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Comment by noname123 | Hacker News Reader

According to Glassdoor:

Sr. Software Engineer at Google, on average (sample size of 189) make $145K on average with $63K bonus for $200K per annum.

So for an average equity of 1.125% for developer (according to angel.co) and average salary of $93K, a startup has to make a non-diluted exit of 8.56 mil on the first year, 17.1 mil on the second year and 25.6 mil in the third year to justify the opportunity cost.

Of course, not every developer can make $200K per year but just food for thought of working for startup vs. BigCo.

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That's not taking into account other important factors:

    * Work on a new potentially game-changing product as part of the founding team
    * Join a small team where you'lll have more say in the production direction and company growth
    * Opportunity to grow responsibilities as the company grows
    * Gain startup experience and expand your network
    * Potential huge upside you'll never get at $150K/year + $50K bonus balanced by high risk of failure

I've worked at both the "BigCo's" (including Google) and "cool new" startups. In summary, it is almost pointless to compare working at big companies and startups.

The variance within both groups is much larger than the differences between the groups. There are pretty good, and very boring big companies. There are amazing, and hugely terrible startups. To find something that you will enjoy you have to evaluate each opportunity separately based on your preferences, not choose a company size first.

All these "important factors" are as much of a marketing tagline as they are an actual benefit. In some startups they might be the case. Probably yes if you are employee number 1-2 but not 10-20, let alone 100-200. But in comparison to some other startups a big company may deliver more value for all of them.

Company size is still meaningfully correlated with certain facts and so the distinction ahead of time is meaningful despite the large variance within each group.

In other words, for various reasons (like learning, wearing multiple hats, building up a network, the desire to start a startup) it makes sense to decide ahead of time to work at a startup versus a big company. As long as you work with great people on a mission you are passionate about.

The first three and half of the fourth can be had at Google, though perhaps not to the same degree.

Those numbers don't take into account vesting. Assuming vesting 25% per year with no acceleration on change of control, the exit must be around $38M for any year 1-4. Assumning 20% equity dilution every year, the number goes up to $45M by year four.

glassdoor is inaccurate for google. 200k / yr is too low for a Sr Software Eng. The all in comp is quite a bit higher. And there are a lot of engineers who make a lot more than this...

And that's assuming your utility function is linear in dollars, which of course it's not.

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