I was employee 40, and approximately 15th engineer of a YC startup where the founders made roughly $50M each, and I made just under $80,000. During this time, had I gone to work at a FANG, I would have probably made a few million dollars just from being a senior software engineer.
I have another friend who has been at 3 startups during this time and deeply regrets leaving his FANG job because he also missed out on millions.
I think the way things are structured, you have to negotiate hard with startups otherwise it's better to stay in FANG. It didn't used to pay this well to be at a big company but the industry has changed. Not sure if things will work its way back, but having a TC of 400k+ as a senior engineer at a tech company is easily achievable these days, so the startups need to give bigger comp packages.
This is 100% accurate and not how things were even 10 years ago. The market today is basically bi-modal. When I first started out in startups (2008) that didn't seem to be the case. The result is obviously worse for you financially if you join the startup, but it has also weakened the teams at startups. Many top engineers are just staying at the big public tech companies. Meanwhile large startups that would have IPOed years ago stay private in the current funding environment, dragging out the lockdown period for engineers. It just doesn't make sense to work at a startup like it used to.
I truly don't think most people that argue to work for a startup have internalized the compensation at the big tech companies. $400k+ really is total comp for senior engineers. Not $200k + some lottery tickets for later, it's $400k on your W2 each year, with some of that fluctuating based on stock price and delivered in quarterly increments.
> I truly don't think most people that argue to work for a startup have internalized the compensation at the big tech companies.
Completely agree. For instance I don't think anyone who throws around the term "market rate salary" has updated their definition of it to include these dramatically higher numbers.
Not to mention, housing costs in the bay area have followed (or been driven by, depending on your perspective) these rising big co salaries. Meaning that startup salaries not only haven't kept up, they may have even gone down in terms of how much money you take home after paying for housing.
This is approximately less than my annual stock grant will be this year at Google, just as a point of comparison. I'm not yet a "Senior" Engineer, just a mid level one.
After the first 10 employees or so, you're looking at nickle and dime stock option allocations (0.05%, 0.10%...) Factor in dilution, liquidation preferences, etc. and you're looking at a nice down payment at a house... if you're lucky enough to have a successful exit. That's a very big if.
I have another friend who has been at 3 startups during this time and deeply regrets leaving his FANG job because he also missed out on millions.
I think the way things are structured, you have to negotiate hard with startups otherwise it's better to stay in FANG. It didn't used to pay this well to be at a big company but the industry has changed. Not sure if things will work its way back, but having a TC of 400k+ as a senior engineer at a tech company is easily achievable these days, so the startups need to give bigger comp packages.