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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Valid reasons to work for a startup:

- You are a cofounder.

- You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats").

- They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else.

- You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route.

Invalid reasons for working at a startup:

- Getting rich off stock options.

- Making a lot of money in salary.

- Work / life balance.

- Stability.

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Not exactly a unique experience, but my .05 - I started of at a startup with a "lol just do it" attitude to whatever the problem was. Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Got to see all aspects of the products and the consequences of the decisions we made early on. Learned more in a year than in the last 3 at corp/consulting jobs. Then again, maybe it was noob gainz and I made at least a third less than I would have at a corp job.

Not sure if going back to a startup would be nearly as beneficial in terms of "levelling up." Seems like the game now is to grind whiteboard before I get too old for Google.

A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside.

> Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast.

Congrats on using the opportunity to grow in an abusive role. It should not be normalized is the point.

On the opposite side of this argument. I was there. I was shit in college but managed a degree and self taught programming. I was hustling hard to graduate and convince someone to hire me as a programmer even though I had no degree. I was 23 at the time.

If you are in this scenario, just you, no wife kids etc. What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? I loved the startup and it fit my perfect niche. I would grind 12 hours days, but also had lots of freedom. Remote work, unlimited days off etc. Sure at sometimes you get burnt out but you are a sponge soaking up everything you can.

now i'm 28 with wife and kids, no overtime for me. I still work extremely hard and lazer focused, but i show up at 7:30-8am and leave at 4 everyday :p

> What is wrong with working really hard on a problem?

Because you're normalizing abusive workplace practices. Need I explain further? It's not right, it's not okay, and if you tolerate it, you do a disservice to your colleagues. Maybe you don't care, that's fine. But when you say "What's wrong?" I will point out that it is not to be commended or supported.

If your employer encourages, supports, or allows this sort of behavior to exist, I hope you find yourself on the business end of a lawsuit.

It seems like what's wrong is if it's not telegraphed that this is expected beforehand. We're all adults here and should be able to make informed decisions about how we want to live. Some of us want a lot of pressure and to not sit around bored wondering what to do with our lives.

When I was in grad school, 100 hour weeks and working 100 days straight was the norm. Also I made 25k a year. And I loved it, because I loved doing science and I got to be paid to do what I loved. And also, it's maybe worth mentioning that your experiments don't give a damn about labor laws. There really are some important societally beneficial things that simply won't get done if there aren't crazy fuckers like me around (not necessarily the projects I happened to work on, they all turned out to be crap)

Honestly what made me mad was that there were a lot of kids who got out of college, and went to grad school because they didn't know what to do next and nobody told them how crazy grad school was. These jokers depressed the asking price for a grad school salary.

It's "pissing in the pool" for the rest of us. I know it feels validated internally because it worked out for you though.

Even when I did a startup, I held pretty normal hours. Working on someone else's problem to make them rich is silly to me. I think it's something that you either get or you don't. I don't plan to convince you to change sides, but I'd 100% of the time rather spend hours 8 or 9 through 12 working on my own hard problems. They're easy to create. I definitely had more responsibility, did more coding, and felt more energy at a startup than a big corp though. Pay and nearly everything else was shit in comparison.

If someone did 10-12 hour regularly on my current team, we'd be pissed. It would set a new normal and management would think they could start replacing people until they get 10 of those guys that are willing to sit here half the day.

Wait, I enjoy my job, want to write code and get lost in my work and you think that’s pissing in the pool?

I know some people at work that sort of have your mindset. I think it’s the worst. Not only do they not want to help someone who’s passionate you now make me suspect they’re incentivized to undermine hard workers as well, since they make you look bad.

Fine, take it easy at work, I don’t care. Just don’t make it harder for people who are trying to get work done.

You are being exploited. Do you get compensated 1.5x your base for all those 12 hour work days?

Making multiples of what the median American household makes, sitting in front of a computer, in an air conditioned office full of free food is being exploited?

I'm sure a lot of American workers are being exploited but I'm not.

So you recognize the abuse disparity. Good! You can then understand why people fight against abuse despite the complaints from the comfortable.

I recognize that a lot of workers in America are exploited and abused. And I support policies to mitigate that. However, trying to associate myself with those or comparing my minor inconveniences to that of blue collar workers seems like it would be extremely spoiled and tone deaf given how exceptionally privileged the average tech worker is compared to blue collar workers.

At most startups (with illiquid equity), TC adjusted for cost of living (assuming Bay Area) is probably not far from median American household. Employers take advantage of youthful zeal which prevents ICs from understanding their true worth to the business. After startup engineers reach the point where 12 hours days become unacceptable from a logistics standpoint (kids, burnout), what do they have to show other than enriching their founders? If they enjoy programming and would do it in their spare time, why not dedicate 8 hours towards their job and 4 hours towards a personal project with potentially much higher personal reward?

> what do they have to show other than enriching their founders?

I don’t get it. Being debt free and having a big pile of money, and a body that still works since I haven’t been doing backbreaking manual labor?

On salary (not hourly) this is a useless question.

Say they make 100k/yr. With 40hr weeks that's roughly $50/hr. With 60 hour weeks and 1.5x base pay, you could say it's $20/hr. It's all the same.

What you seem to be asking for is for companies to pay you the same, just say your base is lower so they can pay you 1.5x you base for appearances sake.

Now, optics aside, if you take an offer with an expectation of 40 hrs / week and they make you work 60, then sure. That's exploitation. But if the expectations are clear upfront, "base pay" is just legalese.

Maybe I can rephrase. Is OP's base 1.5x that of the average (8 hr/day) worker base at comparable companies?

I want you to work hard, I just need you to be paid more (hopefully a lot!). I'm saying it's better if I'm paid less than you.

What I don't want is for you to put in more effort for the same pay and establish a "new normal".

That's all it takes for us both to be happy. I don't want to hold you back, m'dude.

I don't think it sets the normal. We had a great senior dev who never worked a second past 8 hours, never did prod support during off hours, never picked up the phone on the weekend, etc. But when he did work, he delivered way more than the junior devs did. He works there to this day, at a great salary, with no pressure to work OT.

Sorry, but that's ridiculous. People have different levels of dedication to their work. If you want to do 40 hours a week, that's fine, but don't crap on someone who wants to put in more effort.

