Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

The more and apt comparison would be if you should work at a startup vs. a corporate job at a HP or Qualcomm. At those type of companies, compensation is not competitive (they often off-shore), benefits are tight, and the work is not interesting. It could very well be argued that a startup, even with high probability of failure, would be more fulfilling.

What personality type are you? The author likely comes from a structured, religious background and prefers the “certainty” of a corporate environment. Some of us were raised by hippies with little or no religion and high structure. People like that are miserable in highly structured environments in which gaining a sense of the “mission” is impossible.

The main point here is that career decisions are highly personal and one person’s hell is another person’s heaven.

I am 64, and worked in many startups, from 1988 through 2013. My main criteria for evaulating a startup were interesting work, and potential financial reward. I would also try to avoid companies whose business model didn't make sense to me. This worked out pretty well. I started out on an academic path, went to an industrial research lab in the 80s, and this led me to the startup world, where some ideas in software research were used as the basis of innovative products. I wasn't comfortable as a pure academic, and I loved writing software, so this was the right path for me.

At each new company, my thought was: if the business fails, at least I've had fun and worked on interesting software. And this often worked out very well:

- Startup 1: The company was building an innovative product, really a new category of software. I was given responsibility for one huge part of it, and this was my first job ever in which I was being paid to create software (as opposed to research). The company had a modest IPO. Nice payout. In my last couple of years, I started a new project which was rejected by the company. But this led to ...

- Startup 2: I took a summer off, built software based on my ideas, and merged with a startup that had complementary ideas. We needed each other. So much fun. This company was acquired toward the end of the dotcom bubble. Nice payout.

- Startup 3: Post bubble explosion, my choices were a consumer startup or interesting tech at a non-startup. I chose the consumer startup. Pretty dull, although fascinating from a sociological point of view. I left when I got bored and tech startups were happening again. Minor payout a few years later when they were acquired.

- Startup 4: My favorite. Fascinating project, three key pieces, I built one of them. I also really enjoyed building the tools to support the development and troubleshooting work. Acquired by a huge company. Nice payout.

- Startup 5: Really interesting idea. I loved the idea so much that I missed the fact it should have been a feature of a product, not a product by itself. Oops.

I mean, in my experience at startups, founders typically own around 40% of the equity. The option pool for all other employees is around 10-20%.

Now, I certainly believe startup founders deserve far more equity than anyone else, but this highlights that the risk/reward trade-off really only makes sense for founders. I mean, what founders risk in terms of opportunity costs and lower wages is usually only slightly more than very early stage employees, but their reward is ~10-30x. The reward, in rare cases, may also make sense for C level hires at proven startups that are already growing like gangbusters, because they'll get a ton of equity. For rank-and-file, though, the issue is that even if the startup hits it usually becomes more like a nice bonus than life defining wealth.

Later in my career, I have had offers at seed stage companies. The compensations were marginally better than the one described above, but most still needed to 10-15x in value over 4 years just so the annualized comp would match the base annual comp at various series C/D companies I also had offers at.

Given the risk, often poor culture, rampant inexperience in leadership, and long hours, the upside is only worth it as an early employee if the company is a unicorn. And every founder says their company will be a unicorn...

After starting a few (failed) companies myself, I've come to adopt the mindset that the total equity allocated to the founding team (pre-seed + seed + maybe series A) should be around 20-25%. Everyone after should get 15-20%. In the event of a $100M exit, there should be no scenario in which the founders/investors walk away with a win financially, but the early employees do not. The early employees took the same risk and secured that win, and thus should be rewarded accordingly.

Edit: fixed grammar and re-ordered sections

Fast forward to the present. FAANG companies dominate the economy. They pay well, offer upside in actual stock, AND most crucially: they do a better job giving more fulfilling tech work than most startup

Who wants to work at a startup where management likely sucks? They might have no real track record building good tech or empowering great technologists.

You’d rather have your 40 hr / week FAANG job doing what you love, spend time with your kids and family, where you know the balance of risks means you’ll likely end up in a position of upper middle class life (if not outright wealthy...)

