Why does everyone thinks startups don’t pay well? I have worked for various startups all my life, most of them well funded, and competing for talent with faangs. Yes, I could probably make more at Google but I don’t feel like I’m underpaid. At the last 3 startups my base salary was above 250k. I work remotely and I rarely work more than 30 hours a week.

I’d say you’re uncommon. I’ve never seen anyone who is a typical engineer making $250k/yr at a startup that’s below $1B valuation. Same for the amount of work you’re doing and that it’s remote with that compensation.

It’s possible you’d be making $700k+/yr if you were at google. About triple what you are now.

I think one component of their point is that the marginal utility of money beyond $200k/year cash comp is quite small, especially if you (1) came to tech early in life (2) plan on staying in it for most of your working life.

With that perspective, $200k/year and $700k/year both reduce to "well-paid".

Also, a Staff title at a Seed or Series A startup can definitely ask for $250k/year, although they'd likely be trading off against equity grants.

Whoa, that doesn't even pass the smell test, let alone any kind of deeper analysis.

Certainly this depends on where you're going to live, but if you're in a place where startups are common (even considering the current remote work situation), $200k/yr will either be a stretch for you to meet your living expenses, or will require that you live fairly modestly, especially if you have dependents. If you are able to put any of that into savings/investments, it will be a fairly small amount.

With $700k/yr, you can live quite comfortably, while putting quite a bit away for retirement.

And I don't think your (1) & (2) points really make sense here. Investments compound over time; starting off in your early 20s putting $50k in your investment/retirement accounts every year vs $10k will give you a very different outcome once you reach retirement age. Hell, you'll reach a very different outcome in your 40s. (But honestly, if you decided to live a $200k/yr lifestyle at $700k/yr, you'll be saving so much money that you could easily retire in your 30s.)

It will also mean getting to put a down payment on that house much earlier, and/or being able to afford more of a house. And in the meantime, it will mean being able to dine at fancier restaurants, take more luxurious vacations, buy more expensive toys, etc., if that's the sort of thing you value. And I wouldn't even consider all this to be lifestyle creep (as you genuinely wisely advise against downthread of a sibling comment); this kind of lifestyle would be perfectly sustainable at $700k/yr, but not at $200k/yr.

(But really, though, who the hell is making $700k/yr in their early 20s? Very few, very exceptional people, that's who.)

I will happily die on the hill that the marginal utility at $200k vs $700k is a pure function of your lifestyle, even in high cost-of-living areas (I live in one of the highest!). Your choice of adjectives "modestly", "fairly small", "quite comfortably", and "quite a bit" that are ways for smuggling lifestyle choices into the equation, which might apply to you but are by no means universal.

This boils down to "if you have more money, you can spend more money and maybe retire early". This is not a line of reasoning I'm trying to refute.

Dependents are an interesting wrinkle that is worth discussing separately. But let's stay on the straight and narrow, we can talk about in another comment if you wish.

> And I don't think your (1) & (2) points really make sense here. Investments compound over time

The reason I invoked these points was not to compare "could you save $50k at age 22 or $10k at age 22?", it was to compare "could you save $10k at age 22 or $50k at age 32?"

If you're beginning a high-income career later in life, the time-value of money is different because you have less time.

If you start early, you actually need to earn less to hit the same comparatively "fixed" long-term savings goals, because you have more time to compound.

Again, be careful to avoid falling back on "if you have more money, you'll have more money, which is obviously good".

> And I wouldn't even consider all this to be lifestyle creep

Regularly dining at fancy restaurants (anything in the Michelin orbit), taking luxurious vacations (I'd define as anything north of $300/day), and purchasing expensive toys (I don't think this needs any qualification...) is indeed the definition of lifestyle creep, and it's A-OK that they aren't sustainable at $200k/yr.

You can live extremely comfortably without these things. Whether you perceive them as acceptable or not is a you thing, not an objective thing. We actually do get to choose our values and our hobbies!

I would revisit that calculation assuming you are drained at 45 instead of 60, including taxes and the opportunity cost of 500K x a few years at 3% rate for the next 15 years.

That's pretty much exactly the calculation I'm positing. But actually with an even earlier terminus (late 30s or 40 at most).