Sounds like a union where they'd beat on the new guy who actually tried to be more efficient.

Versus management demanding everyone work 50-60 hours a week in an at will employment state? I won’t disparage your work ethic, but recognize that allowing yourself to be exploited enables your company to more easily exploit the unwilling, and without labor protections, it leads to systemic employee abuse.

You can’t say it doesn’t happen. HN is littered with these abuse stories.

I get what you're saying, but don't try to act like working more is equivalent to being more efficient.

I'm on team work/life balance but, in this case, I agree. First job out of school I had an engineering job (not software) in the oil business. Spent lots of time living in shipyards and offshore. Long days. Etc.

But I had a lot of responsibility. Was sort of thrown in the deep end with respect to a lot of things. It was a great experience out of school and, in retrospect, was absolutely the right job choice relative to my other options.

Would I have wanted to have done it long-term? (I left after 3 years to get another degree.) No way.

FWIW, I've worked with a lot of entry-level people at normal companies over the years and would estimate that noob gainz are 30-50% higher in startup land for the first 1-2 years of career, maybe 10-20% higher the next two, then flat or actually lower than corporate thereafter. I think it comes down to 1) startups pile a lot more responsibility onto their young hires than normal companies are comfortable with + 2) startups have a lot higher tolerance for failure + 3) small companies in general don't have headcount for specialized roles, so everyone has to level up in multiple areas.

I've worked at two startups, then a BigCo, and now another startup. The wearing of many hats was definitely a leveling-up experience, but I felt that I plateaued in just the way you describe. Equity from both of those first two startups is now worth zero.

In my years at BigCo I worked with engineers who have 10-20 years more experience than I do. Often felt like the dumbest guy in the room. I learned a ton. No comparison. But I would never have gotten the job there without my previous startup experience. And without that experience I'm not sure I would even have been able to learn from my BigCo co-workers so successfully.

I got tired of corporate politics and a high traffic commute, so now I'm happily back in startup land.

I feel similarly; I started my career at a BigCo, didn't get much out of it, joined a fairly young company, with (1) more responsibility than someone of my tenure should reasonably have due to (2) high tolerance for failure and (3) they didn't have headcount for the specialized role I was doing. Going back to a BigCo, the experience there was utterly invaluable. I realized that my first go round I had absolutely no idea what I should even be trying to get out of it. This time's different.

There's huge value to getting the lay of the land.

I think there's a similar dynamic with consulting - ThoughtWorks / Pivotal Labs type places. You get shunted around between many different projects, there are never enough people, so there are opportunities to take more responsibilities, and things are often a bit fluid, because a consultancy coming in tends to (should!) crack the organisation a bit. There are downsides to all of that, but it's also a way of getting wider faster, if not getting a lot deeper.

I worked in Pivotal Labs for about two years. It is an amazing place to learn the craft.

Just pointing out that noob gainz would be the easily-attained gains at the beginning (of a weightlifting program), suggesting that maybe you learn so much basic stuff at the beginning of your first job, regardless what job it is.

http://nattyornot.com/bodybuilding-basics-noob-gains-explain...

Yes startups will give you more responsibility, but that comes at the cost of far less mentorship. I often wonder if people only feel like they're growing faster at startups because the results are a bit more visible.

It is true that it's easier to be stagnant as an associate at a larger company. If you're not interested in taking on new challenges you can generally sort of fall through the cracks. However, folks who are proactive at a FAANG style company can find great mentors and support to develop skills really quickly. Often skills that simply aren't available to people at startups...

What's more valuable: spending your formative years working on systems at really high scale, or building a quick RoR MVP and managing 3 VM's in AWS for a startup?

You're not taking into account when the larger company simply won't allow you to to work on X because you're not the right team, title or level.

You may never get to manage a cloud VM. You will probably never get to help decide how a CI build pipeline works, how engineering hiring should work, etc etc.

I'm not discounting your point about learning to develop software at scale, but your overall scope of responsibility is much narrower. It's a tradeoff.

You won't get to do those things at BigCo likely until you've done it at a startup.

* If you're not interested in taking on new challenges you can generally sort of fall through the cracks.*

BigCo titles are much more narrowly defined, so most of the time you can't even see the parts that might have new challenges...or cracks.

It depends. When I was at IBM I worked on a small team and we had about 4000 VMs/systems I was the Network Guy, the Storage Guy, the VMware Guy, the Windows Guy, the Linux Guy, the AIX guy, the AS/400 guy, and the Security Guy. Gees now that I think about it, no wonder I was so stressed out back them.

I learned a lot from that job and it opened a lot of doors for me in my career.

I resonate with your observation. I did the reverse, i.e.: FANG, fintech, pre-ipo then start-up after already achieved senior staff level. Start-up didn't tech me anything new unfortunately.

> 2) startups have a lot higher tolerance for failure

I disagree. They have, necessarily, a greater willingness to accept risk since they are already in a risky situation by definition.

If anything the startup is likely less tolerant of failure compared to a big established business, in that it has nothing to fall back on and will simply fail and go out of business.

FANG is undisputably the best risk-adjusted compensation return for a programmer, and they're up there in terms of working with super smart colleagues, and therefore they have a high floor, compared to say a startup that goes nowhere with the blind leading the blind, but the ceiling is also constrained by what projects you're working on. In terms of raw software engineering development there's probably no substitute for joining early in a hypergrowth scenario, because you'll have to solve way more problems in an efficient way, and understand the direct impact on the business in a way that is totally obscured when you come into a massive corporation with thousands of engineers. It's likely company growth will outpace your personal growth (hence the outside hires), but even so you will get challenged in ways that just don't exist in large, stable companies.

All compensations are risk + skills adjusted (a technical term is expected return). With lower risk you must sacrifice possibility of higher reward and vice versa. This universal law is not broken by FANG or anyone else. FANG is not better risk adjusted and there is nothing special about their compensation.

If you are young and blessed with no dependencies, you should attempt exploiting higher risk domains. As you get older with more dependencies, you need to lower your risk tolerance. The technical term for this is exploration vs exploitation. The maximum payouts in many complex system requires some balance between two and sticking with just exploitation is often not the optimal policy when you look at life span as a whole.

