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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

> that it might actually be easier to do a bootstrapped start-up for a year and get bought by Facebook than it is to grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit. I wish I were joking.

If you are not joking you are delusinal, this is not even remotly true.

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You may not agree with OP, but I don't think this view is delusional. Starting a company is a lot of day to day work in terms of hours, but it's more rewarding than doing interview prep. If you spend weeks or months studying for interviews and don't land a job, you get nothing. If you start a business you generally get paid or make profit the whole time, you build relationships and end up with something tangible to show for the experience.

Personally, I would much rather be running a moderately successful business than studying esoteric programming questions full time. At the least, the relative "easiness" of starting a business vs the normal FAANG interview process is personally subjective.

I agree with you that it's a way more interesting journey, but it is by no mean "easier". Especially since OP was talking about getting acquired at the end. Just keeping your business alive is hard enough, let alone being acquired by one of the FANGs.

It's not easy to get acquired by a FANG, but if you're okay with acqui-hire terms of most companies, you'll eventually get acquisition requests if the startup gets a little bit of press or has some traction. I've personally gone through this process several times already, turned down a few acqui-hire requests, and eventually accepted one. One of my startups only lived for 4 months before it was acqui-hired, which was still more enjoyable than doing 4 months of interview prep.

In hindsight, if I accepted my first acqui-hire request, I would've eventually got hired into Google because the startup that wanted to hire us was eventually folded into google, but honestly it's hard to tell from a distance which companies are going to be acquired by a FAANG.

I was part of an aquihire and got screwed every which way. As the acquired's only person in my position and required (almost! I'm not delusional) in order to transition the company, I should have driven a harder bargain when deciding to go along with it. In the future I would not go along without a significant retention bonus, like, say, a percentage of the purchase price that reflected my contribution.

> If you start a business you generally get paid or make profit the whole time

What tech startup is this? Profitability is a long road & for a good chunk of the time you're relying on funding to get you through to profitability. You might get paid but how much you withdraw impacts your runway.

I guess it depends on your previous experience. If you're familiar with actually building a software company, know good people to employ and know a problem that needs solving, it probably is easier to go that route than having to learn the whole interviewing-scam thing that is happening today, in order to just be employed.

Helps that building a company gives you real experience as well while prepping for interview just gives you that, preparation for the interview, while the real job is different than the interview.

The companies that FAANG acquire are usually mid sized, 50+ employees. Getting to that size, in a particular industry that will be of acquisition interested is not going to be easier than getting hired.

Might get you hired at a higher level though, but yeah delusional to think it would be easier.

If leetcoding and going from 0 to acquired by Facebook in a year were just as hard, we’d all be rich.

Even if it was only an order of magnitude difference, the expected value of starting that startup would be so much higher.

They aren’t even in the same ballpark

I think it really depends on your background. For people with a questionable job history, poor credentials, modest intelligence, a speech impediment, and a criminal background self funding to Raman increases in difficulty less than working directly for Facebook. However, ridding the VC train has a lot of the same dependencies as working for Facebook, but is vastly more difficult.

The same is true of networking and friends and family financing. I might look at scraping together a ~200k seed round as trivial, but that’s not true for everyone. On the other hand if 5 of your collage friends are working a FANG companies that’s also a huge leg up.

We’re not talking about bootstrapping for a year, op said selling to Facebook in a year. To pull that off means awesome traction or clubhouse level hype or deep serial founder connections, or corruption at high levels.

All of these are much more difficult to pull off, often requiring years, than simply hitting the books for a few months

OP is exaggerating, but Yahoo under Marissa Mayer wasn't far off. Nicholas Carson's 2015 book about their M&A during this era has lots of details.

what's the actual title of this book? I couldn't find it (my google-fu probably isn't very good, but "Nicholas Carson" is not a very unique patronym...)

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22608584-marissa-mayer-a...

> grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit.

Or go to a serious CS/Engineering school and just take the Algorithm class.

What are peoples opinions on whether just taking the algorithms class helps a lot? People can do it online almost as easily

Most people aren't good at self-directed study of hard things. Taking a class on algorithms at a good school is one of the best ways to learn the challenging material, period. The ability to ask a real human questions when something just doesn't "click" in your brain is invaluable.

You're going to learn novel things in an Algorithms class that you can't learn online - but the way it's taught is easier for most people to digest the material. Motivated/driven/talented individuals can absolutely learn the material themselves.

This is true, since this forum is startup oriented you'll get hate against big companies and pro for startup. Biased but, have to see the conflict of interest

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