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Comment by jconley | Hacker News Reader

Based on the OP's story, I'm going to assume this was an early stage startup. It is foolish to join an early stage startup as an employee if it's all about the Benjamins from an exit. Hopefully this is common knowledge.

However, being an employee in an early stage startup is a great way to jumpstart your career, whether you have entrepreneurial aspirations or not. In an early stage startup you are going to be rubbing noses with investors, working on interesting/tough problems with very smart people, taking on huge amounts of responsibility, getting in way over your head every day, and generally beefing up your resume.

Think of it as an investment in yourself. You will build character, and you will build varied skills that will carry forward for the rest of your life, and someone has paid you for that privilege.

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I don't think it is worth taking a below market wage offer from a startup just because you'll be "working on interesting/tough problems with very smart people, taking on huge amounts of responsibility, getting in way over your head every day, and generally beefing up your resume." You can do all that stuff at a bigger and more stable company.

I'm not saying one should never work at a startup. I'm just saying that startup offers shouldn't be judged any differently from any other job offer. There might be smart people at startup X, but there are plenty of smart people at Google or Facebook or what have you as well. Take the expected value of your options and your salary and compare it to any other offer. No special rules should ever be made for startups except in extremely rare circumstances. Investor connections that one might get from being an employee at a startup are often vastly overstated as well. If you want to be a founder yourself, you need to just go found something--working for another founder just isn't the optimal way to get there, especially with the extra time commitment that many startups involve, meaning you won't have time for your own side projects.

One of those rare exceptions I mentioned might be if you are asked to come on in a CTO or VP Engineering role for a new and emerging startup. This sort of experience can help you get executive positions later on at larger and more stable companies if that's the career path you want.

Edit: I want to clarify my final point a bit more. Titles matter a lot in early-stage startups. Almost by definition, VC-backed startups are going to undergo rapid expansion--and that means lots of hiring. And that means that unless you have a senior title from the beginning you face the real risk of simply having people hired over you rather than being promoted yourself. This is especially true if you are hired into a junior role in the beginning. All of this means you may not get your desired leadership role in the end at all if you're not careful.

I don't work at a startup. But, there is a big advantage of working at a startup over a company like Conde Nest.

Conde Nest is no longer growing rapidly which means... That the only way to move up is for people to quit or for you to out politic your coworkers.

Contrast that with a rapid growth company, lets say one that IPOs in 10 years, yeah, you get a payout, but you also should get a huge increase in salary and responsibility over those 10 years.

I clarified this in an edit to my previous post, but this is actually a somewhat dangerous attitude.

If you don't have a senior or executive level title from the beginning in an emerging startup, you face the real risk of simply having people hired over you rather than getting those increases in responsibility that you want. If you are VP of Engineering from the start, then the founders will struggle to hire too many people above you, if any, because they don't want to sacrifice the sanctity of that title. If you are brought on as a junior engineer, however, you can't count on getting the promotions you deserve.

Of course, not every startup is going to do this. I'm just mentioning it as it should be part of the decision making process. Joining a startup does not equate to guaranteed increases in responsibility and leadership.

> If you are VP of Engineering from the start [...] If you are brought on as a junior engineer, however, you can't count on getting the promotions you deserve.

Playing devil's advocate: for one early employee who kicks ass and is not rewarded with increased responsibilities, how many expect a VP title served on a silver platter in spite of their inexperience and/or inability to manage, and blame the company instead of themselves when that happens?

Speaking as a founder, when I see someone over-delivering and eager to do more, I sure as hell will double his ration of responsibilities, and then double it some more as long as he's willing and able. And yes, in a good company when responsibilities and value added to the company truly double, so does compensation.

...And then you've loaded them up with a bunch of areas where they've taken technical responsibility until they're overwhelmed with maintenance. So you can't possibly put them in a management or leadership position, they're too valuable in what they're already doing!

Doubling their responsibilities isn't going to get them on the conference call with investors. It isn't going to get them in charge of a team, in most cases. Instead, in most cases, an experienced lead will be hired. Or the team will be sold/aquihired, and he'll end up a junior engineer in BigCo anyway.

So, why take a chance on a startup making below market rates, especially if it's not a clear winner?

Now, I operationalize "Startup" as an organization in search of a repeatable business model, as Steve Blank suggests. If instead, the great but junior developer is looking at a profitable, growing company, it may make sense to join at below market rates. That way, product/market fit has already been established and your work can directly be correlated to things that increase profitability.

But those are two different games.

I disagree with you in 3 ways:

* I didn't limit the scope to technical responsibilities. You did. I mean everything from product leadership, customer interactions, management, growth, etc. No shortage of interesting things to do in an early-stage startup if you're willing to get your hands dirty.

