than other places. (Above a certain income.) It's horrific, full of lies and doesn't let everyone in. And that "freedom" is often interpreted as harassment.

But. There's a reason why certain people choose it. You can be less of a cog.

Freedom is harrassment how?

> I get the benevolent vibes when I see comments like golergka's.

Thanks, but why? My comment works in completely capitalist self-interest way, even when you forget about all the joy of programming.

I have a different reaction. I think the idea that you shouldn't be in it solely for the money is a way to protect against the emotional costs of near-certain failure. If money is your only goal, then failure will crush you. If you can point to all the non-monetary things you gained, then you came out on top no matter how the business itself ends.

And even if you succeed, monetary wealth is a dead end. Once you're there, you'll be disappointed that money doesn't happiness (trite, but true).

Silicon Valley is most definitely an important part of history, regardless what Hacker News and its ilk do. It is named after the primary material input of its name sake first innovation, the integrated circuit. Robert Noyce, the "Mayor or Silicon Valley", Robert Moore, and the rest of the "Traitorous Eight" founded Fairchild Semiconductor and then these two went on to found Intel, a unicorn among unicorns. They accomplished all this by challenging many business norms including "not being company men" and selling their product at a loss until volume was up enough to turn a profit. They didn't just spin off companies, they are the ones that transformed the orchards into the Silicon Valley you take for granted today. They and their progeny laid the social (even the use of venture capital!) and technological foundation that is taken for granted today. Many people I ask have no clue who Robert Noyce is, and know Moore only for Moore's Law. It's like being a publicist and not knowing who Guttenberg is. It's embarrassing really. Silicon valley is already a part of history. I know this and I am young, not someone of an older generation that lived any of this. It's all so rivht there in front of your face, it's hard not to know this stuff. Hacker News, many threads show an ignorance of a lot of this stuff, and I'm just about over it all.

I don't know of any other tech startup besides Watsi that's serving a higher cause. Enlighten me?

raise.me

It's idealism wrapped in bullshit to allow left-wing founders to sleep at night.

truth? you'll be over worked, under paid, and you'll get tired of it well before the equity's worth anything.

Sadly, experience you get in some start ups will not help you get a better job.

When I was a manager in big corp, here what was important for us. These things you will not gain in some start ups (and in some you will definitely learn):

- How to write and communicate functional, design, and QA specs

- How to properly setup unit, module, program, product, and system testing

- Understand security issues

And the funny thing is that startups which will help you to grown in areas above are anyway going to be ones which do offer market base salary.

So after your startup experience, somebody will shell out the big bucks to pay for your experience and professional growth? Or is it just that you can write more deep sounding blog articles in the future?

If you're asking whether companies pay more for you as an employee, I don't think so. Sometimes I even get the feeling that they like you less because you might be a threat to management (since you typically ask them about IT and the business aspects of what they do)

But if you ask whether they give you more money because you are now in another relationship with them (consulting?), then absolutely, yes.

I'd be wary of employers who seem uncomfortable answering questions about the business side of the company.

Same. If you get the impression management feels threatened by your skills and experience, it is not a place you should work at. Management should recognize what you can bring to the company at an individual and corporate level and groom you for a tech/business leadership role. If a company isn't prepared to do that, then they probably just want to use you.

Yes. In my experience, they will. People who hired me (or offered to do so) told me, directly, that having this experience was a competitive advantage in their eyes.

It's one thing to hire just a developer. It's another thing to hire a developer who knows first-hand what's it like to run a startup, what's important for management and what concerns do they have.

It might be a competitive advantage relative to a random, older company that isn't well-respected in the tech industry, but compared to working at an Amagoobooksoft, I think you'd be at a disadvantage.

Google or Facebook — may be, they're known for their exceptional engineer culture. But Amazon and other beurocracy-heavy companies with manager-oriented culture look like a disadvantage in the CV to me.

Apart from the fact that not everything is about money, yes, more often than not it will be a great thing when landing new jobs.

If you prove you are actually any good, yes. This is also true if you worked at a place that is small, but not a startup.

The best decision I made in my career was to ride the 2003 recession in a small catalog company that wrote its own code and wanted to grow. Since they were that small, I had responsibilities that had nothing to do with what people of my experience had to do in big companies. I was making stack and architectural decisions quickly. Since we didn't have an army of people, I had to do infrastructure, project proposals, requirements gathering, database administration, and decisions on stack changes. We just couldn't afford specialists. My pay was not exactly competitive, but when I left for a bigger company, I had major advantages over my coworkers, because I had such a breadth of experience compared to them, pigeonholed in roles that did a lot less, and never had to care about what was good for the business, just doing what the next guy in the totem pole said. Your idea of big bucks might be different from mine, but making over 300k in the Midwest sounds pretty good to me.

And it's not just my story: The rest of the people in that team are all doing extremely well. One is a senior architect in a cloud provider. Another is a pretty big conference speaker. The last one is the top technical gun in a consulting firm. All my friends that didn't take risks to go for better experience are doing far less interesting work, for far less money.

That said, a startup just makes it easier to get a job that teaches the right things. If all you end up doing is writing a web app in Rails, you might as well do that in a bigger place that pays better. It's not really about the office being cool, or thinking the company has a good chance at making it, but about finding ways to get a competitive advantage over other developers for the long haul.

+100 corporate experience in big fish companies is completely overrated, people learn a LOT more in a smaller companies.

You learn broad in a small company and deep in a big company.

Which is better depends entirely on the problem.

How are you making over 300k in the Midwest? Surely it's not a purely software engineering role, from my (admittedly limited) experience those roles top out at 180-200k base in Chicago.

As a Junior in college, I appreciate the nuance and perspective you've provided.

Do you have any advice for an undergrad trying to find his way in today's tech industry? You mentioned "competitive advantage" and learning the "right things" - could you elaborate on what you think that is today, especially for someone who'll be joining the workforce in about a year?

Or join an established sane tech company and enjoy both experience and pay.

Or: learning will be awesome, awesome earning will be optional :)

Awesome learning, awesome earning.

I've never heard that before but I realize now that it summarizes my motivations fairly succinctly

So effectively you are paying money to the startup so they can teach you (or you can teach yourself) "experience" skills?

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