Myths About Working as an Engineer at a Startup

“Rock star” engineers sometimes work at startups, but usually they work for big companies who can pay them twice the salary and have multiple indoor water polo pools and racquetball courts.

THIS is something the 'startup world' and a lot of people on HN are not aware of. Really, really bad-ass programmers usually work for big corporations for good salaries. Not always, but usually. The reason I mention it is because there is a myth that startups are built with the latest, greatest tech by the brightest minds. Often this just isn't true...many startups are hacked together by inexperienced programmers fresh out of college. Sometimes this works, but often it means that nobody on staff is really a master coder, nobody on staff has ever had to fend off Russian hackers attempting to take down your code at 3 am, nobody on staff has had to deal with thousands of users who wake up one morning, can't log in and no money is coming into the company. These are the battles that most programmers learn in the trenches of big companies, fighting tough battles, fixing complex problems under fire. It's not ideal, but I'm not sure if you can really become battle-hardened without going through real battles with real jobs on the line.

This is what happened at Twitter - when the government came after them because they were getting hacked too often, Twitter went out and hired 'real' programmers and got things working. That's something that gets missed a lot in the 'startup story'.

1. Salary. Startups always seem to offer lower salary in return for said equity.

2. Career development. Startups demand that you build somewhat hacks solutions for the sake of time. In many instances you might not get the opportunity to learn how to do things right. Too much of this and you get used to building hacks products.

3. 80-hour work weeks might not be the norm, but what about 60 hour work weeks? that's a deal bresker for some.

4. Diversity. Startups are notorious for hiring people just like the founders.

The truth is that for most of the world, bigco's are the default and startups have to sell their employment in order to get employees. They have to find some way to offset the inherent employment instability that working for a startup entails. This has created many of the myths in this article that continue to be perpetuated.

Some observations:

Like a few other comments, I've noticed that the absolute best-of-the-best work for "real companies" and not startups. The reason working for a bigco doesn't get the reputation of having the best engineering talent is simple, talent is like any other thing with a group of people, it follows a pyramid distribution. Most of the people are terrible and at the bottom of the pyramid, and as you move up the pyramid you end up with smaller and smaller populations of very good people. Except you can't have fractions of a person, so in bigco, where the projects might involve 100 engineers. That top-notch engineer accounts for only 1% of the staff. Sure maybe 80% of the staff may not be any good, but that still leaves you with 20% who are at least decent work-a-day engineers.

In a startup, your entire engineering staff might be 10 people, and your top-notch engineer now accounts for 10% of all the staff time spent on a project. It's almost like having 10 top engineers instead (if you try to scale the numbers to match). It's easier to find 3-4 above average folks to round out the top of the pyramid and the rest are just there to fill in the mortar and won't last long.

This means that your individual contribution is magnified in a startup. Everything is magnified in a startup. Decision making power, individual contribution, etc. But so are negative aspects of working in a company. When things go bad, they go bad really fast in a startup. The worst political dramas I've ever seen were all in startups. Points of failure are enormous in small startups.

One of the thing that happens as companies mature and grow is they learn they can no longer tolerate so much magnified failure, so they build in controls to spread around responsibility so they can better survive what would be a catastrophic failure in a startup (founder leaving, tech decision turns out to be wrong 18 months in etc.).

The side effect is of course that in order to turn down this magnified negativity, the magnified good stuff also gets squashed.

Edit: I am asking because I think startups should be paying more than established companies because of many reasons: 1) the work environment is usually shitty (nice, clean offices are nice), 2) no financial security because they are not established, 3) no one outside the startup world wants to hire someone who failed numerous times before, 4) it is much easier to go from Big Co to Small/Tiny Co, then the opposite. (4) is particular true and quite dangerous for recent grads. Young recent grads are better off founding their own company or joining Big co instead joining fresh startups.

> You are also likely to get some input on the way future engineers are hired and the way your technology team interacts with the business team.

This is true, and not entirely a good thing. I was interviewing new technical hires within a year or two at the organization. I asked stupid nerd questions (if you knew C++ like you claimed, you'd know the ins and outs of this template expansion), instead of important ones like: if you're stuck, will you ask for help, or just silently beat your head against the wall and not have anything to show weeks later?

> An environment that encourages learning and experimentation keeps engineers more motivated than one that stifles its technical talent.

It's also an environment that encourages reinvention of the wheel, especially by younger engineers with little supervision that don't necessarily realize that a particular wheel already exists and is ready to use.

> One of the best skills you can learn if you intend to work for a startup is the ability to figure out things on your own.

This is an existential issue at a startup, and particularly important if you're fresh out of college, because you don't know anything and thus must learn everything. This is both good and bad. On one hand, I learned a lot more in a short time than my friends that went to work for big organizations. On the other hand, I always felt like I never really learned how to do things "right" because a startup is a setting where you don't necessarily have the time to dot your I's and cross your T's.

