
No, Fuck Off - ardit33
https://medium.com/startups-and-tech/8c4523242c85
======
creamyhorror
This is making me seriously reconsider my dream of moving to the US for a dev
job in SV. Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent
life and good pay?

It sounds like it's either you take part in the life-consuming startup-founder
lottery or you go work in BigCo (possibly not even tech) for a good life until
you see a worthy opportunity. Or you start doing freelancing/contract jobs
till you have a steady stream of income, which is sort of in-between. Anyone
have advice?

~~~
potatolicious
> _"Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent life and
> good pay?"_

No, author's case is severely overstated.

In my experience startup jobs in SF/SV/NYC pay as much as, if not more than
most big tech company jobs. The notable exceptions are Google and Facebook,
where the compensation and stock is _extremely_ good and generally ahead of
the rest of the pack.

Which isn't to say that author's complaints about crappy startup jobs are
false, but rather that they're really not unique to startups at all - they're
common across _all_ tech jobs, regardless of company size.

In reality there are three classes of tech jobs:

1 - Near-perfection. Great opportunities for advancement, great pay, great
benefits, great work/life balance.

2 - Somewhat a pack of lies. You'll either work too much, get paid too little,
get to fight management all day, have little room to grow, or some combination
thereof.

3 - Complete pack of lies. Deranged management, just complete rubbish.

Most tech companies, even big ones, fall into the second and third categories.
I think author is extrapolating a bit from the presence of Google in his
seeming belief that most big tech companies are great places to work. They are
not.

Case in point:

> _"You can learn more by being in a company that offers reasonable hours
> while you can have a side project. An open source project, a small app,
> something your parents can use, anything that you either enjoy, try to make
> it big, or just make the world a better place."_

 _Most big companies aren't like this_. In fact, I can count the number of
such companies I know on a single hand and have a finger or two left over.
Most startups aren't either, so more accurately _most software jobs aren't
like this_.

The blog post seems to be a lament about the shitty quality of startup jobs,
but really it's more accurately a lament about the shitty quality of software
jobs _in general_.

He wants startups to have good compensation, good environments, and reasonable
hours - but most big companies can't pull this off either. Big Corporate
software jobs are _infamous_ for low compensation, _infamous_ for being
middle-management-infested hellholes, and just as willing to bend hacker
culture to its own ends.

~~~
creamyhorror
Thanks for the great overview, I really appreciate it. I guess it's all about
finding a good company that values its employees. Maybe I'll drop a line to
friends at Google after all...

(Thanks also to the other kind commenters who replied - ctide, rayiner,
smartician, bkanber, prostoalex, avenger123, and akurilin - your answers are
valued!)

~~~
michaelochurch
Google is worth a shot but don't get your hopes up and don't take it
personally if you get shat on.

Google has _a lot_ of great engineers, and if you get a good manager for your
first project and get to a launch in your first 2 years, you become a Real
Googler and it's awesome. If you don't establish credibility early on, you're
fucked. It's impossible to transfer to a good project without already having
had a good project, so your first manager determines your career.

On the whole, I think Google is in decline and it has an absolutely _shitty_
management structure (probe about "calibration scores") but there is still
some genuinely interesting work and there are some _great_ engineers so, by
all means, give it a try.

However, there's probably a 60% chance that you'll land on a dogshit project
with no career advancement and have to job-hop yet again in a few months. Make
it 85% if you're outside of MTV. But if you don't mind taking that risk, then
try it out. Google's upside (stable pay _and_ great projects) when you
actually land well is too high to write it off.

------
praptak
_"If you are currently working on one of these startups, you probably are
justifying with “but I get to learn/do more than working on a large company,
etc. etc.”. No you don’t really. You can learn more by being in a company that
offers reasonable hours while you can have a side project. "_

It is important to understand this "learning on the job" thing. It's no use
hiding the basic fact: just as with the salary, there is a conflict here
between your interest and your employer's. When you are learning, you are not
producing and what grows is _your_ market value - the employer might have to
pay you more to keep you at the company, so for them the benefits of having a
trained employee are at least partially offset by this fact. To put it bluntly
- if at all possible, grabbing an employee whose learning cost is already
covered by another company looks much better from the profit perspective.

It's not to say that learning on the job never happens - just as with high
salaries, there are obvious situations when the employer can afford to pay you
more or take the cost of your learning. The less they compete on cost, the
better for you.

