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Comment by jhbao | Hacker News Reader

This article isn’t about if you should join a startup vs. a big company. It’s about if you should join a startup vs. a FAANG company, which offers outrageous compensation & benefits. From that perspective, FAANG is the obvious choice 99% of the time.

The more and apt comparison would be if you should work at a startup vs. a corporate job at a HP or Qualcomm. At those type of companies, compensation is not competitive (they often off-shore), benefits are tight, and the work is not interesting. It could very well be argued that a startup, even with high probability of failure, would be more fulfilling.

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I'm part of a mentoring group for recent college grads. One of our biggest challenges is that much of the conversation on HN, Twitter, Blind, and other sites assumes that FAANG admission is guaranteed.

This becomes a major struggle for juniors when they realize that there aren't any FAANG offices in their location. Many others apply to FAANG but don't receive offers, which is devastating if every HN comment, medium article, and Tweet they read revolves around getting into FAANG.

It's a strange situation to have to console junior engineers about their "paltry" $130K compensation at comfortable 9-5 jobs in low cost of living cities.

I have to remind a lot of people that the FAANG interview acceptance rate is very, very small. This idea that everyone can call up FAANg and get a $200K+ job in their city is not helpful to anyone but top candidates in a few select cities.

I fully agree that the fervor around FAANG is unhealthy. However, if you are just at the start if your career, that is the best time to move to wherever the jobs you are interested in are, rather than restricting yourself to what is available near where you currently are. There will be folks that have obligations preventing that, but most recent college grads should have little holding them from moving.

This comment is a good summary of the problem I was describing: It's easy to say that anyone who can get a FAANG job should get a FAANG job, but if circumstances don't line up, what else? That's where many students draw a blank, because all of the advice they've consumed revolves around FAANG job offers that may not arrive.

Statistically, more people are rejected than accepted by FAANG companies. A lot of my mentoring time is spent helping students figure out what's next when their primary FAANG plan doesn't (or can't) work out.

The number of successful top tech companies keeps growing. The winner-takes-all reality of our current tech business environment means that the job market is:

1. These top companies that pay very well and offer excellent career growth prospects.

2. Everything else below.

So the real answer is "keep working at your fallback option until you can finally graduate to one of the lucrative positions at the top of the pyramid".

That's the real, no-BS best course for the employees themselves. For companies below that top, that is horrible situation because it means all their employees (and especially their best) are temps just waiting for their real shot elsewhere. However, it is also the reality: most employees do leave for that golden top-tech offer that pays them x2+ their current comp with no risk.

Non-top companies don't really help the situation much themselves; as we all know having FAANG on your resume is the surest way to get interviews, offers, and career upgrades everywhere outside of FAANG as well.

So, the "top-tech or bust" attitude will continue.

Companies below the top can pay competitive rates, of deal with their employees wanting to go to the top. this is a natural consequence of market economies

That is because a lot of people don't realize that we are not all based in the bay area and in fact in majority of the countries you have to scrape for 100 bucks after college with no skills and no name university. I am not being negative here, but its just the fact that privilege (even geographical) makes up for a lot in this case...

They also know that the money/prestige they start making at the beginning of their career can vastly change their trajectory in economic terms. I would argue that the chance of making $500k/yr 10 years into their career will be vastly different if someone goes to FAANG vs a Microsoft temp role.

I suspect it's not a carefully-planned long-term strategy on the part of new college grads - they're just comparing offers and picking the best.

I imagine being under mountains of student debt makes them more nervous.

I work at a company that doesn’t offer a total compensation package competitive with a FAANG, but still definitely very healthy, and we do lose many straight-outta-college candidates all the time who are demanding base pay of $200k+ because “that’s what I’d get if I worked for Google.” After denying that, unfortunately, some candidates insinuate that being offered $1.x * 10^5 for an entry-level position is a shrewd ploy to brazenly take advantage of their valuable skills at low cost.

ironically google pay is competitively low when youre at that tier. having worked there and other places google pays the least out of top tier companies. (no im not considering amazon or msft as the same level)

Which companies do you consider top tier?

airbnb facebook stripe snap google uber lyft and others (not even including hft firms like two sigma or jane street or citadel)

I believe you. I was shocked by how low Amazon offered for a senior-ish position. I walked away from it. Went to a medium-sized high-growth pre-IPO company with Facebook+ comp. FAANG is overrated.

yeah amazon’s offers are amazingly bad. that being said their stellar stock growth has more than made up for it in the past

Top tier in salaries or in technical talent?