I can attest to this as well. I can't recommend this to anyone else, but personally I'm glad I went through it. I had one hellish week where I was so nervous I couldn't eat. Slept 2 hours a night and lost 5 pounds in one week.

Employees shouldn't be treated like that, and I will never work at a place like that again, but I am a dramatically stronger engineer because of those experiences.

"A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside."

This was the main benefit I got from a startup, but that also required winning something of a startup lottery. I was at a company that went from two to 200+ engineers. I was able to grow into the tech lead of the entire thing.

That put me into a leadership track at a relatively young age at larger companies. Which has been great. Financially, however, I suspect I would have been better off working at a FAANG from day 1, even being a very early and key employee for a company that exited at 9 figures.

Still I now know how fortunate I was. At my current gig we routinely hire startup "tech leads" for non leadership roles. They're probably generally thought of as a tier below a mid level IC coming out of a FAANG company.

Startups are a huge gamble. It worked out for me but even the inflated titles are only valuable if the company itself proves to be a winner.

The matching start-up TL to mid-level FAANG seems fair to my observations.

"Seems like the game now is to grind whiteboard before I get too old for Google."

the sad reality of this industry...

> You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route.

This is me. I quit my well paid job and took a massive pay hit so that I could work from home and so be able to spend more time with my daughters.

Absolutely worth it.

At a start-up? How do you manage live/work balance? Are there any on-call duties? Thanks in advance.

There seems to be some kind of understanding that start-up means aways working overtime etc. AFAIK that is not often the case, but people can work quite normally in early-stage companies as well. And mostly it is the founders who are working hard and employees are not required to work the same way.

Yes, I agree. We have (trying to have) a similar culture. The overtime is not expected, but the problem is task/context switching, which got better (less).

I've worked at mostly startups and I have had a normal work schedule except for maybe 1-2 days a year.

It's a startup, yes.

I work eight hours a day on average, and being that we have staff on most continents we don't really have a need to be on call. That said, I've had a handful of 3am emergencies over the course of the last few years.

I work in my garage; so I have no commute, and I no longer lose over two hours a day to commuting. That's meant I contribute far less to open source, which I did while on transit. However, I don't miss commuting at all and am thankful for the time recovered.

Balance is blissful. While my wife was on maternity leave for twelve months our girls were at home as well, and so my breaks consisted of spending time with my family. Now I walk them to daycare before work and listen to the rain on my roof while I work.

Thank you for your reply. This gives me more food for thought.

I am lead engineer at a start-up and my goal is to create a good work environment for our current and future devs. #1 enemy is the on-call, which should be resolved with customer support + some automation.

FWIW, we're a reasonably successful social application that's _heavy_ on real time networking; so there's always a large number of users active and our services are generally humming along at high throughput.

Lots of automated tests. A good community team. Code reviews. A _rigid_ feature-branch-and-test process. A _rigid_ closed beta->open beta->release process.

And we still have bugs. But things don't catch fire often, and when they do, it's usually not our fault. ;)

Sounds like what we want to achieve. Good to know it works for others.

One more question if you don't mind.

What is your vacation policy? Fixed amount + required to take or unlimited + take what you need? I am not a big fan of the latter, but not sure how it works for others.

Thanks.

AFAICT, unlimited. I just ask and they always say yes. Last year I took around 4 weeks of vacation _as well as_ 5 weeks of paternity leave.

I think it helps that they've never taken issue with my general performance; if I weren't satisfactory in my output then I probably would have some push back.

In my very personal experience, many times startups are not full of the brightest engineers, especially if they are based in a major tech hub such as the Bay Area: most talented engineers these days, if location is not an issue, first try a shot at FAANG or similarly big companies where they can experience problems at massive scale and very high compensation.

Hence, many folks who end up accepting to work at a startup are less talented engineers (you're left with the "scraps" of the market), so if you're a high performing individual you might find that you really don't need to put that many hours in to be effective, as compared to your peers (and that's deeply depressing as well, and one of the reasons why I left startups for FAANG, other than compensation; talent is SO SO SO much better).

I speak for direct experience, I rode a startup train for a long time at a company that grew a lot, and rarely put in more than 40 hours a week into the job, while others were routinely putting 60+. And I kept being praised by the management and technical leadership.

The problem (lack of local talent due to big company competition) became severe enough that we had to bootstrap multiple remote teams in easily overlooked areas because the new local hires (San Francisco) were literally trashing the product due to poor development/testing.

Interesting... i'm in a similar space where I found a decent startup, grinded for a year or two... and have pretty much been riding a gravy train ever since. In the midwest, making 100k in my late 20s and going full time remote soon. we got bought up by some corporate shmos as well so got a pretty penny in stock options

I hear conflicting ideas about who's getting the most capable people, and I don't know what's true.

Maybe a decade ago, a knowledgeable colleague, speaking of one of the better-regarded FAANGs, told me, "First they hired the A students, then they hired the B students, now they're hiring the C students."

More recently, the sentiment I heard among CS-ish PhD students at one big university was that FAANGs (or, at least, particular ones) aren't seen as the cool places to go anymore, and people would rather do their own startups, or get professorships.

Personally, I'd consider most of the FAANGs (but not one-sided hire-hazing rituals). But technical cofounder, or working on a startup that's already funded, or a rare research lab position, is seeming more likely to be a good match.

In my 10 year career, I've done 2 startups in the Bay Area (both early, one I left after Series A, another one I left after Series C) and more recently Google, and I can say the level of talent doesn't even compare in my opinion: from my experience, the engineers were so bad quality that I was feeling depressed and wasting my time most of the time (and constantly saying to myself "am I just a jerk in thinking of everyone else as doing bad work?").

Typical thing, that really happened: a coworker at a startup ("senior engineer") had to do some calls to a very simple HTTP API from an embedded C++ component. She proceeded to hand craft her own HTTP requests and manually dispatch them to a manually instantiated connection using sockets, and then manually parsing HTTP responses (!!). I suggested to not spend time on such irrelevant code, I was ignored. Management didn't chime in.

