This is fucking off-the-mark, bordering on ridiculous. It undercounts the pitfalls and overstates the likelihood of the positive outcomes.
And if you go in with this mentality [of wanting early management experience, without focus on money, then] even when startups fail, you succeed. If you put five years into building a company and team, you will end up with a great network of talented and motivated people, lots of first-hand experience, and often some management experience as well.
Not all startups are full of “talented and motivated people”. Most jobs are average, startup or otherwise, and filled with so-so people. Also, when startups go bad, they go really bad: people getting fired, pivots and founder splits, aggressive politicking. You could just as easily build an “anti-network” of people who dislike you.
The risk in joining a startup isn’t whole-company failure, because that only happens if the investors let it, which means that it’s no different from a corporate project being cut. The risk is that startups often have bad cultures, long hours, unrealistic expectations, worse-than-useless management and founders. The same can happen at Google, but it’s less likely because the HR office isn’t going to be cool with a management position to go to the bro who is a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.
Also, many people join startups because they were promised executive positions, but never get them. That’s very common, in fact. I’ve seen startups hire 3 people at the same time for the same leadership position. Startups also lie about reporting structure (offer letter says you’ll be reporting to the CTO, you actually report to the kid that the CTO is grooming in multiple senses of the word). It’s the lack of ethics among startup management that makes startups risky, not the (smaller) risk of whole-company failure in the out-of-business sense.
Worst case, your next step could be going into Google at the VP level it would’ve taken you 15 years to get to joining out of college to “inject some startup DNA,” and catch up on salary within a few years.
That is not “worst case”. You do not get a VP level job just because you spent 5 years at a startup, not even if you were a founder. Much more often, you get the same regular crappy job that you would have gotten before– except, this time, you’re 5 years older. Companies like Google take in lots of people who were executive/founder level at failed startups and they’re lucky if they get Senior SWE.
Here’s how you get rich in tech, guaranteed. (It’ll take 30 years.) First, you arrange for us to get collective bargaining in a form similar to the Screen Actors Guild– a lightweight organization that doesn’t regulate compensation but gives us basic protections against bad behavior by employees, and that gets our compensation and (more importantly) level of respect/autonomy up to what we deserve. Second, you get really good at programming. Third, you work for 30 years and save most of what you earn. You’ll be rich at the end of it. The first of these 3 steps requires a bit of industry-wide cooperation, so it’s probably the hardest.
I stuck around for years as cofounder/CTO at a very toxic startup waiting for the vesting period to end, questioning if that made economic sense or psychological sense or any sense at all.
Getting out felt great, I got some compensation for my stock, but nowhere near enough to compensate for the low salary. Here’s the real downer, though:
Because the venerable cofounders pretty much despised code and the practice thereof, alienating the few coders they had (they have contractors instead nowadays I hear) I sometimes wonder if I could’ve learned more at a real job. On top of having a higher net income over the years.
There is “life experience” in startups but this anti-network is a real thing and like any bidirectional graph it works both ways.
Really careful about recommending startups for anyone. It’s a young man’s game and you’re too old to get in if you’ve turned 26.
Because the venerable cofounders pretty much despised code and the practice thereof, alienating the few coders they had (they have contractors instead nowadays I hear) I sometimes wonder if I could’ve learned more at a real job.
Ugh. I hate founders like that. They’re bad at business (which is why they’re in tech, even though they hate it, instead of the private equity jobs they want) and useless technically. Unfortunately, those tend to be the ones getting funded these days, now that VCs are throwing money around based on flashiness rather than technical merit.
Really careful about recommending startups for anyone. It’s a young man’s game and you’re too old to get in if you’ve turned 26.
I wouldn’t put a hard barrier at 26. I’m 32 and wouldn’t rule out every startup. I think that social connections and market conditions play a major role, and then there’s just stupid luck. The VC-funded unicorns tend to be full of young people not specifically because they’re ageist, but because they’re offering shitty deals.
I think that companies doing Real Technology tend not to have the ageism culture, and can remain options for a long time, but the problem is that there are so many garbage companies and garbage founders and it drowns out the substance. I think that adverse selection is also a huge factor in a typically uninformed (let’s be honest: most people don’t know what they’re getting into, most of the time) job hunt, because the VC-backed unicorns are always hiring where as the companies focused on intelligent, sustainable growth tend to post fewer jobs (and fill based on networks). I’d guess that finding a good tech job after 40 requires knowing where to look, and who to call, in a way that takes at least a decade of experience to attain.