* You imply increased technical responsibilities are a bad thing. How can one think that and be an engineer? Being overwhelmed with maintenance may indicate other problems. Maybe your organization doesn't value gradual maintenance and has to pay it all at once. Maybe you're getting the shit maintenance work while others get the fun projects. Or maybe you have low tolerance for the unsexy but necessary work of maintaining your code.

* You present technical responsibilities and leadership as mutually exclusive. Leadership and management are not the same thing! As a technical lead you may not be anybody's boss, but in a good technical organization it should give you plenty of opportunities to show your worth while growing personally.

I think the mistake here is confusing career advancement with the number of people reporting to you. Startups don't work that way. The measuring stick for your trajectory should be 1) how much you get done and 2) how much recognition you get for it. How many people report to you is an implementation detail.

... If you've been kicking ass managing a small team, have made it clear that you're interested in a director position, and the company hires an outsider instead, maybe they're idiots and it's time to move to greener pastures. That's how smart companies find great first-time directors.

... If you're an engineer but want to try your hand as a first-time manager, and you're not given the opportunity, find a company willing to take the risk.

... And so on.

Or you can even get that nice "VP of Engineering" title and then they say "oh he is too valuable to stop coding so we'll hire an SVP of Engineering -- you know, a professional manager." because you've foolishly spent your 6 months there rewriting the product from the ground up.

Sure, these obviously aren't absolute rules. There are tons of cool big companies and plenty of startups doing boring, narrow work... but I think these are the exceptions.

Early stage engineers do not usually work on interesting problems at a startup. You are hired to do the uninteresting stuff. A startup may or may not beef up your resume. It's still easier to get hired if you have Apple or Google or Facebook on your resume than a failed startup. You generally do not rub noses with investors, but you might be invited to an informal lunch if the company is still very small. You do take on a lot of responsibility and get in over your head. It's a good jumpstart to a career if you can't get a job at Google or Facebook or Palantir or Apple or Goldman Sachs.

Do you think people looking to jumpstart a career are typically in a position to decide between offers from Apple, Google and a startup?

I guess I don't really know what "jumpstart" a career means. Does it just mean to start a career? If they are good programmers, sure, why not? It sounds like a typical story, actually. Wasn't that Marissa Meyer's story? (except Google was the startup at the time)

I think you'd have to be a pretty exceptional candidate. Google reportedly [1] receives over a million resumes a years as of 2010. I'm guessing there are a pretty small number of positions open to people with minimal experience.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/google/2010/09/14/one-half-of-one-perc...

Most of those resumes are ridiculous and amount to little more than spam. The candidates from the pool of people Google actually wants to hire definitely have multiple offers.

Sounds like a truism: it's easy to get a job at google... if you're the sort of person google wants to hire.

If you're talking to investors regularly, it's probably worth your while anyway.

I think this is particularly true if you want to ever become CEO or VP of a much larger company. How else do you prove you're fit to lead a company or division except by a start-up betting it's future on you. I don't know what the stats are but I've seen a lot of higher ups come from start-ups (in particular acquisitions) as oppose to people slowly getting promoted and climbing the corporate ladder.

It's politics and hustling that get you to those positions. You aren't going to be simply granted VP or CEO or lead in a division simply because you participated in a start up for so long. Results will get you there along with some serious hustling.

Early stage startups are also more willing to overlook weak resumes. A company with tens of thousands of applicants can afford to throw away good candidates with bad resumes because they have loads more good candidates with good resumes. An early stage startup might have three applicants, and if the only one who can program didn't finish college and has never had a job, well, beggars can't be choosers.

Yeah, but then you aren't getting a below-market wage anymore, either.

That's the thing about big companies... it doesn't matter if you are willing to work for less; they've got a budget and will hire the best person they can get for that budget. If you don't have the experience, and are willing to get paid less than what the job-role would normally pay to get the job? yeah, that's a pretty effective way to get experience, learn the job, and then switch companies and get paid full-rate for the job role a few years later. and yeah, you will probably need to do that at a small company (startup or otherwise) where the fact that you are willing to do the job role for half what someone with experience will want matters.

But yeah, I wouldn't really say you are working for below-market wages, 'cause you are presumably getting a reasonable wage for your level of experience (even if it's a low wage for the job role.)

I have never joined a startup for the money, either in the short term (hilarious) or the long term, but rather for the plethora of opportunities. All those things are great and decent resume builders, but in reality there is a unsaid agreement that when you work for a startup you are ALSO doing it for the payout at the end -- the problem is that payout is not yours unless you're a founder.

Depends, a lot of places discount startup experience actually.

However, a lot of startup is populated by people who change job once a year, they can be your network and it can grow really large.

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