~~~
buro9
I guess it depends on the employer, employee and culture.

We hire those who want to learn, and we go way out of our way to ensure that
those working for the company really do learn and improve.

The benefit to us, the company and founders, is substantial. And the benefit
to the employee is obvious.

If we can't offer a killer salary yet, and the equity is toilet paper for a
few years, then the biggest thing we can offer is a vibrant environment in
which skills are developed and mastered, in which we can understand more of
each other's role and how all of the bits fit together.

At the moment I can say that every person in the company is learning every
day. Real learning. We drop tools to educate each other, to teach and learn.
We really believe doing so is the key to producing good work faster, that
works with the output of everyone else.

~~~
michaelochurch
What's the company?

~~~
buro9
Just a small London startup in the community space: <http://microco.sm/>

There's only three of us considered full-time right now, with an additional
pool of volunteers and helpers that churn around us.

Our core team have different skills, and so we think it's good to cross-
fertilise that knowledge, to teach and learn more of each other's skills as
well as to support the mastery of our own skill in sharing it and learning how
to communicate it.

We have people - freelancers mostly - who help for a month for free, and then
go do something else for a bit before coming back between jobs to help more
and learn more. They get to work on something they care about and learn new
things at the same time.

We're not kidding ourselves about wanting to pay well, to build a successful
business, and to only be bootstrapping this hard while we have to... but this
process is really helping build this strong learning and teaching environment
and that's been a real benefit to us, so we can all see that staying even
after the numbers side adds up more.

The core value that has emerged is that everyone has something to teach, and
everyone has something to learn.

By helping improve career security for all of our workers, we really feel
we're improving security for us as employers and job security for the
employees. There's no downside to this.

~~~
michaelochurch
_The core value that has emerged is that everyone has something to teach, and
everyone has something to learn._

You are awesome. I would really like to throw 99% of "management" out the
historical window for good. It's a goddamn anachronism. The _only_ genuine
source of credibility is _teaching_. Show me _why_ your idea is awesome, and
if you're right and you teach it well, I'll believe you. You could be a 190 IQ
genius or a Big Swinging Dick rain-maker, but the only way you add true value
is by showing other people the way. "Because I said so" / "I can fire you,
shithead" management (i.e. authority _without_ teaching) can go die in a fire.
It's 2013, which makes it about damn time for that.

I have no idea what you do, and I'm probably not a candidate for your company
(machine learning specialty, plus need to stay in the US for the next 6
months) but I really hope you succeed.

~~~
buro9
Thanks, much appreciated.

And my view of management, is mostly that they're drawn in the wrong place on
org charts. They should be below the workers, assisting and helping to support
the workers rather than ordering them. Workers themselves are the ones with
the knowledge and most qualified to make decisions based on sharing that
knowledge.

I can't find the link I meant to, but this one deals with this view pretty
well:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html)

~~~
michaelochurch
I don't really like the idea of putting managers "below" workers. The
fundamental reason why middle managers behave in such shitty ways is that
they're insecure. (Their job is to be leaders, but they often aren't the
leaders the group would pick; they're compliant stooges selected by executives
who trust them to favor upward interests.) Putting management at a level
_below_ workers is just as bad and will probably produce even more incompetent
management than the dogshit we already get.

We need to accept _different_ that isn't below or above.

What we need is a radically transparent system that allows for division of
labor and investor/worker symbiosis but doesn't turn that into an excuse for
parasitic behavior at any level:
[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-
macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-
macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/)

------
Paul_D_Santana
_WOW!_

After reading this article, I feel so incredibly happy that I work for
"BigCo".

I already like where I am quite a bit, but this article made me appreciate it
an extra order of magnitude.

I think I will read this article once a month so I can feel grateful for what
I see now as an incredible company and work environment.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Sometimes I wonder how few of us "BigCo"
employees there are here on HN.

~~~
derefr
I'm starting to think I'd _like to_ work for BigCo. Not to stay--but because
it's very hard to be both _an employee of_ a startup, while also
_bootstrapping your own_ startup. BigCo + bootstrapping seems much simpler.

