edit: grammar
edit: grammar
This is the answer. Our organization is tiny and works in an extremely boring niche - B2B banking consultants & related software shenanigans. We've been at it since the 90s.
If you adjust your expectations just a little bit (i.e. you are now OK using "boring" stuff like .NET/Java), you might be able to get something much more quickly than otherwise.
Regardless, the market has spoken and we must all adapt.
There's also good existing small companies that are in more exciting tech spaces, that are hiring, that are not startups.
Shout out to Fastmail, my former employer, as they are one of those nice small companies, seem to get lots of love here, and they're lovely people. And last I checked, they're hiring as well.
Even in the 'SaaS' space there are boring but profitable small comapnies that fulfill automation for niche use cases. I just picked up on that we are using for our CDN that cloudfront doesn't being to cover. The pricing is good, the company is small, stable, and I'll continue to use them as long as I can.
So... they're out there, but they certainly aren't FAANG and a lot of times, they aren't wild startups either.
Part of this leads to less "popularity" for potential employees. You've never heard of ABC Bearings & Co, and they haven't manufactured Bearings in 100 years, but they fulfill important roles in the roller industry. Not Boeing, but just as important.
I think this is because startups spend incredible amounts of time trying to grow and to find customers, so naturally they advertise, are in the news, on HN, etc. In a more boring economic sphere (IE: no exponential growth, a few solid players that often times are more cordial than cutthroat competitive) you may never hear of these places.
Maybe visibility is an issue, too? I like boring work for a decent (not excessive, stable) wage. But finding these companies is difficult. Most of the ones I come across are rarely ever hiring because their turnover is low.
Our industry is such that we're not too worried about the recession -- people tend to buy our product because it's significantly cheaper than paying one more employee and it tends to make teams in a particular corporate department far more efficient. When COVID hit, we had a surge in sales.
My last company (larger & much older) also tended to get increased sales when the market slumped. Their product is key to helping governments, utilities, and other companies operate more efficiently.
So there are still great startups (and larger companies) that are hiring. I'd suggest looking for ones that have a recession-tolerant market or business model.
But since you ask: $57M ARR, 117% NRR, 97% YoY growth, 51 NPS, named a best place to work in [insert regional business journal] for the last 4 years in a row, customers really love us, and employees really love working here.
I don't know how reliable Glassdoor is considered to be these days, but we're rated 4.8 stars by employees, 97% recommend to a friend, and 92% approve of the CEO.
Your comment seems rather cynical, but I hope to at least demonstrate that there do exist good VC-backed startups.
Oh, and we're hiring! If anyone wants to know where this is, my email is in my profile.
I am not trying to dismiss anything or being cynical but just trying to point out that a lot of things goes into determining if you are a "good" VC backed startup. In my opinion, a smaller growth in headcount (compared with revenue growth) would have been a better indicator of a healthy startup.
So with that being the only anecdotal data point I have, the emails won't stop until the recruiters become fewer.
> we're desperately trying to hire
Do you wonder why people aren’t joining?
And when was your experience, and what was comp for all these places?
If you're in the bay it might be hard to see, but high comps spread rapidly across the country, to Canada and to some parts of Europe. It became more commonplace hence why everyone and their dog has been trying to get into the industry.
If a significant part of your comp is in stock, then yeah, that portion of your pay is down potentially 70% or more in six months (Netflix). There’s probably some employees at FAANG that are negative on their equity.
lol didn't want to be the last ones holding the bag. What a scumbag move.
Even if you’re only making $250K, that puts you well within the top 10% of earners in the US.
I think Amazon has seen the largest drop out of the BigTech companies and it is down 30% year to date. Amazon has been adjusting SDEs cash component up even before the crash.
Netflix should have never been put in the same category as the 1 trillion+ market cap companies.
But, if you work for employers like mine (we're hiring for multiple senior positions, by the way) all this is going to do in the short term is make hiring a bit easier. Honestly, I'm looking forward to the market getting a little more sanity in it. Bootstrapped or reasonably invested (e.g. non-VC) companies haven't been able to compete on comp in years.
If you want personal advice check this out:
https://www.towardssoftware.com/blog/economic-environment-fo...
Perhaps this is a good place to leave a link to your hiring page...
But any smart, motivated actor can probably derive who you are from your posts.
You probably give away little hints about yourself, interests, tech you use, etc. Cross referencing with data leaks, public Github commits, LinkedIn profile, the time you usually post here (tells your TZ), etc, it's not far fetched to determine who you are...
So on the one hand, that you say you're doing $80-100k sounds low, to me. But $200k for a principal eng. sounds not too bad¹. So IDK.
¹it sounds "inline with what I'm making now, adjusted for experience / title differences. But it's crap compared to the current housing market.