[mful]

Anyone else getting a little tired of the immediate reduction of any conversation around early-stage startup job opportunities to "comp vs FAANG"? As someone who spent the last 5 years in early stage startups, before recently accepting a FAANG offer, I'm starting to realize folks who only think about comp probably aren't good fits for startups. Here are a few quick reasons to take less comp at a super early stage startup:

- You will develop a wide breadth of skills you simply can't develop at FAANG, as you will be involved in product meetings, business strategy conversations, and will regularly eat lunch with the CEO. I imagine the reverse of this is true as well, in that there are skills developed at FAANG that are hard to develop as employee <50.

- You will get to fast-track your career progression, in that you will be in line for promotions much earlier than in large companies, as opportunities emerge.

- Companies (including FAANG) will look for folks with your skillset (my startup experience was a huge plus in my recent job search).

- You will work on hard problems, with passionate people; folks aren't punching the clock here. This is fun.

Also, for folks just thinking about comp, I'd like to gently point out that a 40 hour week on work you feel "meh" about is ~35% of your waking life. That's not to say you can't find exciting work at FAANG (I hope I have), but rather that there is more to a job than comp or career progression, and working with passionate folks on hard problems can be incredibly fulfilling.

Edit: formatting

[ryandrake]

As someone who did a long string of failing small companies and finally settled in among the FAANGs, I respect your experience but disagree with everything you said.

Wide breadth of skills? If you’re hired as a code monkey you’re going to monkey code. Nobody ever asked me what I thought about the latest business partnership or synergy strategy. Just code.

Career progression? Another nope. With only a few people in the company, you can’t go up and you can’t build a team under you. Who are you going to manage? There’s nobody under you! My startup coworkers used to jokingly give each other fake “Senior Director” titles which were meaningless of course because there were two managers in the whole company, one was the CEO. Even if you did somehow get a fancy title or a team under you, and got bought by a big company, you’re back to “3rd engineer from the left” in their hierarchy.

Hard problems? I don’t know, not in my experience. Just problems unappealing to the bigger players.

And for all that you risk the company not being able to make payroll or canceling your benefits. Sorry, I can say definitively that working at small companies probably set my career back 10 years.

EDIT: I suppose it’s highly dependent on the company.

[mful]

I think your edit hits the nail on the head, as we’ve clearly had different experiences.

I should clarify that a lot of the hard problems at early stage cos are around creating something that is not only new, but is also a viable business, with minimal resources and huge time pressure. Whether the technical side is hard or not is another question entirely.

Anyways, thanks for the comment — in addition to providing a good counterpoint, it’s a good reminder for me that my experience is neither universal nor even necessarily the general case. YMMV.

[rimliu]

I wonder, how often "huge time pressure" is more imagined than real. Unless "time"="investors".

[fma]

Career progression IMHO is best at mid size companies. Small enough to get the progression, large enough to actually get experience.

[ryandrake]

I’ll also point out something I learned the hard way. Junior folks take note: Career progression, if important to you, is something you absolutely must ask about and confirm during your interview. Some employers want to hire you as a mid level engineer and have zero intention of ever promoting you past that. You need to be able to identify and walk away from those companies. You also need to take responsibility for it. Your manager won’t. For a long time I had this romantic notion that if only I did a really awesome job, someone would notice and career growth would happen. It just doesn’t work this way. You need to take direct action.

I remember several exit interviews where I told my managers that one of the reasons I’m leaving was no upward career movement. They looked shocked, like they couldn’t imagine that would be important! Maybe they were legitimately surprised, I dunno. I’ve also had managers say things like: “oh trust me, you don’t want to get promoted or go into management, it’s so much stress!” They will try to gatekeep and you need to push through that.

[ericd]

These might be not be unrelated to the fact that those small companies failed.

[thrownaway1337]

But, as "First Engineer", you get maybe 1/25th or 1/50th the equity of a founder, and you might join 3 months after the company's "founding" pre-product / pre-product market fit. The company might pivot substantially 5 times before finding fit, or might not find fit at all, or it might take 10 years to see any benefit in the 1% of cases where the company does make it.

I'm not disagreeing with your comment, but if the reason you join is to work on hard problems with passionate people then there ought to be a strong reason why it makes sense to be engineer #1 and not yourself a founder.

