[michaelochurch]

I already brought some Indignation Sauce to this topic: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-yo...

Mark Suster is right about the financials. You won't get rich.

I will go further. The VC-istan startup promise is empty. You probably won't get investor contact unless you negotiate for it. Why would they help you get the connections needed to be a founder, when the alternative is that you not get those and never be a competitive threat?

Many of these VC-istan firms develop horrible cultures as the engineers realize they won't get the leadership opportunities they were promised, because those are going to go out to entice new hires. You get a lot of ill-advised code throw-outs that exist only because someone was promised, in hiring, that he'd have that authority... so he uses it on the first day without even knowing what's being tossed.

I don't think you should use "learning" as justification for taking a bad deal. Not if you don't know the people, because how do you know if you're going to learn anything?

In general, higher pay tends to lead to higher-quality projects, not for the obvious reasons, but for this: your salary is how much it costs your boss to waste your damn time.

If you're a founder or a key hire and you trust the people involved, it's different but, in general, don't use "these are my learning years" to justify an awful deal.

[dasil003]

I really enjoyed your article. It clearly contains a lot more wisdom than Suster's. Still, I think you underestimate how little one can learn in a big company. It all depends what team you land on and who your manager is, and it can be a huge crapshoot. At least at a startup you have a guarantee that the company needs to focus on fundamentals and you will never be chastised for thinking about the business case for what you are doing (obviously this is not strictly true, but those kinds of startups tend to die fast). At a big company you may be assigned to a team doing something irrelevant that exists purely for political reasons. Your boss is as likely as not to be [Gervais Principle] clueless and the only thing you learn is corporate politics. That might help your earning potential down the road, but it won't make you a better engineer. Sure if you get on the AWS team at Amazon or work at Google or Facebook you get an opportunity to work with tech that a startup could never lay their hands on, but those jobs are hardly the corporate average.

You're right that it's no justification for taking a poor package at a startup, but I think the median startup job is much better than the median corporate job in terms of engineering education.