Show HN: Don't Work With Startups (Or FAANGs)
devcareer.elliotbonneville.com
devcareer.elliotbonneville.com
tl;dr: Don’t work for startups, who need you but can’t afford you. Don’t work for FAANGs, who can afford you but don't need you. Instead, work for medium-size companies, who both need you and can afford you. By doing this, you hold all the cards and can negotiate to achieve the freedom, higher salary, and flexibility that you need.
This reads like a forced conclusion that isn't really supported by the evidence. The points about startup equity having questionable value are good, but it deliberately ignores the fact that startups are the least likely to have bureaucracy and red tape. It then goes on to criticize FAANG companies for having too much bureaucracy and red tape. It feels like cherry-picking points to support the desired conclusion.
Moreover, the criticisms against FAANG aren't really supported by the evidence. The claimed benefits of working for medium-sizes companies feels dubious and doesn't match real-world experience. It feels like this piece is deliberately ignoring the fact that FAANG companies like Google have an overabundance of profits and engineers, leading to some of the most lax demands on individuals. Moving to a medium-sized company means you might be the go-to person who is responsible for keeping a lot of things running, simply because they can't afford to hire enough other qualified engineers to fill out the team. Being desperately needed by a company is a two-edged sword. Especially if you want to go on vacation.
Frankly, this feels like it's being contrarian for the sake of feeling noteworthy or enlightening. It might be more relatable if you at least gave a more honest take on the benefits of working for FAANG or a startup and admitted that medium-sized companies aren't a panacea. As it stands, this just feels dishonest.
> The claimed benefits of working for medium-sizes companies feels dubious and doesn't match real-world experience.
What benefits feel dubious? I'm curious about the real-world experience you're referring to. My real-world experience has been pretty positive, insofar as it has related to my personal goals.
> this piece is deliberately ignoring the fact that FAANG companies like Google have an overabundance of profits and engineers, leading to some of the most lax demands on individuals.
I do like the way you phrased this point a lot, but I did explicitly call this out. Perhaps it needs more emphasis, though? I said...:
> FAANGs pay absurdly well, and working at a large company is much, much slower paced than working at a startup, meaning you don’t need to work nearly as hard.
> if you at least gave a more honest take on the benefits of working for FAANG
What did I miss? I've never worked at a FAANG (have never wanted to for the reasons I outline in my article, primarily location independence).
This like saying "Don't go to MIT; they can tolerate you but don't need you." Sure, you can hold all the cards if you're a big fish in a small pond but wouldn't it better to learn from giant fishes to become a giant fish yourself?
Not sure what you could only learn at a FAANG besides how to navigate intra-company politics, but I'm sure there's at least a few good reasons to be there.
Maximizing freedom and rate probably isn't one of them, though.
> "If you want to start a startup, the best place to learn is absolutely in another startup."
One might equally say that the best place to learn to run a successful business (including a startup) is to work at a place with many successful large business divisions, each with their own P&L.
> "Not sure what you could only learn at a FAANG besides how to navigate intra-company politics, but I'm sure there's at least a few good reasons to be there."
While the skill of FAANG engineers varies, being at a FAANG provides an opportunity to learn from and network with top-tier engineers as well as the processes necessary to deliver quality software on a cadence at scale. While some may scoff that startups don't need that yet, the point of creating a startup is to grow into a successful business.
It's true! I'm mostly going off of what I've read online.
> One might equally say that the best place to learn to run a successful business (including a startup) is to work at a place with many successful large business divisions, each with their own P&L.
I don't think that's true. But even if it were, the point this piece is making is not that FAANGs are not the best place to learn how to run a business.
The point the chapter is making is that FAANGs are less likely to allow remote work / other freedoms, so if that means a lot to you, you should not work at a FAANG. A quick check at levels.io can confirm this fact -- the vast majority of employees are on-site in a tech hub.
> While the skill of FAANG engineers varies, being at a FAANG provides an opportunity to learn from and network with top-tier engineers as well as the processes necessary to deliver quality software on a cadence at scale.
Whether or not this is an important skill depends on what you are optimizing for. I don't need to be able to deliver software at FAANG scale if I don't ever want to work at a FAANG.
While it's true that knowledge does scale down and can make you a better software developer in other areas, I also make the point in the article it's possible to learn about many of these things without sacrificing the freedom that you have to sacrifice to work at a FAANG.
Okay, fair enough.
> "Whether or not this is an important skill depends on what you are optimizing for. I don't need to be able to deliver software at FAANG scale if I don't ever want to work at a FAANG."
There's not much point to enduring the hardship of launching a startup if there's no hope of growing it into at least a medium or large business though? A solid understanding of software processes and even scaling that FAANGs use can be helpful even at that size.
For example, a business I was at was encountering growing pains because their seat-of-the-pants YOLO software development processes weren't working for them anymore at the size they had grown to. Gently nudging them to adopt proper documentation and other software engineering processes known to ease those pains because they'd been battle tested at larger tech companies was part of what I was able to do to help them.
If launching a successful startup is your goal, then working at a FAANG (or a startup, for that matter) is definitely a good idea.
But I think the underlying assumption you're making is that launching a software startup is one's ultimate goal, which isn't a given.