That's why you name the blockers in your standup.
That's adorable.
Startups do not pay less. I'm bringing in $300k as a developer in Ohio. Individual contributor.
I’m paid $1.2M as IC at a FAANG, not in Bay Area or NYC. To get a similar compensation I would have to get very, very lucky at a growing startup. Instead here I entered through the front door last year and got basically that comp (experienced some mild stock growth so far as a nice bonus).
I will concede the argument that a person might not need that much, but I’d rather milk it until it lasts and get a $300k job when I’ll have no alternatives. I’m actually kind of hoping it will stop so the opportunity cost of doing something else, more interesting, will be less steep to pay :-)
I feel we are going a bit off topic here, but I’ll say that you have to deal with a lot of frustrating situations in these large organizations, so it tends to wear you out. Startups, in my experience, are more fun if you are a person who thrives off being productive. Still to this day, I look fondly at my “early startup employee” phase, I have never been able to be so fulfilled in my professional life ever since, despite my compensation going up 10X+ from those days.
Plus, a lot of people on HN routinely and proudly state how they would never want to work for companies like Meta or Google for ethical reasons, so there’s that too.
My network is literally filled with senior developers who are earning $5M+ a year from the successful IPOs of 2020/2021, most after having been there less than 3 years. Crazy stuff.
From that perspective, a FAANG growing 30% yoy looks like a risk-free rate of return :-)
Most people here disdain stock options as worthless. And I guess for the most part they are with a few happy exceptions.
How early an employee do you have to be to get that kind of return?
There are some interesting numbers here: https://iporegrets.com/
I know several people from AirBnB, Doordash, Snowflake who all joined around 2018 and made bank.
I was an early employee at a smaller startup that is still illiquid and my stock options (fully exercised) are worth $6M. They could still all go to $0.
Just by looking at myself and my immediate network, I wouldn’t say playing the startup game is necessarily like a lottery, the odds are better (but note that I still chose FAANG lately, as mentioned above). YMMV.
Depends on which startups. Making the statement of "Startups do not pay less.", in reference to someone stating their experience to the opposite, comes across a bit, err, stiff.
In my decade of experience I have witnessed people, technical people, who magically manage to just not do anything at all, ever. They jump from initiative to initiative without producing anything, and somehow still manage to get some credit with management.
Paradoxically, I find these people more among “tech lead” and managers roles, where their leverage is much higher and they could be having massive positive impact in the organization. I am acutely aware of how incredibly effective a tech lead or manager can be by providing the right context to a team in need even without directly contributing. Here I am not talking about this profile, I am talking about people who have no freaking clue, they are literally leeches who go from meeting to meeting pretending to make some insightful observation, then leave and repeat. The organization is too messy and they can move “faster than they can shoot them”.
The solution in my experience tends to be to go in small startups that are not run by mentally unstable founders: you’ll get paid less but typically people with zero/negative productivity won’t be found there, there’s not enough bureaucracy to support their façade. They’ll start coming once the headcount surpasses 200 or so.