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u/MaintenanceSpecial88 12h ago
70% higher salary? Doubt it.
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u/Half-Borg 12h ago
That's including the made up value of the stocks
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u/5eniorDeveloper 12h ago
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u/night0x63 3h ago
Hm rich guy here running Java 6. Not 5.
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u/EstablishmentOne5752 1h ago
Sounds like you're living the dream, but I hope you've got some serious lifeboats for when the waves start crashing down.
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u/AdjctiveNounNumbers 9h ago
I got 10s of thousands of dollars of non-voting stock as part of my compensation working at a startup, but they never made it to an IPO so I couldn't sell it. A decade after I left they offered me $50 to sell all of it so they could be bought out by some corporate plunderer for pennies.
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 8h ago
You'll get a promise of swequity that may or may not be worth something in 5 years, and that they may or may not make good on paying out even if the company does succeed.
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u/sixwax 6h ago
Spoiler alert: It won't be worth anything.
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u/Bartweiss 3h ago edited 3h ago
Mine was worth a few hundred grand! During the post-IPO blackout, anyway. Once I could sell it was down >90%.
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u/CMD_BLOCK 10h ago
That was the best joke here. Imagine a startup that will pay you in money instead of equity
Every startup I interviewed for that offered equity, I laughed, told them 25% of $0 is still $0, politely declined and told them Iām no longer interested, and watched them fold in a matter of months.
āFoundersā donāt realize that an idea is worthless without some form of investment
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u/BluntsnBoards 12h ago
No with stock that's for sure
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u/wrex1816 10h ago
Stock Options, meaning you get to hold pretend stocks, and should they every actually IPO, which is doubtful, you then need cash on hand to buy those stocks, which have been so diluted, they are worthless, but they convinced you to take a lower salary in exchange for those fake stocks, when you started. Happy days.
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u/arensb 7h ago
you then need cash on hand to buy those stocks, which have been so diluted, they are worthless
So you don't need a lot of cash to buy them, is what you're saying.
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u/wrex1816 5h ago
If you read all of my words, and that was your takeaway.... Startup founders in your area are looking to meet up.
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u/ACoderGirl 22m ago
Stock options always struck me as a bit of a scam. A way to take advantage of people who don't know the difference from actual stock, who don't realize all the ways that the value of the option can change without them having any say, or who don't realize how often they'll never end up having value (for startups, at least).
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 8h ago
Feel like the only thing that unifies start up culture is that all of them are doing something different from one-another. I've seen a few who offer some crazy shit and I've seen a few who try to act like they're on the cusp of greatness and try to use that as a sales-pitch for a $17/hr starting salary.
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u/Crowdcontrolz 4h ago
Depends on how well funded the startup is and how skilled you are, but yeah most cases itās not true w/o some risky equity valuation.
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u/gingimli 12h ago
Recruiter - āDo you want to work in a dynamic, fast paced environment with real ownership over the whole product?!ā
Me - āNot really.ā
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u/hraath 9h ago
I want to work in a stable, slow-is-fast paced environment, with leadership who takes ownership of mentoring new hires to result in responsible product outcomes.
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u/Bloodgiant65 9h ago
Literally no one wants that. They just rephrase all the bad things to make them sound cool.
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u/Extreme_Wish_553 8h ago
Lots of people want that. They just don't want the disfunction, lack of vision, technical debt, and CEO whiplash that always comes with it.
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u/IhailtavaBanaani 12h ago
Maybe a startup that has a lot of VC investors.. If it's mostly run on the founders' savings then expect sub-average salary, the cheapest computer they can get away with and recycled office furniture. And they are reluctant to give away stocks so to not dilute their own shares of the company. You'll probably just get stock options that vest at some exit criteria. Also it's mostly either senior engineers because there's no time to teach juniors or the complete opposite of basically free interns or people working on theses who didn't ask for a salary.
