FANG is undisputably the best risk-adjusted compensation return for a programmer, and they're up there in terms of working with super smart colleagues, and therefore they have a high floor, compared to say a startup that goes nowhere with the blind leading the blind, but the ceiling is also constrained by what projects you're working on. In terms of raw software engineering development there's probably no substitute for joining early in a hypergrowth scenario, because you'll have to solve way more problems in an efficient way, and understand the direct impact on the business in a way that is totally obscured when you come into a massive corporation with thousands of engineers. It's likely company growth will outpace your personal growth (hence the outside hires), but even so you will get challenged in ways that just don't exist in large, stable companies.

All compensations are risk + skills adjusted (a technical term is expected return). With lower risk you must sacrifice possibility of higher reward and vice versa. This universal law is not broken by FANG or anyone else. FANG is not better risk adjusted and there is nothing special about their compensation.

If you are young and blessed with no dependencies, you should attempt exploiting higher risk domains. As you get older with more dependencies, you need to lower your risk tolerance. The technical term for this is exploration vs exploitation. The maximum payouts in many complex system requires some balance between two and sticking with just exploitation is often not the optimal policy when you look at life span as a whole.

If you put a lot of mental energy into organizing your ideology to think of them as evil, sure.

Can you elaborate?

The world is at peril, and full of people who are suffering. I can easily call an oil company evil, because they are burning the earth. I can call a food manufacturer that knowingly puts poison in their products to save a few bucks evil. I cannot bring myself to call Facebook or Google evil because they are configuring computers to display ads that introduce people to products they might want to buy. It’s really a triumph of human progress that they have managed to amass such wealth while causing so little harm.

The harm these companies might cause is primarily in the future. This is still the sunny phase where they have not been incorporated into some Orwellian system (pardon me, google tried really hard in China but got stopped for now)

Upvoted, but at the same time it's worth considering that right now, we have little idea how to account for the harm of the concentrations of personal data that both companies (among others) currently have. Even in the context of marketing, but more pressingly, once it becomes accessible to actors whose intentions may be either more malevolent, or simply up for sale to malevolent actors (e.g., Cambridge Analytica). You're speaking of poisoned products; what happens when data-intensive psych profiling is used to taint or outright poison discourse?

Nobody ever said that about the As!!

I'm pretty certain I've heard Amazon described as "evil". Apple are less objectionable, but I'm sure there are some things that somebody wouldn't like.

It seems Amazon's evilness mostly stems from their reputation for how they treat their employees - not how they treat their customers.

My weak sauce rationalization re Amazon is that I wouldn't work there (I love hearing the big sigh from recruiters when I ask if the client they are hiring for is Amazon.)

Others who choose to work there do so voluntarily. They haven choosen their own pain.

In my mind this is different than using your PhDs to build dark patterns to trick consumers, survelience tech to monetize people, using that surveillance information and neuroscience to manipulate people, and so on.

edit: to add -- I forgot about Apple, since I stopped buying their stuff a few years ago. At least they see that privacy protection may have some value in the marketplace.

Maybe you missed it but Amazon entered the advertising space in a big way, somewhat recently:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-advertising-explained...

Most plausibly their:

- Attitude to third party repair

- Puritanical content restrictions

- Apparent disdain, in many cases, for their 'power users'

Which seemed like a big deal in 2009 but here in 2019 with the misdeeds of Facebook, Google and Amazon they look like a shining beacon of corporate ethics. Funny how things change.

Labor conditions for workers at their factories and at supply-chair partners are not the best. Closed software ecosystem. etc

not really on the same level of "evil" as people perceive FB, GOOG, Amazon etc

Amazon warehouse employees had to pee in bottles because they were worked so hard, and there is that business about selling large scale facial recognition services to governments (possibly in emulation of what China is doing)

They don't look "evil" from the inside. And even from the outside, one needs to considerably stretch the definition of "evil" to call them that.