I joined a startup just after their series A. I was offered what they said was a lot of equity (1/2000 of the company). I ended up with the best case scenario: it grew like crazy and 8 years later went public at a multi-billion dollar valuation. My shares had gone up more than 100x.

My payout was good, but financially not worth it. The company raised a bunch along the way (I stopped counting after series G) so I got diluted a fair bit. I also took a lower than market salary for the time I spent there (which was of course justified by the fact the company was growing so fast and people were jumping to hop on a rocket ship).

I ended up with low 7 figures, which, yes, is amazing, but I actually would have had more at any FAANG company during that same period.

So who really got paid? The founders and the executive team (no matter when they joined). It was a good experience, but startups, financially, are not a great move.

There has been since at least one major wave, which was characterized by disillusionment and cynicism about startups ("just buy a lottery ticket", "startup equity isn't worth the paper it's printed on", etc.). This became standard fare on HN and until recently was probably the dominant view.

That has become old hat in its own right—you can tell that such a wave is in its later stages when the comments become predictable, and then compensate for that by getting snarkier. When information gets worn out through repetition, comments have to add in extra spice to get interesting again—though not necessarily the good form of 'interesting'.

It's too soon to tell but I think we might be at the beginning of another wave now—a more balanced weighing of pros and cons. Many comments in this thread are good examples of that.

There's another dynamic too, which I've not yet seen anyone comment on: these waves are staggered geographically. This became obvious to me when looking at the geography of HN comments (judging by IP geolocation). These waves don't get started and then subside in lockstep all over the world—rather, they exist in different stages in different locations. It took years for the romantic story to make its way to certain locations, and those places are now in the early stages of the cynical wave. Other parts of the world are still in the crest of the romantic phase. This creates unfortunate misunderstandings where someone in one of those areas posts an enthusiastic startup story, of the kind that was popular on HN in say 2008, and then gets blasted with flames by people in locations where the cynical wave is strong.

I hope I'm guessing correctly that the next wave is more balanced and nuanced, because I think we need to look beyond "startups: yay or nay" to asking when they make sense, when they don't, and what changes the ecosystem could make to make them make more sense...if that makes sense.

If you’re in it just for the money AND you have the background and interviewing skills to get a job at a FAANG then you’re better off doing that, you’ll make far more money.

For me though, there’s not many salaries that don’t end in “million” that you could pay me to work at a FAANG. Not only because I mentally couldn’t deal with the people (see Apple’s latest debacle), but because your impact is essentially meaningless. Working on some tiny little fraction of a fraction of a feature means I’d basically have to not give a shit about my job.

At that point you’re just a wage slave. A well paid one, sure.

Additionally, building a successful company is one of the most rewarding things you can do. True American capitalism is a thing of beauty. Taking an idea, building a product, and creating value. Working at a startup is a good first step in building your own.

Every workplace has trade offs, it’s the nature of the thing. The compensation imbalances at large companies are bad as well, for example, it’s just that the total increase in company income allows for much more competitive packages overall.

Really this is more of a question of: what do you want out of a job and career? If you want to maximize compensation, go for that BigCo job. But that isn’t the only valid thing to maximize for, which the snark about “higher callings” towards the end misses. Higher autonomy, less complex organizational politics, More ownership of big problems, potential for better alignment between your values and the companies mission, etc. etc.

For every successful startup we see on here and elsewhere, there are thousands that fail in obscurity, sometimes leaving people in ruins.

Treat options/shares as a literal lottery. Assume your odds of winning are zero when making life choices. Also unless you're a very very early employee, those options/shares are likely to not be worth what you imagine they will be worth even if the company has a successful exit.

Go into it with eyes open and realistic expectations if you choose to try it out.

The conditional chance of picking a successful company to join is way higher than 2%, or whatever the median success rate of all startups is. In particular, I think really intellectually curious, ambitious, hard-working people can, for the most part, identify each other. This is really different from reading about valuations or what other people think in the news, which leads to a lot more noise. If you meet a bunch of people at the company, you can assess the their caliber for yourself.