She kept having problems and problems once that 100s-lines long thing hit production, as you can imagine (every software engineer should know that writing a network client from scratch is not easy!): finally I broke down, linked libcurl in the application, and in 2 hours and 30 lines of code I had the whole thing solidly working. And that's how I afforded working 40 hours a week instead of 60.

At Google, this would never happen.

Some developers use work as an excuse to try something new (or to do something different). This was probably someone who thought a problem was easier than they imagined. Hubris comes hand in hand with experience (seniority?).

These kinds of initiatives happen all the time in every company, including Google. A team lead generally would quash this in the interest of reliability/safety/etc, I think.

> At Google, this would never happen.

At a startup, a flawed but functional deployment today is better than a perfect deployment tomorrow. I've never heard of a startup that was successful because it got software right in it's early stages.

Sure, that's generally true, but in his example the developer actually spent significantly more time and effort on their bad implementation. It was the worst of both worlds, flawed and tomorrow, so to speak.

I've seen people do things like this more than once, even talented people. They some how get an idea in their head and go way down a rabbit hole without stepping back and realizing it's the wrong design. I think that pattern is more possible in small companies because they are less likely to have their work reviewed often, do formal design sessions, or be pairing with another experienced engineer. I don't buy that things like this don't happen at FAANGs because they are just oh-so-much-better, I would guess it's mostly because they have more mature practices.

That's some incredible anecdata. ;)

I've worked at _very_ large multi-nationals where, in my anecdata, I've seen such hand-tuned monstrosities deployed.

At a Startup, especially one that's "long in the teeth", the senior engineering team are those that have been there the longest and have the largest institutional knowledge.

"Why are there 4 unique keys on this table named masterkey, masterkey2, mk1, mk4?"

Principle Engineer. "Well, the masterkey indicates which key this was mastered on, if you check the masterkey db, which is just "id, timestamp, masterid", this is required to comprehensively log the creation date of the row to maintain the db's audibility in case of SOC audit.

masterkey2, refers to the masterkey2 db, which contains "id, timestamp". Any change to the row requires an update to masterkey2, again for auditbility for last modification reason.

mk1, contains "id, userid". Which is the user that created the row.

Finally, mk4 refers to the new mk4link table, which is a LinkTable that links the main table to the mk4update table. mk4update is 'mk4id, username, timestamp, creator' and contains a list of any changes to the table and a flag indicating this is the creation date. Have you done a SOC compliance report before? No? Well, all of this is mandated by the SOC compliance, its kind of ugly, but it works and is absolutely required."

I get it, you've been at some bad startups and choose to generalize that experience. I can assure you I've worked in some large successful companies with building after building full of the dumbest people you've ever met.

This situation is common in acquisition/acquihire scenarios. The critical people end up leaving because they have the skills to move on or the new leadership above them becomes grating, and many other people end up being left behind. This leaves a piece of software/sub-organization that's making money but can't take it much further than where it was left when these people moved on. It is possible to not end up in this kind of situation but in my experience this was the most common reason why there was a whole floor of people without skills or leadership somehow staying on as a zombie.

Interestingly, I have had the opposite experience. In a legit startup, at least one that is pre-significant revenue, when you are still looking for "market fit" (aka bleeding money), you don't have the time to reinvent the wheel. Its more like "Please god let there be some reasonably workable library already built for this so I can focus on the important stuff!"

Bigger companies IME, tend to be the ones that can afford to reinvent the wheel, and also tend to have the ~~arrogance~~ size to feel that they are a special enough snowflake to eschew something off the shelf and build something custom tailored exactly to their needs. They also have big enough budgets to be able to spare the manpower on it.

My experience has been largely in the financial space, maybe that is the key difference.

Right.. at Google, you have immense numbers of people work on entirely useless products that get canceled a year later.

I shouldn't reply, but oh well:

> people work on entirely useless products that get canceled a year later.

You just described 99% of startups :-)

I've worked at both (Google from 09-14, technical cofounder in 07-08 and again from 14-present, and also a financial software startup from 05-07) and my perception is that the kinds of problems you work on are very different.

At Google you do rigorous engineering, you're intensely data-driven, you have to work at massive scale, everything you touch is a distributed system (with all the skills and pitfalls that comes with working on that), and you'll often learn a lot of fundamental CS algorithms because you need to re-implement them to work across 1000s of machines rather than using a standard library built for a single address space.

As a founder, it's just one problem after another, rapid fire, and you might have 1-2 days to solve something that took 2 months at Google. You do a lot of hacky 80/20 solutions. You need to think big-picture on everything and understand how everything fits together. You solve a much wider variety of problems, but you don't really go into depth with anything. Rigorous engineering isn't really part of a founder's job description, and some people view that as being dumb or poorly trained, but you make up for that in speed, ambiguity, and breadth.

I'd say that when I joined Google in '09, the level of colleagues there was much higher than the general level of technical founder prowess in the Valley, and it remained that way for the whole time I was there. But the types of employees Google hired in '13 were very different from the types of employees hired in '09 (who themselves were very different from those hired in '02), and it wouldn't surprise me if starting in '15 or so the balance started shifting back towards startup founders. Honestly I think the best technical minds today are actually doing cryptocurrency "non-profits" (scare quotes because they're actually being paid by capital appreciation of their founder tokens) - I've been quite impressed by the algorithms being discovered by projects like Ethereum, OmiseGo, MakerDao, zCash, Monero, etc.

I've personally cut Google's interview process short several times now; I get far enough to seriously reconsider, and tell them I'm not interested.

> As a founder, it's just one problem after another, rapid fire, and you might have 1-2 days to solve something that took 2 months at Google. You do a lot of hacky 80/20 solutions. You need to think big-picture on everything and understand how everything fits together. You solve a much wider variety of problems, but you don't really go into depth with anything. Rigorous engineering isn't really part of a founder's job description, and some people view that as being dumb or poorly trained, but you make up for that in speed, ambiguity, and breadth.

This is why. While I sometimes yearn for a little more rigour, I certainly do not miss change reviews taking weeks and months at a time, and projects languishing while we attend endless meetings which seem designed to _undermine_ consensus rather than build it. I find the glacial process of large corporations to be utterly frustrating.

That's probably because you were talking to " CS-ish PhD students".

First of all, they're looking to validate the choice they made in lieu of becoming a millionaire. It helps them sleep at night to think Google or whatever isn't cool (maybe it isn't).