Assume an "effective" average pay (i.e. "net" pay + retirement and other deductions, inflation-adjusted to today's dollars and averaged over the course of your career) of $120k/year.

From age 22 to 40, you've earned $2.16mm in inflation-adjusted-to-today dollars as a single earner. With a not-unreasonable average savings rate of 30%, not accounting for tax-advantaged growth or any growth at all, you'll come out with $650k of inflation-adjusted-to-today capital in savings.

Realistically, this should end up invested in some kind of equity (housing, stocks, bonds, whatever). If you finance the purchase of a house at 30, you're only 10 years into a traditional 30-year mortgage at this point, for reference. So you're roughly 1/3rd of your way to owning all the equity in your home. That's fairly comfortably a $1mm home (home equity being 30% of your assets at 40).

Of course, if you're DCA-ing into something that yields a modest average of 5%/year in inflation-adjusted returns, that $650k is closer to $1mm inflation-adjusted-to-today capital. And you still have 25 years at that point for your retirement savings to compound. And you can work part-time in something more fulfilling until retirement to supplement your income.

YMMV, but the marginal utility of money beyond $1mm in equity at 40 and $6k/month in expendable (on rental housing, food, travel, social events) income during your 20s and 30s is pretty small for most people. If you add a partner with any kind of income to the mix, it makes the marginal stress of earning more money even less appealing.

Edit: the main thing you ought to avoid like the plague is lifestyle creep. Spending money on things with zero or vanishingly-small happiness ROI. Read this story every year or two, or whenever you get a raise at work. https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1886/how-much-land-...

What many people don’t seem to realize is there are a lot of early stage but already well funded (10M+) startups who are desperately looking for top quality people. Once I was approached by a founder who offered 500k base salary (wasn’t a good fit for my area of expertise).

Well, in my experience, these are quite uncommon. Especially for being fully remote.

If someone's offering $500k/yr to an engineer plus stock, they're definitely trying to attain someone with very niche skills. Which begs the question: Just how applicable is this scenario for everyone else?

I haven't found many startup roles going past $200k for a fully remote engineer, almost regardless of level. I don't think they even try to get someone who would be Staff+ at FAANG because it's basically pointless.

Top quality in your scenario might mean niche skills like you've done specific computer vision work, have a PhD, and are going to a self-driving startup... Cool but not really applicable to most of us, is it?

Whereas compare as to how common it is to be a typical full stack or backend engineer with a decade of experience... join FAANG at Staff and make $600k+.

Eh, not quite your $250k number, but I was making (inflation adjusted) $200k/yr at a startup with ~$100M valuation back in 2010 (senior SWE level). Not sure if I'm typical, though.

> It’s possible you’d be making $700k+/yr if you were at google.

Possible, sure, but not likely. For a mid-tier SWE joining Google (or another FAANG) today, even $350k/yr salary+equity is probably above the median.

Also that feels like a specious comparison: most people (including those who would be otherwise joining a startup) are not joining a FAANG, and will not be getting paid as well.

Early startup is the part you seem to be overlooking. A well funded startup with few or no runway concerns is a different calculation.

It's a difficult trade off I've found. Large tech companies are boring and slow and you deal with a lot of red tape and BS, and you feel utterly powerless in the security of your own job as economic tidal waves direct the momentum of layoffs and not your personal contribution.

At a startup you have more autonomy and power over your personal position. I wrote 90% of the code that is generating company growth, released 2 months after a layoff. If I had taken longer to release that code or if my code didn't work the company would be in a worse financial position.

But that also means a lot of personal stress. There aren't 4 layers of middle management to catch flak for you. If you fuck something up, you are directly responsible and depending on the environment that can result in some heated conversations. I also work way harder at a startup than I ever did for a big company

Those are the factors that make the tradeoff easy for me. I would vastly prefer direct accountability for my own fuckups, because that means I have the agency to do something to fix it.

What makes me want to put my head through a wall is when I fuck up, and four layers of people above me are the only ones allowed to fix the thing, but they don't, so I keep catching flak for my fuckup without any way to stop it and fix the thing. I have many more heated conversations with those managers, which typically leads to the door.

When I fuck something up, rarely is anyone more upset about that than I am. Nobody's dumping more heat on me than I am on myself, so bring on the heat-- as long as I have the agency to fix the problem.