What are the chances of the startup becoming successful and not turning evil?

and for me that cost is easily covered by the salaries they hand out

FWIW, I've worked with a lot of entry-level people at normal companies over the years and would estimate that noob gainz are 30-50% higher in startup land for the first 1-2 years of career, maybe 10-20% higher the next two, then flat or actually lower than corporate thereafter. I think it comes down to 1) startups pile a lot more responsibility onto their young hires than normal companies are comfortable with + 2) startups have a lot higher tolerance for failure + 3) small companies in general don't have headcount for specialized roles, so everyone has to level up in multiple areas.

I've worked at two startups, then a BigCo, and now another startup. The wearing of many hats was definitely a leveling-up experience, but I felt that I plateaued in just the way you describe. Equity from both of those first two startups is now worth zero.

In my years at BigCo I worked with engineers who have 10-20 years more experience than I do. Often felt like the dumbest guy in the room. I learned a ton. No comparison. But I would never have gotten the job there without my previous startup experience. And without that experience I'm not sure I would even have been able to learn from my BigCo co-workers so successfully.

I got tired of corporate politics and a high traffic commute, so now I'm happily back in startup land.

I feel similarly; I started my career at a BigCo, didn't get much out of it, joined a fairly young company, with (1) more responsibility than someone of my tenure should reasonably have due to (2) high tolerance for failure and (3) they didn't have headcount for the specialized role I was doing. Going back to a BigCo, the experience there was utterly invaluable. I realized that my first go round I had absolutely no idea what I should even be trying to get out of it. This time's different.

There's huge value to getting the lay of the land.

I think there's a similar dynamic with consulting - ThoughtWorks / Pivotal Labs type places. You get shunted around between many different projects, there are never enough people, so there are opportunities to take more responsibilities, and things are often a bit fluid, because a consultancy coming in tends to (should!) crack the organisation a bit. There are downsides to all of that, but it's also a way of getting wider faster, if not getting a lot deeper.

I worked in Pivotal Labs for about two years. It is an amazing place to learn the craft.

Yes startups will give you more responsibility, but that comes at the cost of far less mentorship. I often wonder if people only feel like they're growing faster at startups because the results are a bit more visible.

It is true that it's easier to be stagnant as an associate at a larger company. If you're not interested in taking on new challenges you can generally sort of fall through the cracks. However, folks who are proactive at a FAANG style company can find great mentors and support to develop skills really quickly. Often skills that simply aren't available to people at startups...

What's more valuable: spending your formative years working on systems at really high scale, or building a quick RoR MVP and managing 3 VM's in AWS for a startup?

You're not taking into account when the larger company simply won't allow you to to work on X because you're not the right team, title or level.

You may never get to manage a cloud VM. You will probably never get to help decide how a CI build pipeline works, how engineering hiring should work, etc etc.

I'm not discounting your point about learning to develop software at scale, but your overall scope of responsibility is much narrower. It's a tradeoff.

You won't get to do those things at BigCo likely until you've done it at a startup.

* If you're not interested in taking on new challenges you can generally sort of fall through the cracks.*

BigCo titles are much more narrowly defined, so most of the time you can't even see the parts that might have new challenges...or cracks.

It depends. When I was at IBM I worked on a small team and we had about 4000 VMs/systems I was the Network Guy, the Storage Guy, the VMware Guy, the Windows Guy, the Linux Guy, the AIX guy, the AS/400 guy, and the Security Guy. Gees now that I think about it, no wonder I was so stressed out back them.

I learned a lot from that job and it opened a lot of doors for me in my career.

Just pointing out that noob gainz would be the easily-attained gains at the beginning (of a weightlifting program), suggesting that maybe you learn so much basic stuff at the beginning of your first job, regardless what job it is.

http://nattyornot.com/bodybuilding-basics-noob-gains-explain...

> 2) startups have a lot higher tolerance for failure

I disagree. They have, necessarily, a greater willingness to accept risk since they are already in a risky situation by definition.