Second, they're interested and driven by different things.

Every single good/great practical software engineer I know from college is working at FAANG or a unicorn.

Good point: that sample was of people who chose to go to PhD programs rather than to (or stay in) a lucrative FAANG engineering position, so maybe not representative of people considering engineering tracks.

Adding to the other responses here; in my experience many engineers at startups get sucked into the mindset of aggressive sprints and crunch time. This manifests as a failure to properly estimate project time. If you are working remote, managing your own hours, and properly estimating your tickets then there is no reason you can't have a very reasonable work/life balance.

I've worked at a startup that mandated no developers worked outside core hours (unless responding to an on-call issue, we all took turns on call).

It worked fine. The founders were fairly enlightened people, and well aware that we were in this for the long haul - success would take time and nobody could work long hours without the quality of the work suffering.

This wasn't the case for all staff, mind. There were definitely people in some roles who worked longer hours. Marketing and PR mostly.

Thanks, there is hope then! Something similar I see at my current work place. I always try to send the message it's a marathon and not a constant sprint.

Eng at my startup (I'm a founder) can work a straight 40-45 hours per week, which translates into probably about 30h/week of heads-down coding, and be highly appreciated.

We rotate on-call duties, but seriously, if you're fighting fires all the time, it's because you're bad at computers. Get some discipline about writing code that doesn't blow up constantly, get good at blue-green deploys, do code review, run post-mortems, etc. Basically, exercise some professionalism.

We definitely have fires, but it's not a weekly event. Or monthly.

Now, not every company is going to be professional, but as a software engineer in this market, where you work is your choice. You can work at a startup building comparatively boring software (like mine!) that sells to enterprises, for founders who don't work 80 hour weeks, and have a good working environment. Or you can not. But now, perhaps more than any other time ever, the choice is yours.

Why not do consulting/contract work instead? I quit my job (ironically at a startup) and took a massive pay _raise_. I worked from home while I was consulting. For some reason people find it much easier to part with cash if you're not a permanent employee. :-) I was making _more_ money than I ever did at FANG, by quite a margin, even accounting for taxes, health insurance and PTO (lack thereof).

"Making a lot of money in salary."

I think a bit of perspective is in order. When the bar for comparison is technical principles at FAANG, yes.

If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just fine. That is "wealthy" for a lot of people in this country.

I know someone that delivered food to restaurants. He woke up at 4am, and periodically did double shifts. His work life balance was worse than almost any developer I know. And he had to carry stuff. [That was a bad work/life balance].

Seriously, count you blessing if you're in software now. I have been doing this 20 years and this is the best it's been since before the .com bubble ended.

The comparison isn't between working at a software startup and delivering food. It is between working at a software startup and a different software job. The other software job is almost always better for the reasons listed above.

> “If you want to own a house, have paid-for cars, put your kid through school, put away savings, and otherwise be completely comfortable then you can do just fine.”

lol wut ? if you work in a typical SF startup, you can do precisely none of these things. Like, literally zero.

Well, it depends on the definition of "startup." If you work exclusively at seed-stage or A-round companies with like less than 15 employees, your salary will be a lot lower than if you work at lots of B and C-stage companies.

I've worked at companies that at least called themselves startups for my entire career, and I own a house in San Bruno, my wife and I each have paid-for cars, we can put our kids through school, and we put away savings.

How much more expensive would your house be today than when you bought it? How about 5-10 years from now?

I bought my (current) house eight months ago.

SF startup cash comp for engineers is comfortably in the 150k-200k range, and often higher. This is series A, series B stage companies. If you have a few years of experience and are making less than this then I'm please to be able to inform you that you are underpaid.

If you have one of those incomes at the higher end, you can do these things in the bay area. If you have more than one then that stuff is not hard at all.

Berkeley has pleasant single family homes in a great school district around the $1MM mark. You can absolutely do that on $200k/year. IMO you should for sure be able to reach the mark where this is comfortable financially by the time you're around 30.

You mean people have quit coming in full cash 10-15% over ask for houses in the bay area ?

2 years ago people with standard financing didnt have a chance in hell of buying a house in the Bay

I know a bunch of people who have bought in this price range with standard financing, and I based the numbers on sale prices.

They'll be a lot more expensive by the time some of us turn 30.

Unless you mean both spouses should earn around 200k and thus bringing in a FAANG-equivalent income of 400k, I really don't know how you could afford what you are saying on a single 150k-200k salary (and perhaps another 50k for your spouse's salary, since not everybody works in tech).

After paying for CA taxes, fed taxes, kids' schools, rent, car expenses, 401k contributions, I really don't know how you would come up with the savings necessary for the huge down payment required for a house there.

Just last week, a friend of mine got outbid on a ~1.5M house in the East Bay Area because another buyer came in and offered a down payment of $700k (!!), whereas my friend just had a more traditional 20%.

Good luck getting to those savings on a 150k startup salary and mostly worthless options.

In my experience, and I certainly respect yours, people just need to stop working for startups and go to big corporations, period.

And I speak as someone who had a low 7 figure liquidation event from a startup, and I'm still so against startups, because that liquidation event still didn't match the compensation I could have gotten as FAANG all along.

Why would it matter 20% or 700k as a seller I get the full amount from the bank.

I believe the buyer was also slightly more aggressive, i.e. was willing to let the deal close faster than my friend, who rightfully wanted to take his time before getting into the biggest purchase of his life (inspections and such). That, paired with the massive downpayment the buyer was ready to immediately put in earnest money, was enough to convince the seller. Real estate transactions are not always that rational.

Also, many folks in the Bay Area just go all cash, and that's obviously much better for the seller since it means very fast closing.

But this if off topic, because a person on a 150k startup salary in the Bay Area won't be able to participate in any of these discussions.

Because most offers are "subject to favorable financing" and if the person doesnt get favorable financing, the offer falls thru and the seller ends up holding the housing longer w/o a seller and paying the carry. People will often sell at a lower absolute price (slightly lower) for all-cash offers without the issues of financing.

Also, financing can fall thru for silly reasons (eg the bank found some crazy lien from the 1940s) and want it cleared before they offer financing.