> It seems like startups move faster and create solutions to difficult problems more efficiently than large companies, but the truth is that they normally have a lower quality threshold than their corporate counterparts.

This rings true to me. It was really a revelation to me when I joined a large organization for the first time. It was a well oiled machine, with roles for everyone and someone whose job it was to do anything that needed to be done. Startups have many advantages, but they're not necessarily productive or efficient places.[1] You can spend a lot of time yak shaving at a startup.

Anyway, I'd do it over again in a heartbeat, but I'm not sure if I'd advise someone to go to a startup straight out of school.[2] Maybe one of those well-funded, well-established ones where they're far enough along to have real internal processes and real management, but I'd save the "three guys in a basement" stuff for later, when you know what you're doing. Again, YMMV.

[1] Of course, I imagine they can be if we're talking about a shop run mostly by highly experienced engineers. But in general, I think big organizations are better at getting more output from less-skilled labor.

[2] At least if you intend to make programming a long-term career. If your intention is to jump over to the business side relatively soon, that advice would change. You'll get far more exposure to the business side at a startup than you will at a large company.

Let's say you receive $40k in salary a year (versus equity), for 5 years (let's call that $200k, just for fun). Assuming you're diligent, that salary difference can be invested, even in something as simple a preferred shares, yield a compounded return of +/- 5%, or ~$232k. So, we're not really talking about high levels of risk.

Assuming your startup, like most others has 6 funding rounds before an exit, and that insiders hold the traditional 4% at exit - we'd be looking at someone who started with a full 1% (of the initial, pre-dilution point) of the company, yielding ~$341k over the same period.

Given that 1% holdings are rather high - 0.5% or less would be well expected. That in turn means that unless your company exits for ~275M (over this 5 year period), and you hold 0.5% then FINANCIALLY it's not worth being part of that endeavour.

That being said there are several other great reasons to enjoy startups.

And: don't worry, you will get your shares.

Just a small point I'd like to comment:

> Truth: you’ll get to set the culture, standards, and technologies used

This is quite funny because both startup I worked for were completely different on this point. In the first one I was the only developer, working on an application I created completely from scratch. I could decide entirely on my own which technologies/tools I could use (heh, being able to start a project in c++11 was really sweet). On the other hand, the startup I'm in currently is rather resistant to change with regards to what we use, even though we tried to push these change with arguments as to how it could speed up work and eliminate some recurrent pain in the development process.

What really struck me was the "full-stack rock star hacker" part. As someone who has little to no experience in commercial software engineering and then sees this phrase on many start up roles (includes ninjas and gurus), it really sets an image that start up work is only for the incredibly bright individuals who know it all.

I also believe some of the unrealistic expectations start ups have are one of the major reasons why they fail. [0] "Rome wasn't built in a day".

Working long hours goes with the kind of person you are. 80 hour work weeks may be productive for some people whilst others perform better with 37 hour work weeks (or less). We are all different. Some athletes are born marathon runners, whilst others are natural short distance sprinters. I think this is where most start-ups also get it wrong and its also something that contributes to their failures. Long hours once in a while is fine as long as you are compensated for it.

Media is also a major contributor to what start ups should be like. As mentioned in the article, you only hear about major acquisitions, huge crowd funding campaign success, and crazy company valuations. But its a lot less common to hear about the failures of start-ups, people burning out before their first product release. Why does media never cover these failures?

As much as I would like to join a start-up or even start one, I will continue looking for work at small-medium companies and big companies first, get good experience first and still a personal life outside work. I guess its different for other people, but I value work/life balance and I also think its the key to having a successful career, be it entrepreneurial or employee based.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_wasn%27t_built_in_a_day

They do? Is employee training (outside of on-the-job learning) even a thing in engineering anymore?

This is contrary to my experience. In startups, any time you're not spending developing the core product in the quickest way possible (i.e. the currently established way, don't go exploring whether a new way might be quicker) is seen as time ticking away on the death clock.

In a large corporate environment, I've been much freer, because we can afford to play the long game. I've been able to choose projects, define completely novel ones, choose different technologies to use, rather than the established stack (and indeed, change what the "established stack" is).

https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-com...

The list is getting a bit out of date, and he's writing for business students, but I think the advice is very sound for engineers as well. If I could do it over again, I would have tried to find a similar path.

with more people being brought in (usually at a rapid pace as you hit your growth spurts), you have to adapt to more personality types, and company culture&feel will suffer as a result

Engineering job : Work em like mules.

Now I work for big companies for a good salary. I put in the hours to get the work done, but I'll never do 80+ hour weeks again unless I own a ton of equity in the venture.

The truth is that startups, like the music biz, like video games, like PR require a steady stream of young people with unrealistic ideas who can be exploited. Don't let yourself be played, is my advice now to young engineers. Especially don't take career advice from a VC or a founder...