If anything the startup is likely less tolerant of failure compared to a big established business, in that it has nothing to fall back on and will simply fail and go out of business.

I resonate with your observation. I did the reverse, i.e.: FANG, fintech, pre-ipo then start-up after already achieved senior staff level. Start-up didn't tech me anything new unfortunately.

"A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside."

This was the main benefit I got from a startup, but that also required winning something of a startup lottery. I was at a company that went from two to 200+ engineers. I was able to grow into the tech lead of the entire thing.

That put me into a leadership track at a relatively young age at larger companies. Which has been great. Financially, however, I suspect I would have been better off working at a FAANG from day 1, even being a very early and key employee for a company that exited at 9 figures.

Still I now know how fortunate I was. At my current gig we routinely hire startup "tech leads" for non leadership roles. They're probably generally thought of as a tier below a mid level IC coming out of a FAANG company.

Startups are a huge gamble. It worked out for me but even the inflated titles are only valuable if the company itself proves to be a winner.

The matching start-up TL to mid-level FAANG seems fair to my observations.

"Seems like the game now is to grind whiteboard before I get too old for Google."

the sad reality of this industry...

I can attest to this as well. I can't recommend this to anyone else, but personally I'm glad I went through it. I had one hellish week where I was so nervous I couldn't eat. Slept 2 hours a night and lost 5 pounds in one week.

Employees shouldn't be treated like that, and I will never work at a place like that again, but I am a dramatically stronger engineer because of those experiences.

> Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast.

Congrats on using the opportunity to grow in an abusive role. It should not be normalized is the point.

On the opposite side of this argument. I was there. I was shit in college but managed a degree and self taught programming. I was hustling hard to graduate and convince someone to hire me as a programmer even though I had no degree. I was 23 at the time.

If you are in this scenario, just you, no wife kids etc. What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? I loved the startup and it fit my perfect niche. I would grind 12 hours days, but also had lots of freedom. Remote work, unlimited days off etc. Sure at sometimes you get burnt out but you are a sponge soaking up everything you can.

now i'm 28 with wife and kids, no overtime for me. I still work extremely hard and lazer focused, but i show up at 7:30-8am and leave at 4 everyday :p

> What is wrong with working really hard on a problem?

Because you're normalizing abusive workplace practices. Need I explain further? It's not right, it's not okay, and if you tolerate it, you do a disservice to your colleagues. Maybe you don't care, that's fine. But when you say "What's wrong?" I will point out that it is not to be commended or supported.

If your employer encourages, supports, or allows this sort of behavior to exist, I hope you find yourself on the business end of a lawsuit.

It seems like what's wrong is if it's not telegraphed that this is expected beforehand. We're all adults here and should be able to make informed decisions about how we want to live. Some of us want a lot of pressure and to not sit around bored wondering what to do with our lives.

When I was in grad school, 100 hour weeks and working 100 days straight was the norm. Also I made 25k a year. And I loved it, because I loved doing science and I got to be paid to do what I loved. And also, it's maybe worth mentioning that your experiments don't give a damn about labor laws. There really are some important societally beneficial things that simply won't get done if there aren't crazy fuckers like me around (not necessarily the projects I happened to work on, they all turned out to be crap)

Honestly what made me mad was that there were a lot of kids who got out of college, and went to grad school because they didn't know what to do next and nobody told them how crazy grad school was. These jokers depressed the asking price for a grad school salary.

I'm on team work/life balance but, in this case, I agree. First job out of school I had an engineering job (not software) in the oil business. Spent lots of time living in shipyards and offshore. Long days. Etc.

But I had a lot of responsibility. Was sort of thrown in the deep end with respect to a lot of things. It was a great experience out of school and, in retrospect, was absolutely the right job choice relative to my other options.

Would I have wanted to have done it long-term? (I left after 3 years to get another degree.) No way.

It's "pissing in the pool" for the rest of us. I know it feels validated internally because it worked out for you though.