>>FAANG-equivalent income of 400k

LUL dude, I hear this shit being parroted ad-nauseum. The amount of FAANG people that hit this level or more is like, 5-10%. Take a look at the top 5-10% of non-FAANG companies and you'll see those employees are also hitting this mark. There's nothing special about FAANG. I understand lots of FAANG employees parrot this around to make themselves feel better about their life choices.

According to my experience (and again, that's the only thing I know), that's not even remotely true.

When I interviewed a couple years ago, I made sure to interview at FAANG (specifically Facebook, Google, Netflix) and I also interviewed at half dozen big public companies in the same couple months (among which Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks). I didn't interview at any private company (Uber, AirBnB, ...), since I was coming out of the startup world and I wanted liquid compensation.

The FAANG offers that came back were all significantly higher than the other ones, and the constant was certainly me (a software engineer with 7 years of experience at the time and a BS + MS in Computer Engineering).

All the FAANG offers (luckily I got an offer from all the 3 I interviewed at) were at a total liquid compensation of $~400-450k/y (annualized cash + RSU), and I'm certainly not in the top 10% of their tech workforce, not even remotely close, I come in as a generalist with some ops experience who spent a couple months studying algorithms and data structures. I don't even have an active GitHub profile.

All the other non-FAANG tech companies (I got an offer from 4) were at a total liquid compensation of $~220k/y (annualized cash + RSU).

The only other companies who matched the FAANG offers were a couple of hedge funds on the East Coast, but I didn't want to relocate and I wanted to keep working for a tech company.

In the end, I joined Google.

So, I'm just reporting my own personal experience based on the data I directly experienced (I have PDFs of all the offers :-)). Feel free to ask any follow up question, I love educating software engineers on their real market value, since I think many sell themselves too short in this thriving market.

How has your TC changed since you’ve joined Google?

The stock value has slightly increased over the past year or so, and have received some refreshers. Very happy with the compensation part. I don't have kids and am looking for an early retirement outside the US, so I'm able to stash away significant amount of savings every month.

Sounds like you were interviewing at the ~L5 equivalent level. Any insights on getting hired (or even interviewed) at L5 vs L4?

Yes, based on my own experience and that of my peers, I think it's very plausible that you would have accumulated savings to get you 20% down on a $1MM place over the course of (say) spending the last six to eight years in San Francisco with household income in the 150 to 200k range. You might have to make a tradeoff of (eg) not maxing your 401k contributions if you're on the lower end. I mean, we're talking probably about saving $20k/yr when you factor in compounded returns from (eg) the S&P500.

I agree that this math does _not_ work as well if you're moving to San Francisco and already have a family but no preexisting savings, so don't do that.

It's also true that if you rely on financing you will get outbid on some houses. But I know plenty of people who've successfully bought using financing.

also, self reply to observe: not saying this means you should or should not work at a startup. just that the idea that you can't live a decent lifestyle at startups is not true.

You pay for it in commute time, though. I just checked Zillow; the houses that are anywhere within walking distance of BART go for $1.7-$2.8M, with the $1M homes clustered near the freeway. Driving across the Bay Bridge into SF can easily take an hour; hell, I know people who've been stuck on the bridge for over an hour.

For precisely this reason, the most valuable real estate in Berkeley is BART parking. It's also (officially) not for sale at any price. You have to sit on the waitlist for a few years. I'm sure there's a black secondary market somewhere but I haven't found it.

BART is looking to eliminate all its parking, so this strategy won't work much longer. (They claim that the parking program doesn't bring in much revenue, but also refuse to charge a market-clearing price!)

Maybe the houses away from BART will get a little more affordable and those willing to walk 45 minutes or so will get a break. Or it'll end up like Sunnyvale where most of the "Caltrain" parking is actually provided by the City.

I started a remote job in August (8 months ago) and I've saved about 400 hours of commute time since then.

(~2.5 hours / day) x (~20 work days / month) x (8 months) = ~400 hours

I checked this before I posted to make sure things hadn't changed.

Here's an example: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Berkeley/2333-Sacramento-St-94702/...

BART is a 20 minute walk, five minute bike ride (and with the weather and topography cycling is a great option).

That's still an hour+ commute: 20 minute walk + 5 minute wait + 35 minute BART ride. Plus however long the walk/connection is on the SF side. If you're working at Embarcadero it could be a few minutes shorter; if you're where a bunch of the post-2010 tech companies are clustered at 7th street in SOMA, it's another 25 or so via bus or light rail connection.

> Berkeley has pleasant single family homes in a great school district around the $1MM mark. You can absolutely do that on $200k/year.

Let's say you make $200k/year and manage to put together a $300k down payment and get a $700k mortgage at 3.8%. Here is the breakdown of your annual spending (using 2018 numbers):

$18,500 to 401K

$35,930 in federal income tax

$10,593 in FICA (Social security and medicare)

$13,724 in California income tax

Take home after tax + retirement savings: $121,253 Also, remember that the rules have changed and only $10,000 in state, local, and property tax is deductible against federal income.

Remaining payments:

$39,140 in mortgage payments

$10,500 in property tax

$1,000 in homeowners insurance

$10,000 in car ownership costs (gas, maintenance, insurance, financing or depreciation)

$4,000 in utilities (gas, electricity, water, trash, internet)

$1,000 for phone

That leaves you with $55,613 of "real" annual take home, or $4,634 per month, without counting the cost of food, entertainment, other debt servicing, etc. Certainly not poverty wages, and many people get by with far less, but you'll also spend 2+ hours per day commuting and have a significant fraction of your net worth tied up in a house in an earthquake-prone area.

Since we've already accounted for all housing and car payments (btw, your car ownership costs are way too high as a lower bound. I would say an decent $10k car you hold on to for 5 years at a time would have total annual costs closer to $5/year) that doesn't sound bad at all

I was using the numbers here: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ but you could certainly get it down a bit if you don't mind driving an older car.

15k miles a year is also a lot of miles. I probably drive less than 5k.

Well, if you're commuting two hours a day, you'll certainly be driving quite a few miles.

I drive around 40,000km (~25,000 miles) and that's around a 2 hour round trip commute.