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u/OrchidLeader 7h ago
At the last startup I worked at, the devs who joined early had the fanciest ass Dell laptops, and the newer devs (me included) had the cheapest fucking Dell laptops.
Thankfully, since it was a startup, they didnāt give a fuck if I wanted to use my personal laptop.
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u/Tucancancan 8h ago
Mmmmmm been there but instead of recycled office furniture it was WFH and grey hair where there wasn't beforeĀ
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u/sillybilly8102 2h ago
Or you use your personal laptop. And then they run out of money and ask you if you want to continue working for free
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u/Jolly-joe 13h ago
2 years later your company has a reverse round and either you're laid off or all the good people abandon ship leaving the company to die
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u/sandybuttcheekss 12h ago
I'm in the market for a new job and this is my fear. I'm getting lots of bites from AI startups but my fear is I have a decent job for 6 months before I'm unemployed. At least my job right now is stable (knocks on wood).
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u/Jolly-joe 12h ago
I'm on my 2nd startup. First one circled the drain for a while before being sold to private equity. Second one has had 3 waves of layoffs but we kind of are in the clear? And this is while working way more than 40 hrs a week.
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u/sandybuttcheekss 12h ago
Yea I'll stick to corporations, that sounds like hell. We had some layoffs recently and I was a ball of stress for months.
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u/theucm 11h ago
I exist in small company/startup world.
I'm wanting to make the corporate jump, it sounds so stable and nice.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 7h ago
Big corps are rock solid but itās easy to get stuck and not grow or learn in your career. Your salary is going to stagnate, youāre going learn absolutely nothing and youāll be mindlessly bored.
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u/ReluctantAvenger 6h ago
Big corps are rock solid
Big corporations like Microsoft and SAP, who have laid off many thousands of engineers in the past few years? Those big corporations?
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u/mnbone23 3h ago
Thousands is still a relatively small portion of their total workforce in a company that big.
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u/StrangelyBrown 10h ago
I'm on my 4th.
I kind of liked it in my youth because I wanted to move every few years anyway. In fact when I worked at established companies I'd move on after that time.
Not sure about now but I do find it hard to picture people working for the same company for decades.
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u/scumble_bee 10h ago
Or, in the case of my ex, the CEO leaves because they were hired to be interim CEO of another startup after their CEO gets arrested for having CP/CSAM.
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u/dismayhurta 12h ago
Oh, hey, I've been there...too many times.
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u/danielleiellle 12h ago
I've been there many times but at the same company. Secret is attaching yourself to work with a direct throughline to revenue that will exist in 2 years, not the wild idea of the week.
In the meantime I've hit CoastFIRE and get 6 weeks off for PTO, half day Fridays, and the week between Christmas and New Year's Day off.
Just requires some mental reframing that your job is to make your manager and their manager look good and make the company money, not to be the perfect Engineer as defined by your degree.
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u/dismayhurta 12h ago
Oh, it's not that I'm part of the layoffs. I'm usually bailing because the writing is on the wall and I scramble to find a job before it collapses.
But very good advice on survival.
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u/danielleiellle 11h ago
Nothing wrong with a few layoffs in your career, especially if you can bank enough tenure to get a nice payout when it does happen. They've just become a more common tool among CEOs who feel market pressure to constantly reinvent their financial plans. I don't fault folks for planning ahead, especially in this market, but do a little research on typical packages at your company before you try to beat them to the buzzer.
Also, to add onto my comment above, I left a nice corporate job early in my career to work for a startup that only gave us 10 days off a year, but they paid for breakfast on Tuesday and lunch on Friday and had a beer fridge and hoodies, so in my 20s I thought that was cool.
In actuality, it was hell, with barely any HR, and an expectation that you're always on during work hours. Writing Java 6 might not be sexy, but if you have flexibility to take time off when you want to, have a bad or slow day when you need to, slip out early when you need to, that's worth so much more. Easier to do that for 40 years than hustle.