While it's not a perfect predictor of success, it's at least the case that such people are usually working on cool, worthy projects. Based on this, it's possible to get conviction on a group before their likely success becomes common knowledge—granted it's getting harder to do this because of how much money is floating around.

To put it another way, there are a handful of companies out there right now at Series A/Series B with a dense accumulation of talent. It's probably a reasonable bet to try and join them before they hit unicorn valuations, when room for growth is smaller. And in these cases, you could be #10-#40 at a relatively de-risked company and have a really great outcome.

On the flip side, if you even remotely enjoy learning and autonomy, working at Google/Apple/Amazon/etc is probably a great way to set yourself up for existential frustration. It's not even a great financial proposition. Even at $500k/yr, it's 20 years—a whole working life—to make it to $10m, the hypothetical number from the article. Even if your first startup doesn't make it after 2-3 years, you can try again a few times and still come out ahead. This is a classic pg argument—I can't remember which essay—but the point of a startup is to compress decades of working life.

Caveat: I happened to join a startup whose success changed my life both financially and in terms of career trajectory. I'm very biased. But this is also why I feel passionately that this article's advice is bad.

1. One was recruiting phase as median age of India is low and adds overwhelming number of new workers every day. Google uses it. 2. Second one was a fintech during digital india phase. 3. SAAS with global sales and high scale (rpm)

All three were hard and very fullfilling. I made a lot of money with fintech one and learned a lot on engineering at scale with third one.

In the first one, I made lifelong friends and got to meet important people, attended VC talks and part of decisions like hiring PM as new grad, VC was very involved with CEO about it. Something my salary could not quantify.

If I were to do it again, do it well with patience rather than arrogance and anger against founders.

If that doesn't appeal to you then yeah you shouldn't work at a startup. But tbh I've never met these mythical people who joined a startup thinking that it was actually a rational financial decision - everyone I know did it because they wanted an intense experience.

Just never do it for "equity" unless you have enough money on the side.

But to spend the vast majority of the career in a startup without being one of the founders is not recommendable I think.

I joined several startups in SF throughout my journey.

Took me forever to realize that not all levels of hard are the same:

- Working harder than most for 1% was not worth it. Small team comradery dissolved as soon as the company started going under. Sometimes founders screwed you over at the end. Nowadays I sometimes wonder why I worked so hard for other people's companies.

- Working for FAANG pays well, but golden handcuffs are not for everyone.

- Doing your own startup is super hard. Emotional roller coaster. It sucks all the time, until it doesn't.

All of these are hard, but the last one forces you to learn skills you wouldn't have cared for otherwise. Again, not for everyone, but if I had to pick my "level of hard", that would be it.

Except during this unpaid period the founder took off to Costa Rica to "work on his vacation" while we continued to work in the office with delayed pay. He came from a wealthy background, while I had a young child and a pregnant wife at home and a mortgage to pay.

So he didn't really get it, I think, when I raised a stink. I was offered more stock options and a higher title to retain me (without that title being communicated to anybody else). But a mark was put on me for my whining and my attitude and the founder's attitude toward me took a turn. He pivoted again, and I was either fired or I quit (I was already interviewing elsewhere and had an offer) depending on who you talk to.

Through some hand waving the ability to buy the options disappeared, though I couldn't be bothered.

He built that business up, and a few years later he sold for an OK sum. But the business itself was dubious, I doubt the company that acquired his business kept any talent or tech worth anything and he's now living in Costa Rica. The people I know who worked there and were there from day one certainly didn't get rich.

So yeah, that's when my attitude towards startups in general changed significantly. I used to be very interested and motivated by being early in the process in a company and getting to be technically creative and involved in the decision making and architecture, and I loved the feeling of coding like crazy and really pounding metal on something greenfield. But honestly, it's not worth it when you start to see the kinds of people and egos involved.

So I'm getting older and maybe I'm not the ultimate talent that a startup today would be looking for, but there are plenty of other people like me who've been burned in this game and their advice would most likely be: don't bother. This isn't the 80s or 90s, you're not likely to change the world tech wise, and you're unlikely to get rich out of it, and jobs at FAANGs are soul sucking boredom in many ways, but they'll treat you well.