Berkeley -> Mountain View is 50 miles one way (25,000 per year)

Berkeley -> San Mateo is 35 miles one way (17,500 per year)

Berkeley -> San Francisco is 15 miles one way - 7500 per year (at an average speed of 20 mph)

If you can use BART or CalTrain to get to work then you can get those numbers way down, but it's not an option for everyone.

2+ hours per day commuting? BART from Berkeley to Powell St station is 30 minutes. You have last mile for sure, but this totally works for most SF based startup jobs.

But either way... doesn't this prove my point? This does not sound like a difficult way to live, _and_ it factors in luxuries (I for one definitely do not spend $10k/year on car ownership).

> 2+ hours per day commuting? BART from Berkeley to Powell St station is 30 minutes.

1 hour on/waiting for BART + ~40 minutes walking between your house and BART + ~20 minutes walking between BART and your job gets pretty close to 2 hours.

Car cost is indeed high, but if you have a kid you'll probably need one and then you have to factor in the cost of childcare... $2k/month?

I generously based this on one income. If we need childcare then we presumably have a second income?

I realize that single parent households do exist, but we're not covering every case here.

You don't need to spend $10k/year to have a car. This is pretty trivially provable because there are lots of people who own cars who clearly wouldn't be able to do so if that were the case.

rent a bike locker at the station, bike to BART - 10 minutes

Buy a Brompton folding bike - not sure if the US has the same tax advantages that the UK has.

It's a big world, and a lot of interesting startups are not in SF. A lot of interesting startups in SF hire remote, too.

That's a California problem, not inherent to startups themselves.

Not in the Bay Area, where a lot of interesting jobs are (startup or not).

In order to afford those things there, you need to laugh at startup offers and go work for a big company.

Seriously, I would love a world in which every single damn engineer shows their middle finger at a startup trying to hire them unless they pay market rate AND offer the written possibility to sell their shares every year or so, at the current company valuation.

I didn't pay a college and skip out on 4 years of full time work to compare my work life balance options to your delivery driver buddy. He's simply not at the table in the conversation. I don't care about his situation.

That said, I do Postmates for fun on the side and it's awesome. Grinding out hours delivering stuff is honestly pretty chill. Engineering is at least 2x as mentally taxing, unless you're delivering in weird weather conditions. I can put in 4 hours of delivering without grabbing a meal prior and be ready for 4 more no problem.

The work never comes home with you. You're never sitting there wondering "how do I be more effective?" or "how do I even start to solve this issue?". There's little to no politics and 80% or more of the gig is me riding a motorcycle around and popping a few wheelies.

At some point in my career I discovered - to my horror - that I was learning as much or more new tech at consulting gigs than I did as a salaried employee. Even, I daresay, when I was working at startups.

When I pointed this out to people they didn't believe me. So it turned into a bit of a troll for me to say "yeah I'm going to go consult for a while to build up my skillset" and then watch their eyebrows do gymnastics.

You might assume, as I did, that they hire contractors who already know everything. They hire people with a reasonable skill in a couple areas they don't possess. But to actually contribute you have to drink from the firehose, going deep into the tech you were hired for and the constellation of technologies they use that interact with those things in any way. As soon as you start discovering XY Problems you find they were trying to get you to make X happen because they don't know how to do Y (or didn't know Y was possible) and the clock is ticking.

Other reasons for working at a start-up:

- way less big company type politics

- you won't get lost among the crowd at the big company

- if you join early enough you get to define how work is done, instead of just going with whatever process already exists at the big co

- you will know the CEO personally and have chances to discuss ideas and concerns with them in person, at big co there is zero chance of that

Also, the stability argument is interesting. I've actually experience more stability at the start-ups I've worked at than I have at the big companies. Big companies re-organize often and your manager, manager's manager, etc. might change several times in a single year. Lay-offs happen seemingly willy-nilly for reasons peons will never be told. Start-ups don't have any organization to re-organize, and don't have the people to be continually shifting things around and laying people off.

Big companies have multiple projects running in parallel, waiting to see which one will pan out. If you are working on one that doesn't pan out, it will be cancelled without a second thought (often with lay-offs involved). Start-ups have one project and it better work out or the company dies. It will not be cancelled lightly.

Or if you are an older dev, picking up some more modern skills. I joined a startup for just under a year, and while I did not go in intending for it to be short-term, it ended up that way. But I modernized my skill set, got to work with more modern processes, and walked out a stronger dev than when I walked in.

Do you mind saying how old you are? One of my fears is if you're an programmer, you either need to move into management or quit being a programmer because of age bias. I prefer coding over management though.

I'm 46.

I cannot say whether age bias had any impact on my job searches. There have been interview processes that did not result in offers, which did not happen when I was younger. Maybe I was lucky early on. Maybe something has changed.

But I can say that every time I have looked, I have found work.

> Work / life balance

Disagree here for one specific type of startup...remote (which I know you mentioned).

Here's an example day at BigCorp:

- Rise and shine at 5am to work out early enough

- Leave the house by 7am

- 1+ hour commute into work

- Start work at 8am

- Stay until 8pm

- Get on/in the car, train, bus for a 1+ hour commute home

- Late dinner around 9pm

- Veg out because you're exhausted and go to bed by 11pm

Here's an example day at RemoteStartup:

- Rise at 7am to work out

- Make breakfast at 8am

- Standup at 8:30 while eating breakfast

- Work until 5pm

- Spend some family time and eat dinner until 8pm

- Work another 2 hours before bed around 10pm

The work life balance in scenario #2 is far and away more desirable to most people.

You're being downvoted, but I agree.

I worked at a BigCorp and it was one of the worst years of my life. The work/life balance was awful, and the pay was shit compared to the hours I put in and satisfaction I got out of the job. All other experiences I've had have been much more satisfying.

On top of this, people think BigCorp is a safe bet where a startup is not, but BigCorp lays people off in large swaths all the time because their stock price moves a millimeter in some random direction.

Can someone tell me what letter "BigCorp" starts with? I'm scared because I'm looking at a job at a big corp., but I was under the impression that I could leave the office at 5pm.

I've worked at Uber and Salesforce, and put in very normal hours at both. 8 hour days were standard for devs.

I was at AOL.

My team was acquhired as a "startup within a larger company!!1" which ended up meaning: lower pay, longer hours, no equity, no actual autonomy.

