I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career.

Early engineers often have first dibs on higher level roles, like CTO or director over people that join late.

Your initial grant might not be great, but being director at such a company is huge

It's not about age, it's about what you actually had to do. Company size, company age and political complexity are strongly correlated.

A successful large company engineering director spends their day mostly doing politics across the org, while a successful small company engineering director spends a lot of their day writing code, being an architect, filling in for product management.

> Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.

Big companies want you to know how to play the long game.

Also general coding practices for large teams or multiple intersecting teams.

Few people get those senior salaries, and those who do get it because of their unusual skills and experiences.

A stint at a startup is still a pretty good way to get those skills and experiences, compared to spending the same amount of time as a junior developer somewhere else. If you can make capital gains equivalent to FAANG senior salaries while doing so, even better!

Google, Meta, Amazon & microsoft all do banding, so the base wages is mostly public (hence why its all bollocks about wage negotiation, there isn't any.) The first level of senior for most of these orgs will tip the scales at around $300k

Having worked at both startup and FAANG, I don;t think startups actually give you the skills to flourish here in corp land. Sure, you might be a good coder, but most of the time its navigating politics that actually gets you promotion (that or good luck with a successful project)

You really don't need to be a good coder to be at a FAANG. Sure there are specialisms as you point out. but most of the time its just entry level CRUD, followed by manic debugging with shitty non-documented tools.

Spend your time instead on getting more vacation from the start. If instead you ask for 25 days of vacation per year instead of the default 10 you have a deal (or maybe they bring you down to 20 days). You can't get 50 days of vacation (there is a company max they can't go beyond), but you can get a lot more time.

This has not backfired on me. It just takes 8 times more effort than getting hired at one place. I figured the benefit would compound.

Source: I am no great negotiator, but I've always negotiated my salary and got 10-15 % more than what I would have had w/o asking anything. This compounds after a few stints. And I've been a manager in startup/mid size/big tech: always negotiate.

Especially if you're a founding member or an early hire, it often has much more to do with having good insights about where technology meets business, knowing how to tackle difficult problems using limited resources (IRL, not just in a computer), and even a sprinkle of politics if your startup happens to "disrupt" the wrong kind of industry.

If your startup has a management team that can abstract away all of that stuff so that you can just code in peace, I agree that your tenure there will probably not be worth the hassle in a resume.

If I can get the same compensation working at a FAANG with less stress, better hours and more balance/control over my life, and the resume entry may be 'more interesting' in some ways, but its hard to argue with FAANG on a resume either why wouldn't I? the choice to risk all of that for only a chance at reaching that compensation is a hard sell.

The possibility of pouring your hard work into a company from the start/early on with others equally dedicated, and if it blows up you all blow up is the selling factor.

On top of that, how many startups came from employees of previous successes that turned that wealth into more innovation? Restricting that path to wealth for many and concentrating the profits to a smaller and smaller group doesn't seem to me the best economic bet to make long-term.

Startups pay less and have to take what the can get. This probably causes a vicious cycle that makes the pay gap worse and worse.

Hours can very much depend on the big tech and startup individually, but big tech is certainly moving in the wrong direction here, and in the typically big corporation/enterprisey worst way possible (increased employee monitoring, shallow and manipulable KPI's that act more as perverse incentives than actually improve anything and that increasingly show the disconnect between upper management and engineers)

> And the work is much narrower and boring. The system is designed to make people into commodities and make you do work in the way that most benefits managers senior to yourself. Solve this narrow piece of a problem using this specific method alongside 5 other people doing other narrow pieces, versus a startup where you can just own the whole thing and iterate it faster.

I agree and its my primary complaint/dislike for my job. I would love to, and probably will change to a startup or other job with a company I actually care about and a role I find valuable, but I expect the pay to be a significant drop when I do. Until then I'm leaning on the salary to reduce the amount of time I need to work overall significantly and putting in my time so to speak.

For now big tech is winning, but if startups and employee equity start having the potential payoffs they used to then it changes the balance of the above equation by quite a bit.

