Ask HN: How to evaluate job offers?

How old is your kid? Probably relevant.

Building up enough savings to cover (surprisingly expensive) dental/medical/orthodontia and, more importantly, to serviceably help my kids get to college was supremely stressful for me in my last(=current) startup job.

The likelihood that employment at any startup will pay out is low. You can cycle through lots of startup jobs to improve the odds, but if you do the math across all startups and the amount of time you have, the odds aren't great.

Meanwhile, if you take the corporate job, you can still fulfill your bigger ambitions; you just have to be determined enough to chase them in your spare time, clever enough to scope your projects down to something achievable (at least, until you get dollar-valued traction) in that spare time, and disciplined enough to keep that tempo up.

Over the long term, the way to make the startup path really pay is to be a cofounder. Taking a series of jobs at startups isn't necessarily the best way to cofound a company. Having some degree of financial stability might be more important.

Also, don't forget to evaluate the benefits packages at both jobs. Your spouse doesn't work; the quality of your insurance is going to matter.

6

Well, you've got ~12 years to build up some kind of war chest. If you're willing to work for 15% less money at a startup, consider what that 15% saved every year for 12 years might do for the college problem? On the low end of software positions, I come up with numbers that more or less pay for college.

I will have more autonomy, using more exciting tech, solving bigger problems, working with movers & shakers, and generally more of a challenge.

Do you know or expect this to be true of the startup offering you the job or is this more your general vision of startup employee life? If it's the latter, that would worry me.

Overall, I don't know that you've provided enough information to go on. The fact that one is a startup and the other is corporate work is, IMHO, of a lot less relevance than most would assume. The devil is in the details. In the end, it will all be about your fit with the team at work, your boss(es), your enjoyment with the content of your work, level of responsibility, and work/life balance. Those can be good or bad in either situation. We've all read many a post of a disgruntled startup employee on HN.

I don't have a recommendation of which one to go with, but what I try to do in these scenarios is think of a range of scenarios (e.g. best, worst, and in-between cases) for each situation and use those as inputs to my decision. It's easy to romanticize the start-up and think of corporate work as boring, but the truth often falls somewhere in between.

To add on to what kohanz said, I think it is important to find out concretely what "more autonomy, using more exciting tech, solving bigger problems, working with movers & shakers, and generally more of a challenge." mean exactly in terms of this startup.

Let me explain:

1. What does more autonomy really mean? Do you have product level decisions? Do you have decisions governing the architecture of problems? Do you have the kind of experience that means they will eventually trust you with that?

2. What does more exciting tech mean? Is that a question of you using a new technology, new paradigm or new space? If so, have you considered what will happen in a year's time when the tech is something you get used to? Also, if more exciting tech means the prospect of working on fancy new tools all the time, there is a drawback to that too. As a company grows, you have these bits and pieces which don't fit correctly and don't scale properly.

3. 'working with movers & shakers': Again, it completely depends on the company what this means. Being able to sit next to your CEO or grab a beer with him could mean nothing more than a 1 degree connection on linkedin or something, it all depends on how they perceive you too.

4.'solving bigger problems': Again this completely depends on the company's scope. Scaling up a web app to ten thousand users at a startup vs working fresh out of school in Amazon scaling up to millions and millions of users are two different sorts of bigger problems.

A few years back I was faced with these two caricatures of companies two: a startup being a romantic place where a bunch of cool people sip beer and change the world and big companies filled with engineers who dress in blue shirts and slacks and are generally "cog" in a wheel. Again, the truth is that every company is different.

Oh, yeah, I can't agree more with what _kohanz_ said there. Team matters more. In fact, when I make my decisions, I would care more about the team than whether the company is considered "prestigious" or "exciting".

Also, lastly, unless you are interviewing with an early stage startup, asking the startup to be relatively competitive is not out of the realm. I know there is this perception in industry that working in a startup automatically means lower pay but that doesn't always have to be the case. There are tradeoffs always obviously, in that a small startup won't be able to say match Google's benefits or whatever but having said that, you can surely make sure that your family is not left high and dry if things blow up.

I have no illusions about the startup life, I'm not excited to drink beer with the ceo.

I'm excited by the prospect of owning a technology platform and running with it. The existing tech stack is one outside of my comfort zone (i.e. jumping from windows -> linux), but the architectural & dev principals are very familiar to me.

Solving bigger problems to me means that the company's mission is a good one - working towards a societal good as opposed to building intranets or perosonalizable web portals.

Which group of people do you want to become like?

Incidentally, this is one of the best litmus tests I've found for many life decisions. (college, hobbies, friends, dating, etc.)

"If you tell me who your heroes are, I'll tell you how you'll turn out." -- Warren Buffett

Cute.

In a lot of circumstances it can be that simple however I don't think this is one of those circumstances.

Both options require a compromise. In this case it's a choice between achieving non-work life goals or achieving work life goals. Personally that would be a very easy choice for me despite the choice conflicting with your advice.

He's saying forget about your goals or work-life balance. Focus on the people. If you spend 5 yrs with them, you'll become more like them.

Have you negotiated the startup one? Tell them that you'd rather work with them, but you have another offer on the table for more money. Read Patrick McKenzie's article about negotiation: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ .

Wish I'd read that before accepting my first offer.

    I am married with a child and my wife does not work.

I bet your wife works a lot. It's just that nobody pays her for it.

Take the corporate job.

You have two people that depend on you to provide for them for both income and insurance (assuming you are in the USA). In a year or two your wife could return to the workforce, then go for whatever startup is in fashion at the time. Being as tech startups are, it has a >50% chance of failure anyway. It would also be possible to start your own side project while working the corporate job.

IMHO you left out a couple key data points.

1) How senior are you?

2) How much do you respect the folks that will be your boss, and how much time will they give you?

The more junior you are, the more important #2 is.

Since you have a kid the startup should be very compelling to consider it.