Hard Reset | Hacker News Reader

Hard Reset

sarahguo.com

110 pointsalexzeitler75 comments

No offense to the owner of the site, but the circle thing was very distracting.

I'm not the audience for this but it seems like good advice. Another thing, I learned from the dotcom bubble not to assume a drastic downturn or "macro" (as the article uses) is a temporary thing. They can go on for years and recover slowly.

> It is an unpopular view, but startups are not for everyone. Startups are not for people who panic in times of crisis, they are not for people who want to work 9-to-5, and they are not for people who seek financial stability or a cash salary competitive with FAANG. They are not for people who are going to be offended that someone is sleeping at the office. Teams will once again be more appropriately, and more sparsely populated.

Well, then startups better start paying more. One of the biggest things that caused the "startup financial deal" to get out of whack over the past decade was how much the FAANGs were paying. The old deal was simple "You work harder now, you take less in cash salary now, but with more equity so that if the startup hits, you'll be sitting pretty." Except what happened over the past 15ish years was:

1. VC firms and startup founders took more of the upside.

2. The FAANGs started paying considerably more

So what happened is that all but the very earliest employees, or very senior C-levels that needed a ton of equity and cash to jump to a riskier startup, end up doing worse or barely hitting FAANG level comp even if the startup successfully exists (and, mind you, most startups don't successfully exit).

Basically, I'll put it another way. The reason C-level execs require a ton of cash and equity to join a startup is because they know what their worth is, and they can do math. Many startups still rely on young people fresh out of college who (a) don't know their worth yet, (b) haven't learned how to appropriately value their equity awards, or (c) buy in to a vision to the point that they undervalue how much their skills are worth.

Look, I'm all for working in startups - I've pretty much worked for ones my entire career. But prospective employees should look at their packages and employment options with the same dispassionate eyes that investors use to evaluate companies.

Edit: Sam Altman had a good blog post on how startup employees often get shafted with equity comp, and I totally agree with his diagnosis and proposed solutions: https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity

Yeah, it's more about equity than salary. Founders and very early team members should be sleeping in the office, sure, because their mission, company and personal fortune is on the line. But don't expect a junior engineer who was employee #150 and has no significant skin in the game to give a shit. The "but it's a startup!!" line isn't going to fly unless my personal stake is measured in whole number percentages.

Someone doing it for experience will do it just for that, so junior engineers are ok. But don’t expect someone with 30 years experience building companies and complex tech and kids in college to come and take you to the next level. Taking a 70% haircut for nothing isn’t plausible. And you don’t need to sleep in the office and kill yourself to build amazing software fast and grow a business. Only kids getting started think that works. After multiple 36+12 stunts in my first startup, which was in fact wildly successful, I realized that after 10 hours I wasn’t doing anything valuable. I was spinning my wheels and burning myself out. Now I can do much more in 6 hours of work a day.

I mean hell, you could be part of the magic sauce that helps a new startup grow into something really promising, but until the higher-ups recognize you and truly respect you, you'll probably just get shoved aside at some point, because politics or whatever other change happens during the growth. And the only thing that reflects respect is 1. a meaningful equity percentage and 2. guarantee that you won't be forced to give up the stake because of some exercise deadline after you leave.

I agree with all of this, but I will say that startups can be great for fresh college grads. Not every fresh grad can land a FAANG job, and a startup might be more willing to take a chance on a smart kid with minimal experience. Once there, they'll likely wear multiple hats: everything from coding to infra to even maybe some customer support. Drinking from a firehose can be a great way to learn a lot fast, and likely with more breadth and opportunity to try new things than being SDE Level I on a 10 person team working on a single widget for a multi-widget dashboard for one of dozens of products for 'Big Corpo'.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that a 20-something also has the energy and ability to take risk. A startup folding when you're 25 with no dependents or mortgage is much different than taking that risk as a 40 y/o married father of 2.

As someone in that latter category... nah, dawg, I'll take the steady paycheck and the reasonable work hours.