For me, I'm strongly moving towards the mentality that a startup I care about would at least give me outcomes I care about and an environment I can enjoy without the BS of big tech corporate and the need to prioritize stability, but its largely because I can increasingly afford to consider risks and lower income positions because my current job and income that isn't a startup.

The time/stress trade offs at big tech are increasingly diminishing vs startups (hussle culture taking over there now too), so if I'm going to have to deal with it it might as well have the least amount of BS possible... Its interesting how I prioritized stability early on in my career, and now consider less stable/risky roles that are more interesting or exciting, while you seem to be going the other direction. There are certainly a lot of different journeys through life.

Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else!

On second thought, "irrationally preferred during hiring" gets at that idea better.

Rather: FAANG employees are pushed into startups by VCs.

Startups hire those people when they are risky and the future is unclear. Once there is traction, the VCs and insiders bring in friends for cush Director/VC posts. Quite often the people who took the real risks get left out.

Not to say that the early employee is necessarily guaranteed to be better, but at least they're a known quantity, have demonstrated loyalty, and have loads of business context that the shiny exec hire won't have.

> Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where

If you hire smart people who learn, and who believe in the mission and team... that programmer might well be in the running to lead engineering.

Knowing tech industry a bit, I'd be at least as skeptical of directors from outside. Of course I'd have to consider them, at times. But I expect at least half of the outside candidates for leadership roles will be disingenuous halfwits.

Meanwhile, if you've got people who had the grit to help get you to that point, and demonstrated alignment and loyalty when it mattered, and who foster that trust in your company culture, then you'd be an idiot not to try to find a way to get rare goodness like that in your leadership.

If you don't want to leave where you are, a full time or side-project web startup can be started and bootstrapped with barely any prior requirements that you can't teach yourself and could be a good option.

That said, we're also pretty analytical, and when one could warm a seat in FAANG for ~$400k/year, even many successful startups weren't outperforming that TC.

All I’m saying is engineers tend to like certainty and predictability in their personal life.

I wouldn't say I'm an old-timer by any metrics, but even back in 2012 when I first discovered and joined HN, I remember it was pretty clear in the community (and people I spoke to around me) you shouldn't go to work at a startup if you were looking for "a lot + safe" money.

Sure, you could belong to the 0.001% and work on the next Dropbox, but most likely you would end up not, so don't start at a startup to chase riches, as there are better venues for that. Do work at a startup if the environment/mission/team feels right to you, but with no expectations of a big payday-exit.

- after 2008 Great Financial Crisis

- actual startup, not spinoff from larger company

- financially successful exit

- early non-founder employees made a substantial amount of money?

(Not lost in all this: over the years the tax treatment of option grants has changed! It used to be a hugely advantageous way of giving employees something of value, and that's been eroded a lot.)

Amazon had north of 100,000 employees by the time I joined in 2012. The "plucky startup" days were long gone, even if they did still tell the fable of the door desks at every orientation class

There were also suddenly a lot of people without a home to sleep in, and suddenly a lot of homes on the market.

Basically, right after a crash is the best time to do anything.

It's harder to know from acquisitions, but I'd guess that most of those with sale prices >$1b generated ~10-250 non-founders with $1m+ share packages. I think that the Qualtrics founders said that they minted 250 millionaires from their initial sale to SAP.

There are always cooler heads raising alarms on these booms. What turns them into bubbles is the inflection point where there are more people coming for the dream than for the thing that motivates people who understand the risks and know the statistics.

I seem to remember 2015 or near it as that inflection point. Tech media went from worrying about the steady march of unicorns to not talking much about valuations.

Have a moat* or get exhausted battling against other similar startups until one is the major winner.

Technology is the easy part (for most people) Winning the battle is the hard part.

TO summarize, win battle=big-payday

You don't reach for VC if you just want a lifestyle business, much like you don't reach for mafia money just to pay down your mortgage earlier. You have to know who you're getting in bed with, and what their expectations are.

I understood "lifestyle business" to be a company that tries to be adoptable to the lifestyle of the founder/owner, but maybe I understood it wrong or it changed.

I mean... we all agree, it would seem, this is not the path to getting rich for most people. And it's unhealthy and stressful, so it's also not the best way to work.

