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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

Chatted with some early-stage-then-IPO-ed engineers yesterday, I asked "aren't your company IPO-ed and you should have retired?", the answer is, after multiple dilutions in rounds of fund raises, his options ended up worth just a few thousands, not useful at all.

There is no way the startup you have been working for will keep your interest a priority, and you never know if your share will reach zero in the process of multi-stage VC rounds.

Unless you're the founders who will always be at the negotiation table for new rounds, I saw no point to work for startups, not at all.

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I think the main advantage of working at a startup is when you're relatively young and inexperienced - you're being compensated in the experience and accelerated job titles that you can then leverage to ramp up your career by joining other companies or starting your own. Getting an exit is a cherry on top.

I don't think startup job titles are worth much but they can be massive skill accelerators.

If you're in the first 5 years of your career you'll have more opportunity to learn more technologies at a small startup where everyone has to do everything than at a FAANG (especially compared to Google where you will only learn the Google internal stack).

You can leverage that into a much higher paying job in a way that you wouldn't be able to leverage experience at a mid-level company.

I don't think people at established companies care about gaudy job titles at startups. Being a director at some chaotic mess of a company (and much of the time that is what startups are) doesn't signal competence.

The opposite can be true, when IC's at startups who have not truly learned their craft jump to management too early.

Yeah true I suppose there was some bias in my assumption. I was thinking specifically about relatively well known Bay Area startups... say you're a Senior or Staff Engineer at a startup that has raised from top tier VCs then hypothetically you might be better positioned to be come that #1 or #2 engineering hire at the next hot startup, or you'll be able to get more meetings with those VCs should you start your own thing because you're already a "startup person" rather than 1 of X00,000 FAANG engineers.

In my experience, getting a FAANG job accelerates your career as well or better than titling up quickly in a startup. Having a FANG position on your resume is more of a known quantity for future potential employers than being promoted quickly in an unknown startup.

I'm working for an unknown startup and I feel like I will placed in a pool of entry level candidates if I decide to join a big corp.

I would expect that your startup experience would place you well among a pool of entry-level candidates once you made it past the resume screening stage. Where the FANG position is going to help you is in getting past that stage. Fairly or unfairly, having a FANG position on your resume is kinda' like having a degree from an elite university in that recruiters will view your resume more favorably.

That’s a reasonable assessment. I worked at startups for 3 years before joining a FAANG company and they flat-out ignored my startup experience for leveling purposes, placing me as a junior engineer.

This is worth something.

I worked at a blue chip and we hired young devs with 2 years experience at major banks and they were clueless. I don't think they actually did anything. Worse, they didn't realize that they didn't know how to do anything. It was bizarre.

That said, it makes it hard to work in a normal corp, you have to find a special place to work where at least the pace is 'just right' i.e. you get to actually do thing, but they're not going to push you into the ground with too much work and stress.

Even this is becoming less valuable as bigger companies start to invest in training and mentorship.

Three people I know how graduated college recently working at big companies have senior engineers dedicating multiple hours a week to mentorship and a lot of learning opportunities. They're growing much faster than junior engineers thrown into the deep end IMO.

The faster title advancement doesn't mean much IMO. Working at a big company I can say that outside of a certain group of other big companies we just don't trust titles to have any correlation to abilities.

> Chatted with some early-stage-then-IPO-ed engineers yesterday, I asked "aren't your company IPO-ed and you should have retired?", the answer is, after multiple dilutions in rounds of fund raises, his options ended up worth just a few thousands, not useful at all.

Assuming series a engineering role, .30 - .50%, even after dilution, for an IPO'd company, we're assuming 1BN+, to walk away with a "few thousands" is hard to calculate.

A few hundred thousands is more likely (taxes) and even that isn't a worthwhile trade-off for most folks. It'd need to be in the millions to make it more attractive than big tech at the moment.

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