I actually think it's quite valuable for the young hot-shot to do a stint at a larger company. See how things are done, see what parts of the business you like and don't like, tech that works and tech you'd rather never touch again. Then go take that knowledge to a startup and roll the dice while you're not worried about babysitting or saving for a new roof. You'll have more perspective and more to contribute than a fresh grad for whom everything is greenfield.

IMO I think either or is ok as your first job. With a startup, you also get to see what is possible without the bureaucracy, while if your first experience is a big company, you might think the bureaucracy is necessary.

I think the biggest downside to this approach is that people won’t ask very much of you as a junior.

Yeah, this begs the obvious question - who are startups for? Sure, people love ownership and the sense of mission/purpose, but if the argument is that startups are only for people that love mission/purpose so much that they're willing to get shafted on compensation and shafted on quality of life (in order to make other people rich), then it sounds like the issue is with startups and not the employees who are smart enough to see they're getting a raw deal.

By their logic, startups are for (primarily) white people who come from well off families or otherwise well off individuals that can afford to subsidize and supplement the investor's cash infusion.

Or the family was the primary early investors.

Feels like the point is more about risk tolerance - whether someone is willing to accept lucky of the draw vs. “get shafted.” Most startups fail, but to be captain obvious lots of non-founders still get absurdly rich in startups.

I understand that there's a big difference between a guarantee of a relatively small amount of money and a low chance of a huge amount of money even if the expected value of the former is higher. To also state the obvious, lots of people get absurdly rich winning the lottery - but I still wouldn't advocate buying lottery tickets. Startups which ask their employees to sacrifice "financial stability" (author's words) and any semblance of work-life balance seem like lotteries which most people can't afford to play and provide extremely low EV even to those who can. Even if startups can't match bigco perks and compensation, when they ignore the author's advice and pay employees reasonably well/give them a decent work-life balance, they'll be able to attract talented employees for whom the tradeoffs are actually worthwhile.

The old "ask smart people to be stupid" error followed by confusion from what follows.

The deeper problem is that pattern isn't only common at startups.

Well the FAANG pay is heading in the other direction right now, so the oppurtunity cost math is shifting. I have a feeling it's not just temporary, average pay next year will be lower in FAANGs since there will be less job demand, stock based comp has dropped and is unlikely to go up, and they have very little incentive to bring TC back up to old numbers if there are a lot of people on the market after layoffs.

>Well the FAANG pay is heading in the other direction right now, so the oppurtunity cost math is shifting.

Is it though? I haven't seen any proof of this whatsoever. Bands at my company are the same. Bands at Amazon were recently raised. I keep reading this, and one would expect solid evidence given layoffs, so where is that evidence?

Yes, it is. Bands at Amazon (where the comp was lower compartively) were raised to at least compete with the other FAANGs, but that was before the layoffs/freeze situation when they thought they still had to do that. Comp is majority stock at most of these companies, TC has gone down by definition of stock dropping, and places like Amazon assume growth in fact when calculating your target comp and what to allocate. Refreshers are very unlikely to make up for this drop since they don't have to (supply/demand).

I assume when stock prices are down, then more stock is granted to make up for it no? Obviously, the stock continuing to fall after the grant will result in less tc.

They can and will give some stock refreshers (to those that aren't laid off or marked low performing) but I doubt they will make up for the large drops that happened this year, and the drops that are likely to keep happening over the next year. You have to do that when there is competition, but cross-industry reduction in demand and a want to actually shrink companies (attrition) for software developers means you don't have to do that to keep the number of people you want.

There is a material change in comp when a 'growth stock' stops growing.

speaking of, does anybody know if layers and/or glassdoor have any temporal aspect to their numbers? For example, glassdoor has been around for 15 years, and back then a FAANG comp was very very different than now. Do they just average out the salaries for the last decade when they show average? or is there any way to look at the recent trends on either site? or anywhere else for that matter.