But as far as I'm aware, from most BigCos' perspectives, I'm unemployable;
autodidact [no CS degree] + living in Canada. So, I guess it's back to looking
for a job at another startup while trying to eek out time on my own...

~~~
jaggederest
I work at a large corporation that does not particularly care about
international borders, and I have no degree. It can be done.

------
ishansharma
Looks like the one of the best ways for an engineer to get his worth is to be
solo or work with engineers only.

The moment someone else without a programming background comes in, it all goes
black. I'm seriously amazed at how people tend to think that all programmers
are equal and one guy can't give output equal to three or four.

I'm still in college but I've seen the difference and it is big. In a class of
90, 4/5 people are able to finish one program and when the fifth one finishes,
half the class has already given up or is still busy including header files in
C!

------
berkay
" To me reasonable is less than 50hrs/week or less. 40-45 is ideal" ++1 Not
only it's not reasonable, I seriously doubt quality of code can be sustained
when coding such long hours. There can be "temporary" bursts, couple of really
late nights, or working over the weekend, etc. but in my experience, there is
always a price to pay if it becomes the norm.

------
deleted_account
I don't understand the vitriol aimed at the recruiter. Any developer in the
Bay Area with a LinkedIn account gets a dozen of these a week.

The author just isn't interested in working at a start-up, but god forbid he
receive a recruiting email from one.

I'd take a different tack: your early twenties is a perfect fucking time to
try working a start up. No mortgage, no kids; why not take the risk?

Instead you should what...take a 9-5 so you can have a life outside of work,
so you can work on your side project instead of working at a start up.

Also, attending conferences isn't "professional development."

~~~
epochwolf
> I don't understand the vitriol aimed at the recruiter. Any developer in the
> Bay Area with a LinkedIn account gets a dozen of these a week.

Just because you get shit in your inbox several times a day doesn't mean it's
not shit.

> Also, attending conferences isn't "professional development."

Having attended several conferences for my employer, they can be valuable in
understanding the technology and standards you work with. I had the privilege
of meeting customers over dinner with our salesperson. Those dinners were
valuable for establishing trust for conference calls I occasionally do.

> Instead you should what...take a 9-5 so you can have a life outside of work,
> so you can work on your side project instead of working at a start up.

This is exactly what I'm doing. I'm 26 and working on insurance software. As
the most experienced dev on a small team I have a lot of authority in how
features are developed.

------
zobzu
Sounds about right. That's why I ain't moving. I've seen these companies, i've
gotten the same mails too and uhm.. i'm not going there :)

------
Nursie
50 hours reasonable?

Hell no, not as a sustained habit. 37 is good. 40 is ok. More is too much time
in the office.

~~~
trapezor
I guess they add their break times to the actual work time?

~~~
hga
I read about a study done some time ago that said pretty much everyone starts
"lying" when they report above 45 hours per week. Like your example, they
start scoring things as work that one might not otherwise.

E.g. I found my max "death march" rate of work, which I can sustain for a
number of months, is 6 7 hour days. That's 7 hours of real, at the keyboard
work, not counting formal meetings, lunch, breaks, etc.

More than once I suffered because bad management measured apparent work
effort, e.g. vs. people who put in a lot more hours _including debugging_ for
some inexplicable reason vs. useful results.

~~~
mahyarm
Debugging is work, I don't understand.

~~~
hga
Should have been clearer; my usage of inexplicable is generally sarcastic,
which doesn't always come across in text:

There's a class of programmers who spend a dispropriate amount of time
debugging the very buggy code they just wrote.

That's certainly work in some sense, but most of us prefer to write less buggy
code to begin with. With me, that means I spend what some view as a
dispropriate amount of time thinking problems, where that amount of time is
often measured in minutes, but the point is that I'm not typing anything,
hence in their eyes I'm not working.

There's a great anecdote about a Bell Labs mathematician who e.g. worked on
hard problems that directly applied to building and running Bell's systems and
networks. A boss type once complained that he wasn't working because he spent
a lot of time sitting and thinking (his real/direct bosses were very happy
with that, though).

------
bbrunner
The whole recruiting ecosystem is just awful. Plus in my personal experience,
the best job offers and the best candidates have come through people I know
and trust, not through recruiters.