> After denying that, unfortunately, some candidates insinuate that being offered $1.x * 10^5 for an entry-level position is a shrewd ploy to brazenly take advantage of their valuable skills at low cost.

There are no absolute anchors in the compensation market, it's all relative.

Once enough companies pay $200k for entry-level, then anyone paying $130k is underpaying, regardless of how "big" that number looks to you, or how much lower it was 5-10 years ago.

Why are we implicitly criticizing young engineers for trying to maximize their value in the market? C-level execs reject multi-million offers all the time if they can get a better one. There's no room for moral outrage here at the "snooty young devs scoffing at $130k pay", this is just market economics.

Also, these young engineers are keenly aware of the huge impact that a starting comp of $200k will have on their future comp, career prospects, etc. This is just a reality and we shouldn't disparage our fellow engineers for responding to it.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want to maximize your pay, and I don’t give anyone flak for that. I don’t think anyone has to settle for less if they have opportunities to get more. (Mind you, 95% of the time, when people say they could get more, they don’t actually have another offer in hand, they just posit the existence of it based off of what they’ve heard.)

But I’d prefer engineers simply reject the offer as opposed to insinuating they’re somehow being swindled. It’s ridiculous, especially given all the context.

It’s rich to discuss market economics, because there’s probably fewer than 100 companies, all located in the bay or NYC, and all rather prestigious, that pay the mad money being discussed. By and large, the majority of the market does not pay this much money, and the majority of software engineers could only dream of $200k base salary for an entry-level position. Pretty frequently, it is “snooty young devs scoffing”, especially when they have zero other offers in hand, and no prospects of getting them.

> (Mind you, 95% of the time, when people say they could get more, they don’t actually have another offer in hand, they just posit the existence of it based off of what they’ve heard.)

If they keep doing that, they'll only hurt themselves.

> But I’d prefer engineers simply reject the offer as opposed to insinuating they’re somehow being swindled.

How often do they "insinuate" that?

I'd chalk it up to bitterness: "Blind told me to expect a $200k offers, 10 of the best students in my graduation year got such offers, and I'm just as good as they are, why do I keep getting these lowball offers, the world is so unfair, these companies are so unfair trying to exploit me!"

> It’s rich to discuss market economics, because there’s probably fewer than 100 companies, all located in the bay or NYC, and all rather prestigious, that pay the mad money being discussed.

Nah, FAANG pays about the same in Seattle as they do in the Bay/NYC, and only slightly less in satellite offices.

> Pretty frequently, it is “snooty young devs scoffing”, especially when they have zero other offers in hand, and no prospects of getting them.

If that's the case, then they're only hurting themselves and prolonging their search. Eventually they'll have to settle for one of these position they scoff at.

This is a well-known phenomenon around subjective well-being. It plays out in very interesting ways, for example, most millionaires don’t view themselves as wealthy.

People untrained in escaping these dark thought patterns usually aren’t as happy as they could be.

> People untrained in escaping these dark thought patterns

What is this training of which you speak?

E.g. being raised in a culture of gratitude, where the next generation is trained to find and appreciate the small things of life. It takes time and has to be incorporated into the rhythm of life.

It's not necessarily "dark" in the sense that human beings are programmed to always look for betterment for a reason. If human beings didn't have this drive to always do better and get more, we definitely wouldn't have the highly developed modern society that we have nowadays, with broadly speaking the best living conditions in history.

Of course there are people who argue that the hunter-gatherers might well have been happier in some aspects, but the point is even they didn't think differently: A tribe living in an area with abundant resources might still always dream of greener pastures.

One should definitely learn to strike a balance between wanting more and enjoying what they have, though my point is that to totally label such thoughts "dark" doesn't sound fair to me. If human beings lose this drive altogether, we'd be in for very dangerous times with nobody having the ambition to strive and improve anything.