(FWIW I went from there to a later stage 50-100 person company that was acquired by Google a year later and did OK out of that, but that was a properly managed company run by ethical human beings.)

As a Canadian, I can generally make a higher wage working for an American startup than working for anything local. Usually I can expect 1.5x to 2x over the mean local rate for my skills and experience; and since I don't _need_ health benefits and I enjoy guaranteed parental leave and such, it works out quite well.

I'm happy, and the startup is happy because _I'm still paid less than an equivalent American_.

you only work for a startup if 2 conditions hold

1) the pay is sufficient for your needs (and this is not just in an immediate sense of making ends meet, but also a long term sense of being able to save for future goals / retirement).

2) the job is something you really want to do and you cannot get that experience elsewhere at a more established company.

i.e. if 2 doesn't hold, why would you take less pay than elsewhere?

if 1 doesn't hold, you are making a bad long term financial decision for yourself, by essentially accumulating an actual or virtual debt (need to makeup retirement contributions or other savings) that you will have to pay back in the future.

the #2 point can lead to earning more money in the long term even if the startup fails (i.e. the personal growth can outweigh experience you'd get elsewhere), but this is far from guaranteed. But even then, you shouldn't put yourself in "debt" to do that.

One thing I think people miss is that founding a startup, or working at an early-stage startup, belongs to a class of financially irrational aspirations that includes other things like rock-star, novelist, actor, and professional athlete. For all these careers, the financial rewards are distributed according to a power law. A few superstars take a massively disproportionate share of rewards while the expected ROI is negative across all aspirants.

I stress "financial" rewards because for many of these pursuits there are intangible rewards that make it worth it even for the "losers". I spent most of my 20s playing in rock bands and legitimately trying, and failing, to "make it". During that time I had a day job, so I was working constantly either at the band or at my day job, and really not doing much else. I wouldn't trade that time in my life for anything, despite the fact that it cost me money both out-of-pocket and in opportunity cost, and only perhaps a few hundred people now remember my band. On the other hand, I had no family to support during that time, and I was willing to live a low-rent bohemian lifestyle.

Early-stage startups are probably the same: the camaraderie, the esprit-de-corps, and the joy of building things are the reward.

It's important to enter into these risky pursuits with your eyes open and understand that the most important rewards you receive won't be financial. If those intangibles aren't important to you, or if the base level of financial security you need is higher than that of a bohemian lifestyle, then you should look for something else.

Another interesting (and non-US-centric) factor for me is the flexibility a startup can offer in terms of your work and compensation, especially in an era where going remote seems to be an unstoppable trend. If the company is willing to pay all employees the same amount of salary, regardless of where they live in the world, it could be a no brainer for somebody not living in the US to work for such a startup. The salary they get can easily exceed Google L4 total pay (e.g. in the UK and in Germany, not to mention in most other countries). Of course, many companies such as GitLab aggressively adjust their salary according to where you work from, but I've seen more and more companies that don't. It will be very interesting to see how the market sorts itself out in a few years' time: Seems to me the proliferation of remote work could result in US salary and remote salary meeting somewhere in the middle.

I feel like all I hear about is how bad it is and FAANG is now the ideal. A crazy thought for a forum whose parent company’s sole income is generated by creating and funding new startups.

So what are we going to do about it?

I love small companies, I love the chaos, I love having that bond around some crazy idea that might never work. I love being in the know about how things work and why people buy our product and all of that.

I used to want to work at Google. I have a few friends that do and the common thing I hear is that it is fun at the beginning but then it gets boring. Things move slowly, people are less excited about work and there's a lot of red tape. Not saying that it's inherently bad, it's just a tradeoff. I could see myself being into that kind of work at some point in life.

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One thing that people often miss in these conversations is that if a company is failing it doesn't take a long time to figure it out. If you join a startup and it's tanking or you think the founders are incompetent, you can quit and go try another one. That's more or less what happened to me. I stayed for 2 months at one company, 8 months at another, one company I almost started with some people but quickly realized we'd fail because none of us knew the problem space. Then I worked at a successful startup for 5 years and we all made money.