------
Aloisius
I imagine there are startups like the one the OP is describing out there that
are awful places to work and the OP is right to be annoyed at rookie
recruiters trying to use ego to persuade naive engineers.

But the OP also seems to be a rather angry and bitter individual. That
attitude is definitely going to keep any startup with a functional culture
from hiring you. There is no way you'd want to take the risk of someone
poisoning your culture by ranting about how bad everyone else is.

~~~
rayiner
"Pretend everyone is great" smacks to me of the anti-competition fetishism in
engineering hiring. The labor market votes with its feet. Articles like this
serve the purpose of informing engineers and making them focus more on
functional culture. He's not calling out companies specifically, he's speaking
in general terms about things you should avoid, and that's valuable in
ensuring that better companies have more success in hiring and worse companies
are punished.

More generally, engineers are in an enviable and almost certainly temporary
situation where they have strong bargaining power in relation to employers.
They should use that opportunity to extract as much value from companies while
the situation lasts. When the shoe is on the other foot, that's exactly what
the employers will be doing. It's only a matter of time before the bubble ends
and the management consultants come in and teach companies how to extract the
most value from their engineers while paying as little as possible.

------
larsonf
"He's on Linkedin, Lemon, he might as well be dead"

I think this post does a good job of calling out low-ball offers from startup
founders. In some ways it speaks to just how many developers are really on the
market and how much funding is washing around for 'hustler' startup founders.

But, sir, if you don't want to receive recruiter emails, get off Linkedin.

Startup idea: I'll start a company where people set their own price to be
contacted. Would you like to join our team?

------
Mz
Er, all that comes up on my browser is "No, Fuck Off." Is there an actual
article here? I have tried at least three times. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just an
obnoxious one-liner.

Edit: It apparently does not scroll on Android. FYI and all that.

~~~
Paul_D_Santana
Same here.

I made the article text appear by switching tabs back and forth. I'm using
Boat Browser.

------
louischatriot
Some good points, BUT. The first employees do not take nearly as much as risk
as founders. Yeah you might lose your job if the company fails, but at least
you were hired and got a salary from day one, you didn't have to work for a
year or more on no salary and not knowing whether you would be able to raise
money to even hire that first employee.

Seriously, start a company before stating stuff like this.

~~~
flyinRyan
Most employees are likely taking a lot _more_ risk than founders. In the worst
case, a founder has to look for another job (same as the employee), but with
experience at being an executive at a company. Lots of founders won't have to
look for another job even if their company fails in the worst way.

An employee, on the other hand, puts 100% of their eggs in _your_ basket. If
the company fails then they have no income at all, through no fault of their
own. What goes on their resume? "I was a grunt at some company you never heard
of and never will because it doesn't exist anymore".

Granted, it's possible a founder could be putting up a lot of their own money
and end up being broke if it fails, but I think in today's world of seed
funding and so on, I'd call such a person an idiot. :)

~~~
louischatriot
Being an "exec" at a 2 or 3 persons startup is not far off being a grunt. In
fact it is the same thing. Putting "CEO" on your resume is not impressive if
your company failed.

------
jcc80
Too bad you're going to pass on the opportunity the recruiter was offering.
You could have unlocked your "bragging rights" achievement badge.

------
HunterV
It all comes down to what makes you happy. Startup or big company you could
have a bad experience regardless.

Honestly I enjoy the thrill of working in a startup, if I didn't have fun
doing this I wouldn't be doing it.

But in all honesty, there are people who worked hard and got pricey non-
engineering degrees that are jobless.

If this article speaks to how messed up the startup life is, it also speaks to
how spoiled we all are.

~~~
flyinRyan
You have a limited amount of years in your life that you can earn. Allowing
yourself to be exploited so certain rich people can get even richer at your
expense is not only a bad strategy for you [1], it hurts the market over all
because everyone who does this adjusts the market rate downward.

[1] Seriously, people need to shut the fuck up about "fun". Whether you have
"fun" or not has fuck all to do with anything. You think Micheal Jordan wasn't
having "fun" making a living playing basketball? Of course he was, but he
still demanded as high a rate as he could possibly get because he was _worth_
it.

~~~
HunterV
What are you talking about? If it's "fun" it's "fun".

Maybe I'm just blind and everyone is jumping into startups for no
equity/salary. But in actuality, the startups out there offer realistic deals,
if they don't, don't take the job. Simple as that.