There are other aspects that you need to take into consideration: bureaucracy, the enforced-by-law company values(last year I got an offer which seemed really appealing until I saw the contract and some of those clauses), the endless "open a jira ticket" for every little thing such as rebooting a development server or whatever(which ends up being a 2 day task with hours of explanations as opposed to ssh; sudo rebbot), the endless and pointless meetings which are filled with "we should" coming from people who love taking credit when something is going right but will toss the blame to anyone they can when they aren't. Not to mention absurd expenses for "business trips" which are pointless in the vast majority of cases. I've been to several of these and they were all a waste of money and time: seriously, fly 20 people across the world just so they can listen to 3 days of "we should" lectures, there goes a ton of money which could have been spent on something useful like training or even a few small bonuses for the people that have worked their asses off. I've worked in such environments for many many years and the idea of ending up in such a place again terrifies me(I certainly started appreciating the absence of all that crap, though I never really knew how much all that truly bothered me until I ran away from it).

My point is, if you decide to go with a FAANG, you will get the quirky benefits and traits but at the expense of having to throttle yourself much below your capacity and dealing with a ton of frustration coming from the corporate side of things.

Most tech startups seem to model their hiring practices and organization around FAANG companies (technical screens, OKRs, Agile, reliability teams, etc.) so I think the comparison is actually more interesting if you leave out the "normal" jobs. Since a lot of the skills are transferrable, you're more likely to have the option of either rather than one or the other.

The reason tech tends to compare vs FANG is that the "canonical" startup is founded by a Stanford or Harvard graduate and hires friends/employees exclusively from Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. This was certainly the case for the tech focused breakouts in the last few decades (FB, Google, Dropbox, Palantir, Stripe).

Given these are the example startups, every one of those employees more or less had a FANG offer as a backup.

Ding Ding Ding! And here’s the quote from the article:

> contrast, if you were to take a job at a tier 1 tech firm, such as Facebook or Google, as a high-quality engineer your salary can be $200-400k with an additional $100-250K in equity.

Even then, I don't think lumping all "startups" in one basket is fair. A friend of mine joined Snowflake (and rejected some FAANG offers) when it had ~40 engineers, i.e. when it could still well be called a "startup". He can literally retire after his options are fully vested, just 4 years after he joined (barring some catastrophic event to Snowflake withinin a couple of years' time horizon). AFAIK aiming for late-stage startups has been a common strategy for people trying to strike gold. Maybe it's less valid nowadays? But it doesn't seem to make sense to me to say that working for a startup is 99% of the time worse than working for FAANG. "Overrated" it could be, and many startups, especially early-stage ones, suffer from a huge amount of uncertainty for people aiming for the liquidity event, which they may well underestimate. But I can't imagine anybody, by working at FAANG, getting the amount of money he is now projected to get.

Another interesting (and non-US-centric) factor for me is the flexibility a startup can offer in terms of your work and compensation, especially in an era where going remote seems to be an unstoppable trend. If the company is willing to pay all employees the same amount of salary, regardless of where they live in the world, it could be a no brainer for somebody not living in the US to work for such a startup. The salary they get can easily exceed Google L4 total pay (e.g. in the UK and in Germany, not to mention in most other countries). Of course, many companies such as GitLab aggressively adjust their salary according to where you work from, but I've seen more and more companies that don't. It will be very interesting to see how the market sorts itself out in a few years' time: Seems to me the proliferation of remote work could result in US salary and remote salary meeting somewhere in the middle.

You giving both examples as product companies is still generous. Most computer scientists work in service companies.

Why do HP and Qualcomm want to offshore but FAANGs dont?

The job of an outsourced position and senior+ IC role in top tech firms are fundamentally different. You can't survive just be churning through ticket backlogs. Sometimes you are expect to come up with initiatives, gather support and resources, deliver said initiatives that have a measurable impact to a global company without much guidance or help from your boss; at higher IC tracks, the kind of initiatives you lead can have meaningful impact to a whole sector.

These expectations, in a more traditional company, is normally reserved for positions much higher up in the org chart.

Business leadership culture.

Does anyone consider FAANG to be startups? I'm confused by your comment.

No, what they are saying is that people present a false dilemma where your options to work are either at a FAANG or at a startup.

Most people work at non-FAANG companies. If you're going to do a write-up on relative merits of working at a startup vs a larger company things are going to lean heavily in favor of the FAANG because the overall risk to compensation is much more favorable.

But if you compare a startup to a more standard tech company then each side will have more pros and cons.

Ya, if we compare startups with say Walmart or Bank of America or InfoSys, startups probably win.

No, and I don't think that's the parent is suggesting that. They are saying if you are looking for a challenging, highly rewarding role, FAANG is a better fit than startups.

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