Another reason to work at a startup is if you ever want to start your own company. Starting a company consists of doing a lot of different things, so it helps if you have some prior experience with them. I learned a ton of random things working at startups, from interacting with lawyers to doing content marketing. I recently started a company and I talk to other founders a lot and I think people who worked at startups before are better prepared compared to people who come out of large companies.

Well at least we have better social benefits all around i guess.

I'm not interested in working on the "retention" team, or the "console ad integration" team. I want to build the main thing and feel like I make an impact every day I go to work.

It is possible to do that at a larger business but the odds are stacked against me. Google has a history of killing large projects, and the thought of two years work being cancelled by an accountant because it didn't make enough money just sounds draining on a completely different emotional level.

I would say that each of my startup experiences had some dark times, it wasn't always easy by any measure. At the same time, each of those experiences provided a lot of personal growth and opened other opportunities for me.

The sad thing was it was one of the most interesting places and domains I’ve worked, and if the company launched while I was there, it probably would have been acquired (like all our competitors). The founder was quite innovative but think was scared to launch and had a new idea/approach to market every few months. Eventually I lost faith, and being expected to work late every evening knowing my options were tiny killed all motivation.

As the author said, I calculated the expected value, decided it’s no longer worth it and left. The moment that changed my outlook was when they decided not to approve my leave (I had already booked and didn’t expect any issues since I had mentioned it in conversation a few months before). If I had stayed, I would haven’t enjoyed all the travelling and experiences I’ve had, earning more and working less.

The company is still going, and probably a long way off from having any exit. A few months after I left, some incompetent recruiter tried to hire me for my previous role at a £30k increase in salary.

Having said that, I would definitely join an early stage startup again, if the work was interesting, but would expect at least 1% and decent salary next time.

To expand on this: Venture capitalists are incentivized, by the nature of how they invest, to drive companies towards becoming unicorns and attempting the extreme-risk-extreme-reward scenario. If you put $10M towards a company, and it says "Great, we're stable and our employees are happy and productive and we're building the cool thing we wanted to build and we're about to get enough sales to break even" and it doesn't hire or grow, the investors won't see the $10M back for a very long time. That scenario is only slightly financially better than the company shutting down, and in practice, given that the investor needs to keep thinking about the company, being on its board, etc., it's not worth having that distraction.

So even if your company would be successful, if it's VC-funded, it's going to get pushed to be either hyper-successful or to fail.

And even if it's hyper-successful, it will probably experience mission drift. Early employees at Tiny Speck who wanted to build a neat MMORPG are probably very financially happy with Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, but all that remains of Glitch is a 404 page. (Read their shutdown announcement: https://www.glitchthegame.com/closing/) So if you're going into the startup because you're mission-driven instead of profit-driven, remember that the people who decide your mission are ultimately profit-driven.

I have only worked in the startup environment over the last 30 years. I don't miss the big company environment and what I see from my GF (FAANG, plus one F50 brick and mortar) just reinforces that.

But a lot of people choose startup jobs because they read (or saw on TV!) a romanticized version. As described in this article the very things that make it so great aren't the things that most people want...and if you try to blend in too much of the big company thing too early the company doesn't usually make it. It it much more fun to work with people who are really into that environment so anything that steers unhappy people away is better for everyone.

I worked with a guy who had an extreme version of this: his limit was about a dozen people. And looking at his linkedIn he's since worked at some amazing major companies....always at the very beginning. It's just his thing.

And this is especially true if the field is one you're excited about working in. You're putting yourself at an emotional disadvantage. You're more likely to put up with missed paychecks because you're supposedly "working your dream job". And when you end up in a bad situation, if you don't have a cushion of cash to fall back on, it could very well sour your view of your "dream".

I know an early employee at Zip2 who told me some amazing Elon Musk stories.

One of the stories relates to the quote aebove.

Elon Musk spent almost all his money on this McClaren - to the point he couldn't even afford the insurance on it.

But, this person claims it was an incredibly smart move - because it allowed Elon to start hanging with other super car owners, who were also the movers & shakers of SV at the time - like Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo.

