I’m about to join a startup. I just want to do meaningful work and learn new things. I view it as a learning experience. I am so fed up with corporation life. I don’t see a way out other than joining a startup or starting my own. I don’t want to deal with project managers and fill their spreadsheets anymore.
The most valuable thing I have is the remaining time I have in this life. Not the number in my bank account.
>The most valuable thing I have is the remaining time I have in this life
Then why work for a startup? Most will demand a huge amount of your time compared to other jobs. Why not pick a job which demands a sane amount of your time and spend your free time on relationships and hobbies?
All the startup employees I've talked to work 80 hours a week. Why is robots so important to you that you're willing to accomplish absolutely nothing in at least a few of the important areas of your life such as health and fitness, friendships, romantic relationships, extraneous interests, relaxation, or family?
> All the startup employees I've talked to work 80 hours a week.
Worked at many startups. Currently run a startup. No one has worked 80h weeks at any of them, except myself in the first year of creating my own startup.
If you really have friends working at startups for < 10% equity and doing 80 hour weeks, something is wrong.
I work at a startup. Neither myself nor anyone on my team works 80 hours a week. I’ve been in tech in the Silicon Valley for two decades at a half dozen startups or more and have only ever put in a few 80 hour weeks.
Doing that consistently is unhealthy and sort of antithetical to building a thriving business.
Anecdotally, I worked as a software engineer at a very small (10-15 person) startup that just got acquired by FANG, and I, as well as almost everyone else there, generally worked 40 hour weeks. My relationships were fine, I went to the gym most days, and I worked on a masters in AI on the side, and I also learned a lot more than I would have at large companies since I got to own way more complex and interesting projects than I would have if I had just taken a job at FANG.
I feel like a lot of it comes down to how strong your management team and market position are. Our CEO had a pretty crazy track record, and drove the company into a really interesting, strong position, and then wanted himself to have a good, sustainable family life, and would constantly reiterate that he wanted everyone else to do the same.
I have other friends who have had roughly the same experiences, again, anecdotally.
I can't really say for sure, but some things that stood out:
People skewed older than I expected for a startup. Most people were in their 30s, and the C suite people were mostly in their 40s. No one other than me was below late 20s, and everyone seemed laid back but competent.
I probed at it during the interview and was told that everyone leaves between 5-6, and that the CEO wanted to go home to his family and didn't expect anyone to do differently. When I asked engineers things about how days and weeks went there they were very direct about how people didn't stay late and didn't dance around the subject.
The CEO had already sold multiple startups while raising his family, so I assumed that he would be able to make the company successful without setting a precedent of burning yourself out and without us being under constant threat of death.
Also yeah, I didn't make nearly what I make now that I'm at FANG. But I ended up in a higher role and with more leverage than would normally be possible at my age and experience level in the new company, and got some cash from the deal, so it's been pretty great. But yeah, if I was just trying to maximize short term dollars earned it wouldn't have made sense to work there, since I couldn't have realistically known that this was the outcome.
Look for places with diverse workforces. My experience is that managers who expect long hours also expect everyone to be 100% aligned with the company vision, and people with different backgrounds tend not to last.
Consider the compensation package a company offers. Companies that want young go-getters are more likely to offer high cash and equity; great benefits packages are better for drawing in risk-averse family types.
Also don't be afraid to ask straight-up what the working hours are like during an interview, ideally from the lowest-ranked person they'll let you talk to.
Disclaimer: I don't have strong data supporting any of this, just my personal experience and intuition from working in the bay area.
You can ask, but the ones that are terrible will tell you point blank that they care about work life balance and then simply fail to follow through.
My advice to folks is that if you don’t have a very significant chunk of the company, ie >1% then the payoff can never be good enough to compromise work/life balance.
If you’re a founder or very early and have 5% or some such the. That’s between you and your family.
one kind sent rockets and recollected them, made robots run and jump. The other kind, shrank blog posts to 140 characters, or added a timeout to short messages, removed the thumb down button, and called them a new feature.
Today, we still remember the names of da Vinci, Tesla, Turing, not because they had a successful family ...
So you're living based on how you will be remembered by strangers? That sounds incredibly unfulfilling and doesn't sound like a good way to live. In a few hundred more years almost no one will remember the names of those people either.
>da Vinci, Tesla, Turing
It's incredibly safe to say that you are not going to be as successful as these people. Almost no one achieves this much success in the sciences. At most you will probably advance your field by a few useful steps and then be personally forgotten about except in research paper footnotes.
>not because they had a successful family
You know who cares about you and remembers you more significantly than as a research footnote? Your family.
In a few hundred years nobody will remember you either: x220 the family man, who lived a complete life and raised wonderful children who went on to live very comfortable lives and have children of their own.
"I" am the best witness to my existence. Not the person giving my eulogy. Who are you to tell someone how to define what "fulfilling" means to them?
Why are you trying to tell this guy what he should value? He wants to do work that interests and excites him, and he's making the tradeoffs that balance his personal set of values - with, incidentally, far more information than you have about what those values and specific tradeoffs are.