So it has to come down to "the mission". You must be doing something so amazing, so innovative, a boon to mankind, that all else is secondary and you're willing to endure financial risk and a stressful job, right. Right?

But no. Most startups' products are unremarkable or banal -- with some honorable exceptions -- and mankind doesn't really care either way.

It is hard to build a successful business out of even a most mundane ideas. That alone can be a great accomplishment that many people strive for. Also to be able to set and execute initiatives is also a great motivation. Seeing the fruits of your labor can be very rewarding.

[1] And possibly contacts, or safety net, or wealthy family and/or friends.

Or the startup was a stepping stone in your career. Big Tech wouldn't hire you, b/c you have a different background, so you work at a startup to develop experience and then switch to Big Tech.

Startup: you look at something, plan, execute, learn skills as you go. Big company: here is x, do as I say. You must use these things from these teams, don't make it yourself.

Coping with the step down in responsibility is hard. Going from owning the entire stack to not even having a real decision in planning is very hard to deal with, especially if you've done that $thing before, and have to mount effectively an election campaign to change direction.

I think people with startup backgrounds in big tech tend to hustle harder in their careers than people that were “born” in that environment.

Being able to see, react and change based on changing business goals was the key to my career success. Being able to talk to decision makers and get something in place to mitigate risk/take advantage is a key thing in buisness.

Going from being able to do that, to not even knowing what the business goals are, much less getting access to any kind of decision maker is a tough change. Its like having the scope of a CTO and then going to a scope of an intern. You feel infantalised.

Founders made more than I'll probably earn in a lifetime.

The rest of the money belongs to the MBAs and the bankers. It's always been their money, it will always be theirs.

If I had $1M and lost it, I would be devastated.

If I had $1B and lost $1M, it would be a rounding error.

I don't have any money, so how do I even get to $1M? And neither does my parents.

VC invests $1M in a startup, they are risking $1M. You just work at a company, get paid every month, and don't buy any stock, you are risking $0. That's all.

If the company does well and the VC makes $5M back, it probably won't mean much to them, either. But that's how the contract was written, because the company needed that $1M.

Time is the most precious resource we have. It's per-se underrated whenever it's dollarized. Unfortunately, most don't have a choice than to sell their time for money. Thus, it's even more important to spend time wisely.

Thinking, you don't risk anything because you don't spend money on a startup is wishful thinking. Or more likely: It's just a good story VCs and founders like to tell, because it's in their interest.

If the goal is economic security (FU money) then the quickest path is to get a job at a big tech company. This requires engineering skills and also the ability to play the various corporate games (ugh).

For the rest of us there's entrepreneurship and joining startups.

At big companies with lots of revenue the shenanigans can become fortresses of crazy (cough Google cough) that can go on forever.

Liquidation preference!

Until then, naturally, it's all paper money. A bet. Maybe an investment, of your time and effort.

The majority of startups fail and the majority of startups having an IPO will not make anyone rich via stock grants.

It's definitely a safer bet to find a high paying job in a stable company.

GP comment argues correctly that there's no guarantee that employee stock options will return a profit even in the case of successful exits. Valuation multiples, senior debt, clawback options (see Skype exit [0]), fractional stocks being rounded down to zero after stock splits have all been implemented successfully by startups and VCs. I wouldn't invest my time, which is very precious compared to my capital, into any company that is managed by someone I don't know personally. I would rather earn surplus money to invest into high risk high return options. Treat startup equity as a lottery ticket and don't pay too much for one.

[0] Skype options turn out to be worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692985

Since then, I have seen similar things happen more than once to other friends. I can only imagine that as the number get larger, the problems become more complex.

Also, I have no way of knowing if the same ownership thing is going to happen again. Giving me another 0.5% of the above calculation. Sure, lots of people make millions in a startup. Way more people make millions, although over a longer time span, in tech companies and index funds.

That's the thing: there's literally no business idea in most startups beyond "sell to the highest bidder at 1B+ valuation". And the rest are hoping to coast on unlimited investor money.

That's it.

There are no business plans of, you know, building a sustainably profitable company.

