This is assuming one can get hired by a FAANG, which is not true for many.
The most valuable thing I have is the remaining time I have in this life. Not the number in my bank account.
Oh boy are you in for a surprise. Whether a company is a startup or not is almost entirely orthogonal to a culture of “filling out spreadsheets.”
Why? Is that simply because you are more familiar with the language or does the project actually require the raw power of Cpp?
2. yes, familiarity.
Then why work for a startup? Most will demand a huge amount of your time compared to other jobs. Why not pick a job which demands a sane amount of your time and spend your free time on relationships and hobbies?
one kind sent rockets and recollected them, made robots run and jump. The other kind, shrank blog posts to 140 characters, or added a timeout to short messages, removed the thumb down button, and called them a new feature.
Today, we still remember the names of da Vinci, Tesla, Turing, not because they had a successful family ...
I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid.
So you're living based on how you will be remembered by strangers? That sounds incredibly unfulfilling and doesn't sound like a good way to live. In a few hundred more years almost no one will remember the names of those people either.
>da Vinci, Tesla, Turing
It's incredibly safe to say that you are not going to be as successful as these people. Almost no one achieves this much success in the sciences. At most you will probably advance your field by a few useful steps and then be personally forgotten about except in research paper footnotes.
>not because they had a successful family
You know who cares about you and remembers you more significantly than as a research footnote? Your family.
>I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid
Man, don't we all.
Pursue your own balance of values with passion, and allow others to be meaningfully different from you. Their desires don't diminish yours.
"I" am the best witness to my existence. Not the person giving my eulogy. Who are you to tell someone how to define what "fulfilling" means to them?
I can live with failing. I can't live with not trying.
I feel like a lot of it comes down to how strong your management team and market position are. Our CEO had a pretty crazy track record, and drove the company into a really interesting, strong position, and then wanted himself to have a good, sustainable family life, and would constantly reiterate that he wanted everyone else to do the same.
I have other friends who have had roughly the same experiences, again, anecdotally.
Most people aren't going to lie to your face that a normal week is 40h if they expect 80.
My advice to folks is that if you don’t have a very significant chunk of the company, ie >1% then the payoff can never be good enough to compromise work/life balance.
If you’re a founder or very early and have 5% or some such the. That’s between you and your family.
Probably still ain’t gonna pay off.
Consider the compensation package a company offers. Companies that want young go-getters are more likely to offer high cash and equity; great benefits packages are better for drawing in risk-averse family types.
Also don't be afraid to ask straight-up what the working hours are like during an interview, ideally from the lowest-ranked person they'll let you talk to.
Disclaimer: I don't have strong data supporting any of this, just my personal experience and intuition from working in the bay area.
People skewed older than I expected for a startup. Most people were in their 30s, and the C suite people were mostly in their 40s. No one other than me was below late 20s, and everyone seemed laid back but competent.
I probed at it during the interview and was told that everyone leaves between 5-6, and that the CEO wanted to go home to his family and didn't expect anyone to do differently. When I asked engineers things about how days and weeks went there they were very direct about how people didn't stay late and didn't dance around the subject.
The CEO had already sold multiple startups while raising his family, so I assumed that he would be able to make the company successful without setting a precedent of burning yourself out and without us being under constant threat of death.
Also yeah, I didn't make nearly what I make now that I'm at FANG. But I ended up in a higher role and with more leverage than would normally be possible at my age and experience level in the new company, and got some cash from the deal, so it's been pretty great. But yeah, if I was just trying to maximize short term dollars earned it wouldn't have made sense to work there, since I couldn't have realistically known that this was the outcome.
Doing that consistently is unhealthy and sort of antithetical to building a thriving business.
Worked at many startups. Currently run a startup. No one has worked 80h weeks at any of them, except myself in the first year of creating my own startup.
If you really have friends working at startups for < 10% equity and doing 80 hour weeks, something is wrong.
Maybe go to another big co?
I'd hope even the smallest of startups is thinking about how users interact with their software and organizing those interactions into some sort of prioritized backlog for development.
In my limited experience in talking with other people, FAANG tends to not have as much process as finance, IBM, insurance or other 'boring big companies'.
The point about FAANG paying so much gets made a lot, and that employees of startups are fools for their decisions, as if everyone's handed a dozen offers and makes a choice.
Most of us are lucky to get a single offer, sometimes after months of trying, so we take what we are given. The rosy picture portrayed on HN isn't at all accurate to my experience.
Though to be fair my current salary, as far as it is from the unrealistic portrayal of salaries here, still feels far better than almost any other job I would remotely have the capacity to do, and certainly far more than I need to live and have a pretty easy life if I were honest.
I'm payed a crazy amount of money to do something I love.
> The rosy picture portrayed on HN isn't at all accurate to my experience.
> I'm payed a crazy amount of money ["far more than I need to live and have a pretty easy life"] to do something I love.
You're living the rosy picture portrayed on HN. You react to $400k the same way most people would react to what you're describing.
At one point I was close to giving up on being a developer entirely after months of failing to find work, though thankfully I had a friend from a former job who helped give me a legup to a startup he was working for.
It was that painful experience which made me grateful for what I have, even if its looked down on so much by my peers. I realized how lucky I was to be working at all.
The rosy picture I was referring too wasn't so much the salary as the ability of software engineers to get these jobs. In my experience it was a lot more like a professional sport (spend decades working and practicing in this field and you still don't have what it takes) than finding a store with a help-wanted sign and filling out an application.
I guess there's something of a paradox there... its a weird industry.
Conversely, if you can get hired to a unicorn in a position that's senior enough to have any hope of coming anywhere near top tech pay, then you are likely talented enough to work at top tech instead.
There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies. That doesn't mean it's easy to get those jobs. It does mean that you should apply your talents where it fits.
BTW, you don't need to be at a unicorn to earn top EV. 1% of a 100M exit is 1M, which is more than the vast majority of equity grants I've heard of from FANG. Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
I worked at both. Talent overlap is quite high, far higher than is commonly assumed.
> There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies.
I worked in startups for many years, and most of my friends still in the field are either founders or C-level execs. They are fully aware of the top compensation for top engineers in startups presently. Startups don't match top tech comp currently. Unless you factor in the options as a sure thing, and the startup ends up exiting at unicorn levels.
> Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
This is a reflection of how many people have spent precious years of their career working for startups, and generally seeing 0 return on these options.
It's also a reflection of the perceived lack of control over this sort of deferred compensation, and various nasty dynamics that often snatch value away from rank-and-file employees, even at the last minute or past it. See the LinkedIn exit and their infamous clawback policy.
Startup options have earned this reputation for 0 value over a decade of overhype and underperformance. Far too many talented people were promised the sky and ended up with nothing after years of hard work.