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Comment by achompas | Hacker News Reader

Max, are you trolling here? This kinda smells like trolling, because I don't think you'd be the type to generalize across all startups like this.

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It's my opinion. Working at a startup, you're underpaid and overworked for very little financial benefit.

Ill second that - skip the startups and work for yourself instead if at all possible

I have friends who love startups but would never start one. It's not for everyone.

Agreed - if someone enjoys their startup life, more power to them in that there is nothing that pays better than enjoying your situation. For someone who is looking at it as a financial play but sitting in a startup that is grinding them down to nothing, they are most likely making an extremely bad investment.

Obviously, that's true of some startups, but very wrong in others.

Working at Weebly, you have similar hours to BigCo (although you'll be 10x more productive), paid market rate (or slightly above), and receive your fair share of the outcome.

You also get to work with a fun group of people who are obsessed with being productive, and not much else. Maybe we're the exception, but we don't care if you're a 9-5 type of person, if you're very productive during those hours.

Working at a startup doesn't have to be shit, just because some startups are.

Maybe in the dot com era. Venture backed startups nowadays pay better than a lot of typical programming jobs.

That's fine, I'm just surprised you'd make such a sweeping generalization. Not all BigCos are the same--why would all startups be the same?

I'm not a startup cheerleader -- "come change the world!" is the most overused pitch line ever -- but there are tons of examples (37signals, some YC teams, some of the larger NY startups) countering this generalization.

Why would he be trolling? Sounds like the general truth to me. I'd accuse him of trolling if he said the opposite

You really think this would be true across a spectrum of companies with different funding situations, different revenue streams, and different user bases?

Not trolling at all. Some of us have the opinion that you have to be a fool to work at a startup.

I don't get this sentiment--it completely ignores the differences between mature and fledgling startups.

It's clearly not all unicorns and cupcakes, but there's a difference between "work for us at 2/3rds market plus 1%" and "we're VC-backed, work for us at market and get health plus other nice perks." Startups are not uniform.

Max is right. As an employee, Startups do beat the shit out of you and if the startup shuts down after a year, you gotta begin all over again from where you started a year back.

but starting all over again is the fun part

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