PS maybe worth "asking hn" for this one, note to self

Actually, I predict there will be a software engineer glut in Big Tech like never before in an year or so because:

1. Many visa workers will go back to their (big-tech-less) home countries. Many won't be coming back. Many who were planning to emigrate will not.

2. If you're a CS senior and on the fence about doing a PhD, maybe the headlines will nudge you towards staying in school. Same for career changers.

3. People will value the bird in hand more than ever before. If earlier 30% more money was enough to get someone to hop over, it will take more to make them throw away a stable situation.

That's a load of baloney, man

Those FAANGs are still pulling in a million or three per engineer per year, and there's still a very limited number of engineers who can operate at that scale. That's why Google pays $400k+, not because of cheap interest rates or greed or anything like that

I can almost promise TC will go down on average over at least the next year unless there is a miraculous recovery in the tech sector (as it did signficantly this year already, as I was one of the FAANG folks who saw my pay get cut a huge amount). There's a reason layoffs are happening and hiring freezes. There's also a simple supply/demand aspect here, they have very little demand when hiring is frozen.

Even if they’re down 30% on tc that’s still probably at least p90 for startup pay considering the fact most startups’ monopoly money is in even worse predicament facing inevitable dilution

TC is definitely going down, if for no other reason than unvested RSUs' values have all dropped across the board, but we aren't going to be in a situation where Google is paying remote senior engineers $150k the way that startups do

At my startup we're trying to pay senior devs $150k/yr with no bonuses with stupid vesting plans (if any equity at all) while the CEO is making $500k a year.

Why is the CEO pulling a salary at all? Or are they not the founder and were brought in?

Founders just take the bare minimum to survive, anything else is just irresponsible.

Ha, at a YC backed startup I was at the entire C-suite (which had the two original founders) took a pay bump to $240k+ in less than one year of operation (was not anywhere near cashflow positive) on top of whatever multiple full percentages of stock they held (and assume the founders stock was better than the employee pool. I asked a few times to see the cap table, even redacted, and they refused).

I left so I don't know how much they are paying themselves now...

The startup space is rife with people just looking for a job.

They are a founder with equity. Why? Because they need to support like six kids and their wife doesn't work.

that’s stupid

It is incredibly stupid.

The increase and acquisitions and how negatively they tend to impact employees has also really reduced the expected value of startups. I know dozens of engineers who were at middlingly successful startups and the story is always the same - founders, VCs, and a few key employees get paid and everyone else is shafted.

This has changed how I do the math when founders approach me as an early engineering higher. I make us game out different valuations and how likely they seem and what my potential payout is - I let them know that unless they can offer some contractual protection for my upside during a buyout I have to treat that scenario as one where I get nothing. So far not a single founder has been willing to entertain that sort of agreement.

TL;DR:

After causing a newly minted generation of entrepreneurs to lose fiscal discipline, investors demand companies unwind this capital-burning strategy by seeking immediate profitability, in turn allowing those investors to demonstrate fiscal discipline to their LPs.

The hijacked cursor is very annoying and disappears as one scrolls. Not sure what it's meant to achieve.

what % of startup founders need to hear this advice right now and are blind to reality

I once again ask, how much of the tech industry today could survive a recession? How much of the tech industry revolves around the assumption that user data and advertising space will always have a growing market? How much of the tech industry has no clear path to profitability at all?

> How much of the tech industry has no clear path to profitability at all?

You’re saying “tech industry” but it sounds like you mean “tech startup industry” as how many non-startups are unprofitable?

After benefiting from the fed money printer for the last 15 years you can now see the VC class starting to panic. And the best they can come up with is asking startups to "return the money to your investors" or "work twice as much and sleep in the office". Please. Your lack of due diligence is not my emergency.

It is your emergency if you need to raise funds again, or structured your deals in such a way that the VCs sit in your board and have power.

I can't focus with this circle thing.

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This transcends tangential - it's so annoying it's unusable.

