
Job choices: Big company like Google or small new startup company? - AIginger
Job choices: Big company like Google or small new startup company? The new startup company is about smart homes. Which one should candidate PhD choose after graduation? What wage do you expect in new startup company? Any advice is welcome, thank you all~
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hkarthik
Neither.

If it's an option, I would suggest a late stage startup (Series C or later).

Such companies give you the advantage of being less risky, and having enough
structure to support folks that are new to the industry. They can also still
have big challenges with impact and untapped growth which help you learn more
in your career.

The downside is that you may see less financial upside compared to Google or
Facebook and you will have less liquidity until the startup goes public or
gets acquired by a public company.

You will need to do more homework and research to understand a late stage
startup's potential, see how strong the team is, etc. If you go to a big
company like Google, you can assume all those things are solid so it's less to
be concerned about.

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saalweachter
As a software engineer at a large company, you will be a cog in a machine.

You will probably be one of dozens working on a given project. You may have
specific duties ("Implement these features as they are designed") or you may
have a broad mandate ("Make this thing better, figure out how.") but you will
rarely have a feature or a product you can point to and say "this is my work,
I made it". You will have contributed in a small (but sometimes critical) way
to a big product used by millions or billions of people. You will be able to
tell people, "I work at this place on that product" and most of the time they
will know what you are talking about. Every big company has office politics;
office politics are like the sports and games inside Final Fantasy games. In
some companies they are just a fun diversion that you can get some neat loot
out of, in other companies they are critical to the game and you can't win
without playing them. You will be paid very well for this, and have exquisite
benefits. Your eye doctor will comment on the comprehensiveness of your vision
plan.

As a software engineer at a small, new startup, you will be responsible for
everything, soup to nuts.

Depending on how early you start, you will be in complete control of the
technical details of the entire software stack you work on, OS, language,
source control, frameworks, everything. You might be told what to build by the
founder/CTO/CEO, there might be a PM who designs the product for you to
implement, or you might be responsible for designing the product given broad
strokes and feedback. You will almost certainly be responsible for all of the
development, testing and production support of the software you work on. If
you do not test the code thoroughly, no one will. If you do not make a backup
plan to backup company-critical data somewhere, it won't be backed up. If a
server goes down at 3am, it will be you that gets called to fix it as quickly
as possible. If you do your job poorly, you and everyone you know will be out
of a job. When you tell people what you work on and where, they will pretend
to understand or be interested, but you will be able to tell they don't really
care. You could be paid anywhere between nothing and a good wage, and will
probably have some sort of benefits. You will be given a random amount of
stock or stock options, which will probably be worth nothing but could
hypothetically be worth billions.

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AIginger
It's awesome to know such many different considerations, which makes me think
a lot about my career and make me care only about the most important thing to
me. Thank you all for the discussion.

And I also have a question about the future of data analyst, do you think data
analysis will become more important in the future? How to become an
irreplaceable data analyst? What kind of companies don't you recommend to a
data analyst?

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muzani
It's really a matter of personality. Startups are high risk, high return. Big
companies are moderate risk, moderate return.

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pryelluw
I disagree.

A startup is all about risk and low return for employees. You get paid less,
work more, and have less job security and benefits.

A big company will give you a noce salary, benefits, and better job security
without the risk. It might also give you stock options that are worth
something and can sold.

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muzani
If you were employee #100 in Facebook you'd make $200M.

If you were employee #1000 in Facebook, you'd make $20M.

If you were employee #100 in Dropbox, you'd make $10M.

Source: [https://genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-
start...](https://genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-startup-
annotated)

These numbers are all calculated back in 2014, and they're probably a lot
higher now.

Also, personality. Some people don't enjoy job security and want a little
adventure. For those who have to do it, they just have to do it. It's similar
to the pioneers from colonist era Europe going off into strange countries.

~~~
wholien
Are there other examples where employee #1000 still made $20M? That requires a
$200B exit which... have any other startups gotten to?

Most exits would be less than Dropbox ($10B). Say it's 10% of it, a $1B exit,
which is extremely respectable. But as employee 100, you get $1Million. That
probably requires 4 years at the company to fully vest. Assuming you were paid
$150k/year, your total compensation is $1.6Million (pre-tax). Assuming you
spent the same time at FB, you can probably pull in an average of $300k per
year, depending on which level you start at [0]. So your best alternate path
has a return of $1.2million.

You beat the FB route if you are the first 100 employees, vest most or all of
your shares, and your company exits at $1B and above. I'm not sure what chance
of that happening is, but it's probably lower than 75%, so the expected value
of the startup route as an employee is lower than $1.2Million. Of course, FB
route doesn't have a 100% chance of happening either, but it's a lot closer to
100% than the startup route.

[0]: [https://www.levels.fyi/](https://www.levels.fyi/) \- I used the average
of E4 average and E5 average.

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richardknop
Easy answer, Google or other big company. Much better compensation, work life
balance than early stage startup.