[lordCarbonFiber]

Not to say it can't happen, but I dislike the meme that early engineers for startups are working on "hard problems". From a business and social sense, for sure, having to develop quickly, pivot even more so, and pound dirt to carve out a fit is an experience in itself. But, from a technology side, most startups are positively mindnumbing for engineer one. Think your Ubers, your Instagrams, your Facebooks, your Dropbox, the problems don't get technologically interesting until you start doing them at scale. Until then you've got a bog standard php/phython/whatever web/mobile app. Compare that to the opportunity to work with the cutting edge in machine learning, or deployment at scale, or bleeding edge hardware that you'd get at your Facebooks, your Googles, your Microsoft. To me working at a startup I expect hefty comp to be giving up getting to work on interesting problems for the chance of having more agency and winning the lottery if we get huge. YMMV of course, but for me and I think a lot of tech people I'd rather do interesting work for a soul crushing application than soul crushing work to #changeTheWorld (especially if the former pays upwards of 5x more and the latter only pays out to the founder(s)).

[arikrak]

For future career prospects, a stint at FAANGM is a safer bet than joining a small startup. Most startups fail and it may not easy to find another job right away. If you're at a big tech company, you'll have the credential to find a job more easily (and with their job stability you can generally choose to look for one while working there).

[austhrow743]

Its ~35% of your awake hours during work weeks. At FAANG comp rates there's no reason that has to be anywhere near ~35% of your life.

[ummonk]

>Anyone else getting a little tired of the immediate reduction of any conversation around early-stage startup job opportunities to "comp vs FAANG"?

The difference is so big, that I hope it continues to get repeated, until we start seeing a fairer distribution of equity.

>- You will develop a wide breadth of skills you simply can't develop at FAANG, as you will be involved in product meetings, business strategy conversations, and will regularly eat lunch with the CEO. I imagine the reverse of this is true as well, in that there are skills developed at FAANG that are hard to develop as employee <50.

Yes, this is true. Note, however, that this exposure isn't necessarily that transferable, unless you plan to become a founder yourself (which isn't a bad idea).

>- You will get to fast-track your career progression, in that you will be in line for promotions much earlier than in large companies, as opportunities emerge.

Only internally. It won't transfer to long term career progression unless your startup happens to be widely successful.

>- Companies (including FAANG) will look for folks with your skillset (my startup experience was a huge plus in my recent job search).

Nah. Experience in general is a huge plus in today's job market - but non-founder startup experience is no better than any other experience, unless your startup happens to be widely successful.

>- You will work on hard problems, with passionate people; folks aren't punching the clock here. This is fun.

People are passionate and not punching the clock in most places. You certainly do get to work on hard problems at small startups much more though.

>Also, for folks just thinking about comp, I'd like to gently point out that a 40 hour week on work you feel "meh" about is ~35% of your waking life. That's not to say you can't find exciting work at FAANG (I hope I have), but rather that there is more to a job than comp or career progression, and working with passionate folks on hard problems can be incredibly fulfilling.

And your comp today directly determines how much of your waking life down the road you will need to spend on work. Higher comp today means financial independence tomorrow (allowing you to work on whatever the heck you like).

Note: I'm a happy early engineer at a startup that offers competetive comp (based on my personal evaluation - and I'm normally a skeptical person - the expected value of my compensation is clearly higher than what I would get at FAANG), so I'm not agains startups; it's just highly unfortunate that most startup founders are incredibly stingy with equity.

[heurist]

They are stingy with equity because it's easy to make a bad hire and then be unable to fix the cap table. I do think there should be a better balance, though, and agree that they can be quite stingy even with those who turn out to be good hires.

I feel being first engineer at a startup gave me the skills to found my own company and make a living on my own terms, which is ultimately what I want from life. Being super rich isn't too important to me as long as I feel I have broken out of the mold and am on a path to greater personal and creative freedom. I honestly wanted to kill myself after a few years at a well-liked, growing 1000 person company. It was too confining and I was too distant from the real world. I can't imagine ever being happy at a FAANG Corp, even if the work is initially interesting. The weight of layers of managers above always becomes unbearably heavy for me, especially since I naturally struggle against authority.

[ummonk]

Well, while large companies are moving towards immediate vesting, startups continue to have 1 year vesting cliffs, so they have plenty of time to fix the cap table after a bad hire.