The guideline is there specifically because these things are super annoying. So annoying that talking about them can eat up the whole thread, as this thing is threatening to do.

The guideline seems to be about the common annoyances. That massive yellow thing is definitely not common, and personally had me immediately "nope" off the page.

No the guideline is about not filling threads with one's irritation, however righteous. If it was too annoying to read, that's regrettable but largely interesting to the person who didn't read it. If a wasp is pestering you the entire time you read a piece you probably don't feel the urge to comment about it on HN right? Same thing.

I'm sure the New Yorker wouldn't tolerate this level of irritation. Or were you not shown there?

Maybe they can't use you.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath.
The masters of the subtle schools

Are controversial, polymath.

If the HN link directly resulted in wasps showing up heck yes I'd be commenting about it

The cursor issue was the single biggest takeaway from the article, positive or negative. The headline should have been about it.

Is there a rule about backseat moderating?

registeredcorn posted a workaround. I've pinned it to the top of the thread. Let's stay on topic now please.

It's even more annoying than usual because if you disable scripts you'll find that there's no cursor at all, because the page's css has

    main {
        cursor: none;
    }

Same. Based on a glance through the minimized JS here[0], it looks like it's a custom animation implemented using GreenSock's "TweenLite" [1]. I'm crossing fingers that this isn't a sign of a larger trend.

[0] https://sarahguo.com/script/minify/blog-post-text-min.js

[1] https://greensock.com/tweenlite

Thanks, I went from "neat!" to "arghghlgh" in 3 seconds tops.

Why bother writing words if you're going to deface them with a chew toy?

Ironically "how not to drive your web content off a cliff" applies here.

Running these two lines in the browser console removes the circle and restores the cursor:

  document.querySelectorAll('.container-mouse,.mouse-pointer,.circle-path').forEach(n => n.remove());
  document.getElementsByTagName('main')[0].style.cursor = 'initial';

Agreed. I can't even tell if the circle is the worst thing, but it doesn't behave like a cursor as it moves off the screen while scrolling, but jumps back (with visual noise) when the mouse if moved even 1px. Anyway, this grabbed my focus and I did not finish reading the article.

The content actually looks really nice on mobile. But on desktop it is a travesty. We left these cursor modifiers behind in the early 2000s for a reason.

Maybe this entire website should be re-submitted as an anti-user experience.

I don't like it a lot as an implementation but thinking about how I read webpages I will often highlight sections of text I am reading as I go so I don't actually hate it as an idea.

I also enjoy reading non-narrative physical books with a pointer.

EDIT: I think I find the blueness intrusive. I would prefer a smaller yellow circle with pure black text maybe.

It's brutal. For an otherwise bit of decent advice, that is some really bad design.

Paste in console to remove:

var style = document.createElement('style'); style.innerHTML = ` main { cursor: auto} .mouse-pointer {display: none} .container-mouse {display: none} `; document.head.appendChild(style);

Firefox reader mode made it readable for me.

I scrolled it off the bottom and used the mouse wheel.

Still annoying though since I like to keep my place with the mouse pointer.

Looks fine in w3m. Granted, the modern web mostly stopped being usable years and years ago...

Can't figure out what the purpose of the circle is.

Feels awfully like a fluff / personal marketing piece:

- Just launched new VC fund

- Her personal website advertising alp Greylock investments

- Irritating CSS built by an "agency"

- Posted Saturday evening to maximize HN hits

At least today's web makes it easy to sniff out these types ...

For real.. it's not 2008 anymore. I don't think anybody is buying the "grind yourself into dust for VCs in times of economic uncertainty" bit anymore.

You ever hear of a VC sleeping in an office?

TIL posting Saturday evening is the strategy for views…

Does no one on hn have a social life? I’d expect Saturday night to be the worst night!

why are we still referring to Twitter and Meta as startups?

What are you talking about? The author refers to neither Twitter or Meta as startups.

> What are you talking about?

Can you please edit out swipes like that? This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment would be just fine without that bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com