Pursue your own balance of values with passion, and allow others to be meaningfully different from you. Their desires don't diminish yours.
I'm with you, man. I'd rather spend my life pursuing big dreams and try to do something meaningful, and leave a legacy - even if I fail and die broke, penniless and alone - then spend my life engaging in boring, pedestrian "normalcy".
I can live with failing. I can't live with not trying.
They're not working 80 hours a week. They're just saying they are, because that's fashionable. Or rather it used to be fashionable. It isn't anymore, so I'm surprised you're still hearing this.
Pet peeve: they are not working 80 hours a week. Simple number crunching. That would be working 8am-10pm every single Mon-Fri, then five solid hours on Saturday, and another five hours on Sunday. Every week. No, that's not happening.
I work at a big tech co. I almost never fill out any spreadsheet, use JIRA, use a ticketing system that strongly, worry about 'user stories', have 'hurry up and wait' deadlines and so on.
I wouldn't say all of those things are bad things.
I'd hope even the smallest of startups is thinking about how users interact with their software and organizing those interactions into some sort of prioritized backlog for development.
We definitely have a planning process, I do write things down into design docs, and do keep track of things in some spreadsheets, docs and tickets. But I don't find it an excessive, oppressive or impractical process, which is probably what the parent post is hinting to.
I would love to know about the list of "good" big companies (and good teams within them). In my direct experience, the big companies are soul crushing and monotonous and one is surrounded by mediocrity.
The best way to find out is to go interview at big cos, and ask them about all of your worries about process. One team can have a ton of process, the other can barely have any. It's really mostly a team and department basis thing.
In my limited experience in talking with other people, FAANG tends to not have as much process as finance, IBM, insurance or other 'boring big companies'.
Careful what you wish for, startups have people who will wear as many different hats as required to make it work. Corporate life may have had a really well defined job role, that may not be true in any startup you join.
I think I'm very entrepreneurial. "wear as many different hats as required to make it work", this is basically what I do for my side projects. I write both the web frontend (vue) and backend (in c++), do devops, content marketing, whereas my day job is device driver development.
Cool to know. Do you use any framework for the backend? And if you don't mind what's the project? I am thinking about using Rust for one of my projects but I am still unsure if I should use it instead of something like NodeJs or Python.
The point about FAANG paying so much gets made a lot, and that employees of startups are fools for their decisions, as if everyone's handed a dozen offers and makes a choice.
Most of us are lucky to get a single offer, sometimes after months of trying, so we take what we are given. The rosy picture portrayed on HN isn't at all accurate to my experience.
Though to be fair my current salary, as far as it is from the unrealistic portrayal of salaries here, still feels far better than almost any other job I would remotely have the capacity to do, and certainly far more than I need to live and have a pretty easy life if I were honest.
I'm payed a crazy amount of money to do something I love.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I don't make 400k per year and I've tried to work at high paying tech companies in the bay area in the past and was rejected many times.
At one point I was close to giving up on being a developer entirely after months of failing to find work, though thankfully I had a friend from a former job who helped give me a legup to a startup he was working for.
It was that painful experience which made me grateful for what I have, even if its looked down on so much by my peers. I realized how lucky I was to be working at all.
The rosy picture I was referring too wasn't so much the salary as the ability of software engineers to get these jobs. In my experience it was a lot more like a professional sport (spend decades working and practicing in this field and you still don't have what it takes) than finding a store with a help-wanted sign and filling out an application.
I guess there's something of a paradox there... its a weird industry.
Conversely, if you can get hired to a unicorn in a position that's senior enough to have any hope of coming anywhere near top tech pay, then you are likely talented enough to work at top tech instead.
Not necessarily, as talents at that level which are valued in top tech may be different than talents at that level that are valued at growing startups.
There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies. That doesn't mean it's easy to get those jobs. It does mean that you should apply your talents where it fits.
BTW, you don't need to be at a unicorn to earn top EV. 1% of a 100M exit is 1M, which is more than the vast majority of equity grants I've heard of from FANG. Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
> Not necessarily, as talents at that level which are valued in top tech may be different than talents at that level that are valued at growing startups.
I worked at both. Talent overlap is quite high, far higher than is commonly assumed.
> There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies.
I worked in startups for many years, and most of my friends still in the field are either founders or C-level execs. They are fully aware of the top compensation for top engineers in startups presently. Startups don't match top tech comp currently. Unless you factor in the options as a sure thing, and the startup ends up exiting at unicorn levels.
> Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
This is a reflection of how many people have spent precious years of their career working for startups, and generally seeing 0 return on these options.
It's also a reflection of the perceived lack of control over this sort of deferred compensation, and various nasty dynamics that often snatch value away from rank-and-file employees, even at the last minute or past it. See the LinkedIn exit and their infamous clawback policy.
Startup options have earned this reputation for 0 value over a decade of overhype and underperformance. Far too many talented people were promised the sky and ended up with nothing after years of hard work.