This network would prove invaluable to everything Elon did after Zip2.

This animal fable opposes two animals similar in morphology but which have two different lifestyles: one is wild and the other is domestic. This confrontation allows La Fontaine to present two conditions: the insecurity linked to freedom and the comfort linked to servitude.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Loup_et_le_Chien

But FAANG big as they are are a small fraction of the action.

Even those who joined Uber in 2016 or later got something back. Uber's success did give halo to its employees. As a result, many became senior managers or directors or staff engineers in other reputed companies, even though they had started their career only 3 or 4 years before.

The trick to land on a promising startup is taking sunken cost seriously. Switch to a different company decisively and swiftly once you are convinced that the company has a bad leadership. And trust me, there will be many signs. Take Uber after 2016, for instance, you would see 1. Head of HR reported to this hot-head VP, who was the buddy of the CEO; 2. CFO told employees that they RSU hold period was a year instead of 6 months and the reason is for employees' own good; 3. CEO told employees that he didn't want to go IPO simply because he didn't want the employees to check stock price all day. 4. Uber copies pretty much every policy from Amazon yet could execute well and everyone was launching project for promotion and the company had more than 800 services. 5. CEO forced managers to A/B test packages to see how low a package can go to hire people. 6. Company splurged 10s of millions hosting extravagant parties for 4 days straight in Vegas for bogus metrics like total number of trips; 7. HRs used number of people hired as the key metric to boast that Uber was the fastest-growing company.

See? When you see so much distrust from the top, you should just jump ship, and use the halo you get from UBER to land on a different top startup, whatever that is, and rinse (in case you ended up joining WeWork).

My opinion is to try working for early stage startups while one is young and idealistic, choosing it by heart, thus maximizing its chances to success. Getting familiar with different techs and stacks. Getting a good networking while visiting meetups and hackathons. Even if the startup won't fly, it will help to get much more interesting position in established company later.

Plenty of large companies build small teams for new ideas but they too have the problem of often not staying small for long. Empire building is a hell of a drug. But you can often see this coming and I’ve known a couple people who were very good at moving horizontally within a company every few years to avoid most of these sorts of problems.

I didn't understand this math, 2% is the chance of it being a unicorn. 1% of 1B is 10M is the amount you might get if the startup sells for 1B. what does 2% of 10M signify?

I chose to work at an early stage startup, in my home country (which is known to be adverse to entrepreneurship), in a very monopolized market, even though I could’ve easily moved abroad and joined a big company.

Despite all the odds it worked out for me financially and I’m proud of what we achieved, but I realize it was basically gambling.

My advice is to take a shot at it if you’re young, but try to aim on ambitious startups so you can balance the slim odds with huge potential upside.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

* $150k base (take-home $100k)

* $30k/yr options that expire 3 months after you leave or 10 years.

You have to either set aside 30% of your take-home to invest in a extremely high risk single stock or you're chained to your desk until the company exits.

If you golden handcuff your way to an exit, you better hope the exit happens before the 10 year mark when your options expire.

A good startup experience can help you figure out what you really like to work on. In a big company things are already specialized — it’s pretty hard to be a data engineer and move over to the android team. Not impossible, but hard. That’s why people say you go to startups to “learn” — because in our line of work you learn by doing and in a startup you can usually do a lot.

Do it because the startup excites you, and be okay with things if the startup fails and you are out of a job. Because the economics likely won’t work out, you’ll have to derive value in other ways.

He's now starting his own company, doing something socially useful that he can be proud of. Got a good team and making good progress. Will see MVP in a couple months!

If you just want the experience of working at a startup, go for it. But don't do it expecting any financial reward beyond of your salary.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/bxa3qz/guide_for_n...

If you want to learn a lot, get a sense of startup, have great founders, bootstrapped company then startup is a good idea. Especially at the start of your career.

But if you are late in your career with family, responsibilities and health issues - then startup isn't the best place to work.

I hope - you decide weighing everything and enjoy the process.

The pay wasn't a critical thing in my suffering. Now I'm making a third less and feeling ten times better.