But I was young and foolish and, caving to peer pressure, decided against my better judgement to take the gig. After my 1 year cliff (and successfully launching the Editions app that they soon after shitcanned) I got the fuck out.

EDIT: keep in mind, my hours were a product of my specific team, and the fact that I was commuting from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto. It would have likely been a regular 9-5 on other teams, and I'm pretty sure most of the other people there had regular hours.

It all depends on the team you are on. When I worked at IBM I knew lots of people who were 8 to 4. My team was pretty much 60 hour weeks minimum. Though it was because of the asshole management I had.

I once got a dressing down from my director because I took a PTO day after working 20 days straight. I am so glad I don't work there anymore.

Who the fuck works 12hr/day at bigcorp? I work at bigcorp and I think most people are probably working an average of 7 hr/day working generally any hours that have them in the office during core business hours

I know ~10 people that work at Google and 20+ that work at Amazon. I haven’t asked every single one, but the consensus is that around principle level your work days are pretty much always 12+ hours.

What an absolutely ridiculous strawman. Anyone can come up with lopsided scenarios to make one seem better than the other.

Here's an example day at BigCorp:

- Rise at 9am because standup isn't until 10am

- 10 minute commute since you're paid well enough to live near the office

- Arrive at work at 10am

- 1 hour lunch break at 12pm

- Leave work early at 4pm to miss the gym rush

- Get home by 6pm, enjoy the rest of the day until midnight

Versus RemoteCorp:

- Rise at 6am, immediately start working since you're online

- Work through lunch and eat your desk because you don't have a separate space

- Don't clock off at 5pm because you're always on. Keep checkin in on emails until 10-11pm

- Don't go outside at all because you never changed out of your pajamas. Sunlight seen: 0. People talked to: 0.

I definitely know which I prefer.

I don't see the argument here. Strawman or not, the case I made is fairly common (ask around). The case you made is not.

many of my friends have that schedule. It's kind of what you make it (and to an extent your team at BigCo). But definitely fairly common in my friends' cases.

You can have an unhealthy work life balance in any job, whether on site or remote.

Some of that is undoubtedly controlled by the job itself, but some is usually also controlled by you and the boundaries you choose to set for your job.

Most people work around 7-8 hrs/day at big corp. It is also possible to stay inside of 15 minutes from work (A lot of Boston, Seattle people I know do this)

I know some people who go back home for a quick lunch or disappear for an hour in between. Many of these companies only care about you getting your work done and being present for all the meetings.

Ofc, there are just as many where your case applies. But, it is certainly not the norm for FAANG-eque companies

> Invalid reasons for working at a startup: > - Making a lot of money in salary.

Once a startup raises a series A is there actually any reason to pay below-market? Fresh out of college I was employee #1 at a startup that had funding, and was basically at the mythical "Google salary for new college graduate" figure that is thrown around here, and higher than competing offers from name brand tech cos.

Equity grants from public companies are pretty liquid and as good as salary.

Yes, because startups are usually still cash poor after a Series A and you don't want to burn more than you need to. The whole point is to conserve cash until you can find more money or turn a profit, and employee salary is usually the largest cost for most companies.

>> Once a startup raises a series A is there actually any reason to pay below-market?

Yes, because there is a greater fool competing with you who seems to thinking the theoretical value of their illiquid options is worth a trade-off for equivalent actual cash.

> is there actually any reason to pay below-market?

"market" is a big chunk of change. "Google salary" is not market. It's closer to 50% of market. (GSUs and annual bonus are significant aspects of comp that are basically cash). "Netflix salary" is market, and for a series A company there are a lot of reasons not to pay senior engineers 300k+.

I'd personally add one - if you're an early enough employee, you can have a hand in personally shaping the culture of the company around you. I suppose this can fit into "work a certain way".

It's fulfilling to do that, but all successful startups go through a phase where they become more professional and hire a lot of experienced leaders. The culture the 'old' team worked to create very quickly gets diluted and replaced. Not necessarily for worse, or for bad reasons, but it's a reality that a lot of early employees find challenging.

Another valid reason: - You'd like to found a company yourself but would prefer to learn from other people's mistakes first.

To add another invalid reason for working at a startup:

- get good experience on many different technologies

If you want to learn how to do things quickly, often in a way that barely holds together, then yes, you will get that work experience in a startup.

If you want an opportunity to learn how to do things right, you need to work with experts. Your startup is incredibly unlikely to have experts on many different technologies.

What's "valid" isn't a matter of immutable natural law. Clearly there are some contributors to startups---founders and early investors---who demand and get low-probability, high-reward financial bets that can, albeit probably won't, pay off big. Whether that bet is available to others, and to what extent, is a matter of choice.

If you've got something valuable to offer, and want founder-like exposure to risk and reward, negotiate a founder-like equity package. If they won't give it to you, it's not because they're a startup. It's because they're unwilling to give it to you. Perhaps they don't think you're worth it. Perhaps they just don't want to share the pie like that.

Maybe, one more in valid reasons.

- Less politics, and more autonomy (if you are given a certain role). - The dopamine or kick that comes with solving problems and the joy of getting results fast. Quite a few occasions, I have felt more involved in a startup than a big MNC. Maybe different kind of culture. (Consulting is the worst in case you like to see results for your ideas though)

In general, I agree with this. I'm also working with a startup now, and not as a founder, and a couple of your reasons to do so resonate.

But also, as to your invalid reasons list:

- The money is good.

- The work-life balance is excellent.

- And it's perfectly stable.

This usually is not the case. But if you're in a position to negotiate for these things and the founders are in the right position to offer them, it can be.

"- You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route."

for this you have a much better chance at an established small company that doesn't need crazy growth. From what I see most startups prefer putting everybody into a big bullpen.

What kind of startup are we talking about here? E.g., 1-10 person company, or one that's accepted a few rounds of founding and has a measurable likelihood of IPOing in a few years? Both can reasonably be considered startups.

I think a point of confusion is that "startup" means different things to different people. I believe the parent comment here really means "average, early-stage SF startup" in place of "startup".

I've had great work / life balance at the last couple startups I've been at. I think you can find the full range at both startups and big companies.

Wow, the music business.

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