One thing is for sure though, you're not going to get as good a deal at a
startup as you would at a big company. There is a reason for that, you
(should) have a possible big payout.

Now, if people are actually taking low paying jobs with barely any equity
while the founders feast, I totally agree that's messed up.

Also, the Michael Jordan example doesn't apply. He would be like a Google
employee that demands a higher salary, and because he's worth it, gets it. He
was having "fun" playing in the NBA, so he stayed. If he went out to start his
own basketball league that would be a different story.

~~~
flyinRyan
>What are you talking about? If it's "fun" it's "fun".

Fine, but that has nothing to do with anything. You should always try to find
work you enjoy. But it doesn't affect the rate. Picking up trash probably
isn't fun, but it doesn't pay more for being an awful job that no one wants to
do. Why should "fun" jobs pay less? They should not.

>But in actuality, the startups out there offer realistic deals, if they
don't, don't take the job. Simple as that.

Have you not seen people on this very site saying "well, the pay is bad but I
don't mind because it's fun" or "I'd take 50% less if the job was fun" and so
on? It happens fairly often.

>Now, if people are actually taking low paying jobs with barely any equity
while the founders feast, I totally agree that's messed up.

I think the issue is, they see numbers and think "wow, I'm getting 15% of the
company, that's huge!" but in reality their equity has no protections against
delusion so by the time they could actually sell their stock it will be worth
a few thousand. Nothing remotely compared to the salary hit they took. So they
don't _think_ they're getting barely any equity but that's nearly always the
case for an employee.

>Also, the Michael Jordan example doesn't apply. He would be like a Google
employee that demands a higher salary, and because he's worth it, gets it. He
was having "fun" playing in the NBA, so he stayed. If he went out to start his
own basketball league that would be a different story.

NBA isn't a company, it's an organization of individual companies. The Chicago
Bulls are a separate company with their own staff, payroll and so on. The NBA
would be comparable to something like "organic foods retail". It's not all of
basketball but it's all of one kind of basketball (NBA pro ball).

------
cpncrunch
Simple solution: untick the "Career opportunities" box in linkedin if you're
not interested in receiving job offers.

------
signed0
I was half expecting the article to end with 'btw, Spotify is now hiring.'
Well done.

------
SurfScore
Am I the only one that sees the author as just a _little_ misdirected?

On one hand, he bitches about not wanting to make startup founders rich by
working shitty hours in an unstable work environment. I get that, I really do.
However, he hasn't indicated he wants to BE said founder (nothing wrong with
that).

So go work for Google or Facebook. There's a lot of early employees there who
are benefitting in ways that are only possible from being an early employee at
a successful startup. Granted, these are rare, and you shouldn't count on
them.

I do agree that a lot of startups can have shitty working environments
compared to BigCo, but it sometimes it just comes with the territory. That's
part of being a startup, always more work than people to do it. That's like
getting a job in a coal mine and complaining that your hands are always dirty.

------
hkmurakami
I have to wonder how much of this can be mitigated by founders giving up more
equity to the employee stock option pool.

It's something I've been seriously thinking about for my own decisions in the
future.

------
rshe
Come on. Being part of a startup is not about whether you can get a good
salary for reasonable hours. It's not about founders trying to take advantage
of engineers to enrich themselves.

If you're considering a startup, ask yourself: am I passionate about what this
startup is trying to accomplish? If you really are, join the team. Get on the
bandwagon. You get equity, which means your successes are shared. If it's just
another startup that you don't care about, it's not a good match anyways.

~~~
flyinRyan
If you're not a founder it's not your company. Being passionate about someone
_else's_ "dream" (often; get rich quick scheme) isn't noble, it's naive. That
"equity" you get is almost certainly worthless (what evidence do you have that
it's not? "feelings" are not evidence).

------
thinker
Coincidently I got this same recruiters email today.

------
jbackus
I'm not sure whether writing this post will make this guys situation better or
worse.

~~~
ardit33
No worries, I am happily employed.

------
buildnship
grammar.

~~~
ardit33
Thanks. I just came from happy hour and had a couple of drinks. Will edit it.
:)

~~~
jdrobins2000
Looks like someone's not a happy drunk. ;)

Thanks for the interesting perspective.

