Aside, as a small startup I am generally upfront with the salary since if you are not in the range we can afford it is not worth having a discussion.
At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary but a lot of the same advice applies.
"You can't write me a check?" I said, "No, I -- a check? Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money. Tell you what, I'm just gonna pay the whole thing off right now! I'm gonna be a congressman when I grow up."
But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %
If you think about the amount of money given up as a startup employee you will definitely get some winnings.
For example, say as a startup employee you are earning/being compensated 80,000 a year in equity. If you bought $80,000 of lottery ticket’s each year how much would you win. Depends on the lottery but most lottery’s have a rough payout of approximately 50-70%. Let’s say it’s 50%. So you would expect to receive back $40,000 per year.
Do half of all startups equity turn into cash, I think not. So probably more likely to make money from the lottery.
But most startup people don’t work at most startups.
For the most part, outcomes largely track from strategy and execution.
The purpose is to trade EV for a small probability of high payout. It's less extreme than the big ticket lotteries but more extreme than a scratcher. If that's not for you, don't do it
Also your last point is either obviously not true (if you're talking about big lottery winnings) or trivially true (if you're talking about $1000 scratcher prizes). More people made life changing money from a single company (Facebook) than all California lottery winners combined across all time
You are making an empirical claim that can be made rigorous, it's just off by several orders of magnitude
Surely the calc is, the number of money gambled in startup equity versus the amount of money gambled in the lottery.
Do startups payout at .5 or above, I think not.
Also…the lottery and startups work very differently.
The other benefit of not-unlimited is having it paid out when you leave. But if I had 6 weeks a year PTO, I'd just use it all anyway, so the part where it gets paid out isn't a big deal to me.
I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.
Just started my own business instead.
And all the FAANG combined probably don’t even have half that many positions, with negotiable salaries, in total worldwide.
The majority of positions at any of these (except maybe Netflix) are not hired through negotiable salary packages of the types relevant to the post. I never said anything about overall employee count.
Have you never read a report from any of the FAANGs?
e.g. Out of Google’s 183,000+ total headcount… maybe a quarter are engineering positions with negotiable salaries of any kind.
Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.
Never take equity over salary. Equity at a startup is a lottery ticket. Would you agree to be paid $10,000 less for $10,000 in lottery tickets? For $20,000 in lottery tickets?
There is negotation power but only if you pass all the interview challenges. Only at that point you are in a position to name your number (of course you won't ask $500K when you know the company you are applying to pays around $200K... because you have done your previous research on that; you'll ask something between $200K and $250K and see how they react). Layoffs and AI hasn't change this (sure, thing, 5 years ago companies were hiring more and perhaps were more relaxed about this, but that didn't change the fact that you can only negotiate when they want you)
We as engineers have let the recruiters and VC funding brainwash us into lower salaries. Kind of looking forward to a rebound.
That said, once the project goes beyond a certain threshold, LLMs offer little more than a highly capable autocomplete. In larger codebases, the current context window is too small for the tools to even answer questions properly, let alone make any non-trivial changes.
Productivity starts going down once you try to use LLMs in a large codebase and expect them to be as helpful as they were in a smaller one. Often, these authoritative little shits will whirl you around in a doom loop and still won’t find any useful solution. And suddenly you find yourself having to clean up the mess.
I’d still say the productivity benefit is positive, but at the same time, the hype around these is bonkers. Employers are holding onto the hype cycle to bring down wages through FUD.
I find LLM autocomplete extremely annoying compared to traditional intellisense
It is wrong way more and I don't want multi-line autocomplete, it's too intrusive
It's more or less the same as intellisense most of the time, but occasionally it tries to guess an entire multi-line function and it throws me way off
I don't know if it's a matter of just sticking with it to learn like any new tool, or if it is just really not as useful as people say
One thing I've noticed is that with traditional intellisense it was often fast enough to get ahead of me so I could tab complete
Cursor is slower than me. Often I am typing faster than it can think, which makes it suggest things I'm already past.
Llms are still a big speed boost there
Exactly this. I've really tried to find use for LLMs in my big tech company SWE job and I just can't. The context is just too large, and not just the code context. In the time that I can "explain" everything to the LLM, keep iterating until it spits out something semi-useful and massage that into something I can merge, I'd rather just do the whole thing myself.
But it's amazing for greenfield personal projects.
Significantly so! But the thrill of the gamble keeps me coming back, sadly.