Also, if you manage to get rich, you can afford more risks... in the hopes of getting even richer

I lacked the empathy to consider it from that perspective.

I guess "Even if I got rich, I would play it safe." is just my poor people scarcity mindset instead of an abundance mindset.

It wasn't my original idea either :)

lets take this bit by bit.

First, you need to have a decent % of the company. At each raise your share of the company will dilute. So you might have 1% at join, but by series d its been diluted in % as well as seniority.

You reach unicorn status,but the company isn't making money. So it might take on debt.

Eventually you then IPO. You either have your options converted to real stock (for a fee) and a covenant saying that if you leave before x, you'll have to hand back those shares. or if you are lucky you might be able to sell after say 6 months (super rare)

so after n years, you are able to sell your 10k in ordinary shares.

But in 2024 there were 21 IPOs. The chances of IPO are vanishingly small.

The insiders get rich via salary, bonus, benefits, and looking for their next job while they are on startup-expensed conference tours, paid forbes articles, and company-sponsored fellowships.

Once the financiers took control and ensured they would reap the majority of the rewards, the risk/reward ratio was no longer there for many workers who gravitated towards big-tech instead.

Now big-tech is pushing burnout culture hard, and with higher interest rates limiting capital investments from VC's I wonder if we will start to see movements of people away from big-tech to more traditional startups again in the near future?

AI startups I believe are already showing this trend away from big business (and even away from their own 'big business' towards smaller startups within AI), but that probably falls more into the group that "believe in the 'mission'" as you point out.

I work at startups because I prefer the type of work generally found there. I like smaller teams, I enjoy having to learn new things, and I (usually) enjoy how quickly projects and direction can change.

For anyone considering a startup I'd say to just consider equity a lottery ticket for a decent bonus. It will probably not amount to anything, and it probably won't be worth what many expect, but it can be a nice bonus if you like the job and team regardless of an exit.

Back during the dot com days, everyone from the secretaries to the chefs to the founders were getting rich but nowadays YC teaches their founders to keep the money and stock options for themselves and for the investors. The only way employees make life changing money is if the company exits for over $10B.

They first told us we were in, but that we would need to adjust our cap table so that only 2 founders would have equity. They gave us a phone call, we pushed back, and later they sent us a rejection email

We were willing to compromise to some degree, and the non-founders said they would give up most equity if that meant getting into YC

But after the call, we got a rejection email saying something weird like “your cap table seems to be in flux”, thus disqualifying us

In founder-matching profiles, I've started saying that I wanted to spread the wealth around with early hires, more than the convention. If founders win, the early hires also win.

Lesson learned: no matter how busy a founder is, they are no less petty than anyone else, and some will make time for a call, just to see who this hippie a--h--- is. :)

Well it turns out even that wasn’t enough and they did the same thing. I suspect VCs control too much of the financing.

I mean, the model for most companies - having a very heavy legal component when big money figures are being generated/spent - requires a great deal of bureaucracy which, somehow, inherently prohibits participation at an individual scale, in the massive profits.

It seems that a lot of it hinges on the nature of work for hire. If only there were systems in place that could make every human being a work for hire payment, even those performing CEO duties, then possibly the profits would be easier to spread.

I think a lot of startup problems exist in the Founder/CEO versus Founder/CTO versus Founder/CFO dynamic, which is what any company following the legislated structures must deal with.

VC’s exploit these dynamics, they can do it with money/financing, and they can do it without it, as well.

The crazy thing is, cases exist throughout history of three individuals getting together, building something great, and doing it without requiring any venture capital, generating through their own efforts, adventure capital.

As someone who is old enough to have been working in tech since the 1990s... not really. I mean, it happened on occasion but it wasn't actually a common occurrence even during the heyday of large dot com exits.

The idea of this was massively propped up by overhyping the vanishingly few cases in which it did happen.

I'm not at all refuting your basic point that the "we're all getting lambos" fiction got increasingly disconnected from reality over time, but it was always more apocryphal than real.

Mid 90's startup: Sold company, proceeds company covered debt, basically. I learned a ton on those 2.5 years, but had to have a part time job to make ends meet (and I was not living a lavish lifestyle).