Even when I did a startup, I held pretty normal hours. Working on someone else's problem to make them rich is silly to me. I think it's something that you either get or you don't. I don't plan to convince you to change sides, but I'd 100% of the time rather spend hours 8 or 9 through 12 working on my own hard problems. They're easy to create. I definitely had more responsibility, did more coding, and felt more energy at a startup than a big corp though. Pay and nearly everything else was shit in comparison.

If someone did 10-12 hour regularly on my current team, we'd be pissed. It would set a new normal and management would think they could start replacing people until they get 10 of those guys that are willing to sit here half the day.

I don't think it sets the normal. We had a great senior dev who never worked a second past 8 hours, never did prod support during off hours, never picked up the phone on the weekend, etc. But when he did work, he delivered way more than the junior devs did. He works there to this day, at a great salary, with no pressure to work OT.

Sorry, but that's ridiculous. People have different levels of dedication to their work. If you want to do 40 hours a week, that's fine, but don't crap on someone who wants to put in more effort.

Sounds like a union where they'd beat on the new guy who actually tried to be more efficient.

Versus management demanding everyone work 50-60 hours a week in an at will employment state? I won’t disparage your work ethic, but recognize that allowing yourself to be exploited enables your company to more easily exploit the unwilling, and without labor protections, it leads to systemic employee abuse.

You can’t say it doesn’t happen. HN is littered with these abuse stories.

I get what you're saying, but don't try to act like working more is equivalent to being more efficient.

Wait, I enjoy my job, want to write code and get lost in my work and you think that’s pissing in the pool?

I know some people at work that sort of have your mindset. I think it’s the worst. Not only do they not want to help someone who’s passionate you now make me suspect they’re incentivized to undermine hard workers as well, since they make you look bad.

Fine, take it easy at work, I don’t care. Just don’t make it harder for people who are trying to get work done.

I want you to work hard, I just need you to be paid more (hopefully a lot!). I'm saying it's better if I'm paid less than you.

What I don't want is for you to put in more effort for the same pay and establish a "new normal".

That's all it takes for us both to be happy. I don't want to hold you back, m'dude.

You are being exploited. Do you get compensated 1.5x your base for all those 12 hour work days?

Making multiples of what the median American household makes, sitting in front of a computer, in an air conditioned office full of free food is being exploited?

I'm sure a lot of American workers are being exploited but I'm not.

At most startups (with illiquid equity), TC adjusted for cost of living (assuming Bay Area) is probably not far from median American household. Employers take advantage of youthful zeal which prevents ICs from understanding their true worth to the business. After startup engineers reach the point where 12 hours days become unacceptable from a logistics standpoint (kids, burnout), what do they have to show other than enriching their founders? If they enjoy programming and would do it in their spare time, why not dedicate 8 hours towards their job and 4 hours towards a personal project with potentially much higher personal reward?

> what do they have to show other than enriching their founders?

I don’t get it. Being debt free and having a big pile of money, and a body that still works since I haven’t been doing backbreaking manual labor?

So you recognize the abuse disparity. Good! You can then understand why people fight against abuse despite the complaints from the comfortable.

I recognize that a lot of workers in America are exploited and abused. And I support policies to mitigate that. However, trying to associate myself with those or comparing my minor inconveniences to that of blue collar workers seems like it would be extremely spoiled and tone deaf given how exceptionally privileged the average tech worker is compared to blue collar workers.

On salary (not hourly) this is a useless question.

Say they make 100k/yr. With 40hr weeks that's roughly $50/hr. With 60 hour weeks and 1.5x base pay, you could say it's $20/hr. It's all the same.

What you seem to be asking for is for companies to pay you the same, just say your base is lower so they can pay you 1.5x you base for appearances sake.

Now, optics aside, if you take an offer with an expectation of 40 hrs / week and they make you work 60, then sure. That's exploitation. But if the expectations are clear upfront, "base pay" is just legalese.

Maybe I can rephrase. Is OP's base 1.5x that of the average (8 hr/day) worker base at comparable companies?