2/3 startups had excellent returns in the form of equity. Life changing over time. Startups: 66% hit rate.

Bigco was mentally draining and sucked. Bigco: 0% hit rate.

Starting the first company was a failure, but the second one seems to be doing pretty well. 50% hit rate.

Many people find value in the experience whether we got paid or not. I'd rather work my ass off for a startup than spend money on an MBA.

I've been a part of five startups. One of them (and the financial collapse) resulted in ruining me financially in 2009, but it was my choice. No one told me to take the job.

Three were mine (two failed, one is in hypothesis mode). The other was with a millionaire and it also failed. I learned to look at things differently because of all of those experiences and my value as a consultant today is because of those experiences.

I know you can get screwed over by sketchy founders and unscrupulous venture capitalists. You should absolutely understand where you stand going in. Stock options are 100% worthless unless you have a startup that succeeds and you have a founder that is honest in their intentions. Even real equity can be diluted, so that's no guarantee.

But there are always cases where the first few hundred employees make a life's worth of wealth in a few years.

I hate these articles bitching about the startup world. If you're gonna bitch, maybe go take a job at a nice safe boring mega-corporation that will maybe just destroy your soul. You'll get paid on time and you'll work 40hr weeks, have PTO, health benefits. If that's what you want, then just go do that.

It's also true that a great deal of the promotion of this career path is propaganda that benefits owners - both founders and financiers.

Jump ship as far and as soon you can.

When joining a startup you are a minority investor. The value of your options depends 100% on the integrity of the majority investors.

Many people, including myself, make this mistake the first round at startups. The mistake of believing if you work hard the outcome will be good. I wrote an article a little while back on how this relationship works and how it follows a logarithmic and exponential relationship, risk and equity, and how human minds are terrible at understanding those scales.

For anyone interested: https://louiebacaj.com/equity-and-risk/

I did employment and self-employment with consulting.

Trying a product business is simply an interesting new step.

We're a five-person legal tech startup and the work environment is far and away the best I've ever experienced. Granted, I've only been a developer in total for four or five years now (including almost three here), but of all the jobs I've had it's the best.

My CTO/supervisor is amazing: smart, funny, likable and with a management style that works for me amazingly well. Mostly hands off, but fully available for deep dives on technical subjects when necessary. At this point I've earned enough trust to be able to just get shit done with minimal oversight, though we do check in daily at least, and keep each other apprised of what we're up to, or interesting things we've come across.

The lack of external forcing agents is probably a win for us at this point. Obviously there's benefits to having a pile of money to burn: we'd probably hire several more developers and really work to hone our product. But for a team with two full-time developers and a really great designer, not to mention extremely smart and talented leadership and sales teams, we're doing great, and ship features at a pace that seems to put to shame similar companies with much larger teams and far more money. Honestly, I have no idea what they're doing with their time.

Still working on that product-market fit though...

Anyway, tl;dr I feel like I hit the jackpot here.

I had my own startup at some time, and worked for both other people's startups and for big corps. I used to maximize career and CV over quality of life. I was easy prey to assholes/takers/sociopaths. Burned 15 years of my life without much to show. On the upside, I really appreciate now working for good bosses and good leaders. I could easily earn 1.5-2x in a soulless corporate job. But I know my current employer would go out of its way to try to not screw me over while the 2x employer will throw me under the bus the second I stop being useful.

You can study or do research on your spare time. Good bosses will understand if you eventually move on. And some might even help you progress against their convenience.

I’ve worked the whole gamut from FAANG to 1st employee (and founder of a side project startup) and I just don’t know how they compete anymore.

We need innovation and new companies.

But for my own side project I can’t imagine hiring someone. I either are hiring if we become wildly successful or we just get acquired with our founding team and still make an outsized outcome.

It’s a grim outlook for startups but we need them

Seriously, just how many startups in the last ten+ years involve anything but some sort of internet service/social media/advertising software construct with (usually) the hope of selling the company? It all sounds kind of depressing.

Edit: and I do it while working at one of the tech giants. Paycheck goes to crypto.