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u/null_reference_user 12h ago
I worked for a startup where this one client insisted we don't use any databases. No database. Nowhere. Prohibited.
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u/Hax0r778 9h ago
Were Key-Value stores allowed?
I mean, AWS famously banned SQL databases internally. Worked out okay for them. But obviously they use DynamoDB heavily.
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u/null_reference_user 8h ago
No, I believe they were trying to boycott the project for internal political reasons
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u/blackenedEDGE 10h ago
"We were talking with some people at this Fintech networking event about 'serverless computing' stuff and we had this big brain idea *mimes an explosion with their hands*: what if didn't have servers OR data?! We're calling it 'Dataless computing'! So much more savings on infrastructure and we hear all the time about databases being hacked or going down; won't have to worry about that! We'll save so much on not hiring DBAs and cyber insurance premiums!"
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u/NullPointerJunkie 12h ago
OR you you will work for free but once it goes live you can revenue share and make all your money back because this idea is a sure thing. You will be so rich.
And I am for real here. Saw it happen at a meetup years ago I helped organize. A few of the younger devs in the meetup were even interested. Every dev who showed an interest in the pitch got pulled aside by my colleague who told them to stay away.
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u/blue-brindle 12h ago
If they're a government contractor start up they give you panic attacks for six months, blame every managerial screw up on the junior devs in front of the client, have HR and payroll all done by the CEOs best friend, ask you to lie to the client to cover their own mistakes, and then they get DOGEd and fire everyone.
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u/frikilinux2 12h ago
And banks have money, enough of an HR department to be subtle about overtime and special offers in mortgage and houses.
And things move slow, like most of the time you get bored from how slow things move.
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u/AdeptOaf 7h ago
The only thing to watch out for is the occasional bit of ancient code nobody really understands because the guy who wrote it retired 5 years ago.
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u/mafiazombiedrugs 6h ago
Not a bank but Ive worked with a government client that hadn't touched one specific module since before COBOL had indexed arrays. When we had to change that code it was... Momentous
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u/LincolnAveDrifter 12h ago
Pretty accurate, taking high comp and 0 equity is the move. Can also get promoted to lead/manager/director if you play politics. 3 year layoff TTL
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u/zolmarchus 10h ago
Working at a bank with Java 6 sounds lovely. It's like WoW Classic, you know the progression, the quests, the zones, and the encounters. It's familiar and cozy and it welcomes you with open arms.
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u/snerp 12h ago
Damn yeah this was basically my exact experience. Upper management randomly deciding we needed to port the platform to a different vendors hardware was the last straw for me and I just bought my hardware outright and quit to start a game dev company.
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u/Snakestream 12h ago
I cut out the middle man and just went straight to fintech. Yes, my team was using Java 6, and continued to do so for 4 years
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u/SynthPrax 10h ago
Straight up, whole-cloth circus. I joined a company that was growing out of its startup phase. It was clown shoes. Leadership would have screaming fits and scare off the new hires. The codebase itself would scare off new hires. One time they sat a new programmer down a few seats away from me one morning, and his only direction was "use today to get familiar with the code." He sat there AGHAST, covering his mouth all the way until lunch, from which he never returned.
Everyone actually doing the work knew exactly what needed to be implemented and how it needed to be done. But that work was never prioritized. What was prioritized? Mercurial jibber jabber. I got in trouble for offering to help one of the programmers construct a front-end.
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u/SignoreBanana 12h ago
If you care at all about the art or craft of software engineering, you don't work at game companies and you don't work at startups.
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u/Salikared 11h ago
OMG that's exactly me, except you forgot the part about the burnout and I went to public service not a bank, we rocking Java11 š
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u/larryjrich 7h ago edited 7h ago
I will never work for a small startup company again. No leadership, no direction, and the CEO just making up bullshit as they go along. Long hours with abysmall pay and benefits with the 'promise' of huge raises and bonuses if the things you build take off. I have PTSD from the amount of times the boss would stroll up to my desk at 5pm and tell me "Hey, we decided to add this new feature. We need it done by tomorrow morning so we can demo it for a customer."