Late 90's - Mid- 00's: Partner in consultancy that made generational wealth for at least one client, worked to burnout multiple times, never able to use the consultancy to develop a product with ARR. Made good profit share and salary the years prior to dotcom bust. Company was sold for basically the debt on the line of credit.

Mid-00's - Mid twenty-teens: Joined a "startup" that was really a consultancy. Spearheaded substantial growth, Shareholders just increased the dividend amount every time company grew year over year. Unable to negotiate an equity position that aligned incentives (me giving up my life and energy to further build the business) so I left. I was forced to surrender the equity in another startup when I quit the first one. The other start up is limping along, I think losing a (manageable) amount of money annually. I never valued this equity because the shareholder group was the same as the parent company, so this one had the same issues.

So I guess in a 25 year period I had something like 2-3 exits. I worked more than full time between 1998-2015.

I'm now a firm believer in that a successful exit takes knowing the right people and getting lucky.

Dan Luu wrote about it over a decade ago: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

The math is not in favor of working at a startup, if you do it, don't do it for the money. People finally wised up to this.

Even as the founder, working at a FAANG usually works out better financially and is much less stressful. VC's do all kinds of horrible things to founders, like firing them, forcing them to sell at a price that means they get $0 (VC's get preference usually up to 2x their investment - if the sale price is lower than 2x the investment, founders and employees alike get wiped out.) People are also wising up to this.

If you're going to found a company think really hard about joining YC and/or going the VC funded route.

I think it'd be a lot more pleasant to found a company worth $10 million after 10 years, and own 100% of it, than to found a company worth $100 million after 10 years and own 10% of it.

VC is only really for when you've found real product market fit and your biggest problem every day is meeting the insane demand. Everything is just falling over and you can't scale fast enough and you're leaving piles of money on the floor because you just don't have the resources to serve those customers. Then maybe it becomes a good tradeoff.

You definitely don't have that in the beginning, and most companies never experience that.

I used to drink the koolaid, I applied to YC multiple times. I'm still trying to start stuff on the side of my day job, but I no longer apply to YC and fully intend to bootstrap a smaller but profitable software business.

Even class A shares are given in the form of options? Such that even to make it yours after a certain period (usually after leaving) you actually have to “buy” it and then pay taxes on its fictitious price difference.

I have come across ESOPs just once from an American startup (but I worked in my home country) and the whole thing just shocked me. The price used to change as if someone (Board? Banks? Founders?) woke up and just threw a dart on a number chart and that became FMV of that day! Even when there’s no funding round or so!

What is fuckyou money at this point? Take the Mega Millions lottery jackpot, it's default is $20 million nominal. You get cash payout instead of annuity, now it's about $10 million. Maybe you live in a state without income tax (I do), but the feds get their cut, now it's $5 millionish. You look for a nicer house (been living in an apartment)... and, since you don't want to lose it to property tax arrears all that quickly, you budget for that too for the next 20 years. How much house can you afford? Turns out, you're getting at most some upper middle class home in a second class city. Maybe with a nice car in the garage too. No live-in maids and chefs, no 40,000sqft mansions with indoor Olympic swimming pools and gold-plated toilets.

Hardly seems like fuckyou money at all. I think while we weren't looking, inflation snuck in and changed what fuckyou money actually was. You basically need to not just be a multimillionaire anymore, but a sub-billionaire.

That's a young man thing. Still trying to grow, to attract mates, etc. It switches (at least for those who develop correctly), to be able to provide for offspring and descendants material wealth is key.

>I don't need a giant house.

Perhaps, but we were talking about fuckyou money. Living in a crackerbox isn't an indication or test of fuckyou money... if Warren Buffet drives a beat up pickup truck, he's not interested in signalling fuckyou money. But he could also drive 31 different Ferraris, one for every day of the month right? My point was that fuckyou money has changed, and that by any measure even lottery jackpots aren't really fuckyou money anymore. Those are "yay, we get to send the kids to college without them being debt slaves" money. It's a strange world now days, that didn't used to be the case.