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Comment by jypepin | Hacker News Reader

My view is only a data point, but what I've observed is that while comp at startups has not evolved much in the last 5 years (seeing roughly same salaries + stock packages), total comp at later stage startups or bigger companies has sky rocketed.

The comments on the 2018 post you mention are all still true and relevant today.

My experience has proven than as an employee, joining a post series B will usually be a better bet with if you want to have impact + leverage on stocks, and joining a bigger company is the better bet if you want to maximise your income.

Earlier startup are just as risky for a new employee than founders, but with much less leverage, offsetting making it interesting.

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I think one thing to consider with an early stage startup is the potential to advance in terms of responsibility / role far more quickly than a large company or even a post-series B company.

If you join a 20 person startup and are a good performer, it's not at all unlikely that by the time the startup is at 60-70 people (which isn't going to be a long time at all for a funded startup), there's a high likelihood that you'll be in a director / manager / other senior position.

In terms of equity though, I'd say you should value your equity at 0, since that's what it's overwhelmingly likely to be worth even in most positive outcomes and only join if you're comfortable with your base comp.

It's worth noting that depending on the senior role, it may not transfer as you might expect. Being in charge of a group of people shows something, but it may or may not be the kind leadership needed to be in charge of the same sized group of people at BigCo. I'm not saying BigCo managers are better. I am saying they have to worry about internal networking, internal recruiting, working with infrastructure teams, and other things you don't have at SmallCo.

Point being, depending on the BigCo and the role, you might have to take what feels like a step back in job title to eventually end back where you started. At least the competition for influential roles will be more intense since there will probably be several BigCo employees that want the same job and have advantages of shared culture and better access to the people doing the hiring.

> If you join a 20 person startup and are a good performer, it's not at all unlikely that by the time the startup is at 60-70 people (which isn't going to be a long time at all for a funded startup), there's a high likelihood that you'll be in a director / manager / other senior position.

If you're looking at this from a compensation perspective, that's only helpful if the company also starts paying competitive wages at that point. If you end up wanting to switch to a big tech company as a director with only 3 years of total experience, you'll probably be hired at L4 which you likely could have gotten within a year if you started your career at that company.

Of course if you think you'll like the job and it's not a question of compensation, then this can be a big benefit of startups.

The rub is that many 20 person companies will never get to 70 people.

Having stagnated at a start up and grown a lot at a BigCo, I think easy career growth is really more about company growth than absolute company size. The scenario you outline still holds if the company grows from 1,000 to 2,000.

It's sad and strange at the same time that the market isn't reacting. Early employees shouldn't accept the huge difference between preferred and normal stock options, they should exactly understand how much their stock will be diluted at the point when they can sell it.

Anyways these kind of HN threads are awesome, I hope they can rationalize the market somewhat.

After having just gone through this with my startup - the litigious nature of society makes it hard to reveal any of the information. If the board or the C* reveal too much, it opens the company up to a lawsuit.

True but it's very hard to rationalise. I only know a lot of (great) engineers who either don't believe it when they are told the level of income in BigCo, or think that the comp is that high because people are much better at BigCo and they'd never be able to get a job there.

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