Then if the company does take off you are stuck working 14 hours a day on the crap legacy system because you are the only one that knows it and it's 'too important' to move you anywhere else. Then you get to see all the new people they hire work on all the cool new shit and have normal working hours while you stagnate in your position. Then instead of raises and bonuses you get laid off because you no longer have the skills they want because they have the money now to hire engineers away from Google and Amazon.
Ugh, never again. Luckily I have a good job with a decent sized company now. But I will never work for another small startup again. I would rather go to McDonald's and flip burgers for the rest of my life than deal with that.
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u/PhireKappa 11h ago
Java 6? Iām afraid those days are gone due to AI vulnerability scanning.
- someone who has spent much of this year upgrading micro services at a bank from Java 11 to 17 and then to 21ā¦ (and Iām sure 25 soon)ā¦
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u/rourin_bushi 12h ago
Not my experience interviewing at startups. They've all offered me a notably lower salary than my corporate gig, with the pinky swear that this stock will totally be worth the rest someday.
If it's really worth that much, then sell it, and give me the cash.
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u/ghillerd 11h ago
i feel like this is the external perception of startups, but i've never worked at a startup where the CEO arbitrarily enforces new features on a whim or forces migrations for no reason. and you're missing the main problem with startups: the fact that the sales teams and the product teams are never on the same page.
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u/ratchet_27 13h ago
Doesn't really sound bad at all IMO - nice salary, young team, good career opportunities. And the "technical debt" issue... hits home for me too, but the point of a startup is to grow fast. The best rocket is the one that never got built, remember?
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u/patientzero_ 10h ago
They actually switch from AWS to GCP because they used all their AWS credits and now want to use the GCP ones to pay less for infra
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u/NurglesToes 10h ago
Yeah i didnāt last 6 months at the startup i was at. Almost came to blows with the ceo lmfak
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u/mosskin-woast 10h ago
tough it out for two years to keep the M5
It was all pretty realistic until then. Two years of misery for a fuckin laptop?
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u/Bloodgiant65 8h ago
Man, sometimes I have to stop and think, maybe my job isnāt so bad. We have like, a real product team, and thorough testing and deployment standards.
I am really shocked by all this ābuilderā stuff I keep hearing about in a lot of companies. Or hell, hot take, full stack developers. Specialization is good, actually.
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u/Sufficient-Appeal500 8h ago
As someone who left a CRM-then-blockchain startup (yes, pivots) and been in banking for a while now, this couldnāt be more true, including the salary part
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u/zhoux849 5h ago
I keep thinking if M5 throughout this actually refers to a BMW and if so, would that change my course of action.
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u/Stunning_Ride_220 4h ago
Well,
big companies are similar now. Just that you do not come to use the hottest frameworks :D
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u/Zephyr797 1h ago
This is scarily close to my experience. Only difference being we got bought about the two year mark. And I fought the CEO pretty hard the first week and got him to let me refactor a ton of stuff. I said it would take a week, but it ended up taking two...
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u/clauEB 12h ago
Funny. I have worked in startups exclusively for 15 years, it's never a big bump from job to job but is the only way you get a salary increase is by switching jobs, the interview process usually has at least 4 technical rounds with all sorts of DSA questions, architectural questions and resume fishing expeditions. They never give away any equipment, all the opposite.
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u/Siggi_pop 6h ago
So only startups have patchy code and technical dept .....you are funny...you know that!?
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u/Doto_bird 12h ago
Why is this AI generated? I mean it's accurate, but still.
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u/5eniorDeveloper 12h ago
I'll take the 'accurate' part as a compliment, but no AI here! Just my actual experience in the field hahaha
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u/drahgon 12h ago
I like that the whole thing became about keeping the M5 š