The other factor worth noting is that it’s not just age but birth year that plays a major role in tech careers, because the boom-and-bust cycle is such a factor. 1980 is terrible: you’d come out of college in a time (2002) when programmer salaries were $60-70k in NYC and the Bay Area and, while you’d ride the increase, you’d often get shittier projects because of your weaker salary trajectory and the status imputed from that (let’s be honest again: firms don’t really assess merit; they compensate based on your leverage and negotiatory skills, and back-rationalize your level of merit). 1983 (my birth year) was a little better but still pretty lousy (we were too old to cash in on youth for the style-over-substance plays in froth times) and 1988 is probably ideal: you’d have no battle scars (which might improve your character, but hurt your CV and your virginality) from lean times and enter the market in peak froth, without the confidence-impeding negative experiences of your elders. But 1995 is a terrible birth year for VC-land tech, because it means you’re going to be entering the job market post-crash and after the people a few years older fucked everything up for you.
They’re bad at business (which is why they’re in tech, even though they hate it, instead of the private equity jobs they want) and useless technically. Unfortunately, those tend to be the ones getting funded these days, now that VCs are throwing money around based on flashiness rather than technical merit.
Being bad at business may be a thing. They had something set up before me, got me in as CTO (in name, mainly, I’m afraid) and we started on a slight riff of their original thing - and fairly soon boosted our tech demo into our main product.
There’s nothing wrong with changing the business, but the final product had very poor monetization. The original product may have been better in that regard, but in a more competed sector. I’d often get the feeling that the company wasn’t exactly founded to make money, which is a horrible way to start, because there’s no other practical way for a company to survive.
I don’t know about VCs throwing money. This started five-ish years ago, and we’re in Finland, so we didn’t have a real easy time getting investment. Our seed round lasted us quite a while and we did get people aboard, but it was a convertible (fortunately they didn’t exchange stock for debt when we didn’t hit the milestones).
The worst thing to happen to us is government money. That’s so common here it’s not even funny; the most common grant is the government matching the amount privately invested in shares, into an r&d project that’s allowed to fail. It makes a mess of the dynamics, because investors may require you to get that grant in order to double the worth of the investment. So from a government POV your project may fail, but the investors need to make sure you don’t. They don’t invest much, because “it’s only half anyway”, so they can afford to lose or convert (and then maybe lose) the money. The investors aren’t necessarily professional or knowing so they don’t know how to help out. Oh, and the government demands constant reporting, so it distracts the business guys from their work.
Especially for larger startups, larger companies in general, this system is really broken. They can chip off money from their bank account, get it matched by the government, and have have people work on someone’s pet project that every operative person knows will never pay itself back.
I had had to fire someone, who looked like a great candidate and did good work in the beginning, but flopped later on. It’s also hard to fire people in Finland, and I wanted to do this while this was easy on his trial period, but the cofounders didn’t agree because “it’s tax money paying his salary” and “it’s better to have an extra pair of hands than not.” sigh
(We had a talk when the government-granted r&d project was over and failed, and we had neither money nor product, and he quit so we didn’t have to hassle with firing. An honest thank you in order.)
I wouldn’t put a hard barrier at 26. I’m 32 and wouldn’t rule out every startup.
I’m soon 34 (early 1982) and I almost would. Maybe individual companies can work, I wish my friends in startups the very best, but the entire startup scene is ruined for me. Maybe it’s personal bitterness, but short-sighted circle-jerking isn’t my thing anymore.
My age barrier is somewhat biological in nature. Three years is the generally talked-about make-it-or-break-it period; starting at 26 leaves you knowing where you are at 29, which is not an uncommon due date for having kids. Uncertainty and bad salary doesn’t really help taking care of your family, no matter the assumed double income. Youth unemployment’s so high here that it helps to expect taking care of your family, 70s style, and be the father who keeps it all together anyway.
Having to worry about pay reductions and late salaries while your girlfriend’s giving birth can’t be any more fun than waking up to teething at age 38.
is terrible: you’d come out of college in a time (2002) when programmer salaries were $60-70k in NYC and the Bay Area
Sorry, not sure what that means. That’s after things turned to shit, right?
This might also be different over here.
I entered the workforce in 2001, without any formal education, as a junior who knew enough from his hobbies that he could be paid to learn from documentation and whenever the experienced people could help out. This was a startup, one that ran into financial troubles later, but my salary was very nice for a 19-year-old kid in 2001. At the first wave of layoffs they put a cap on my working hours and in wave two I went out. They actually managed to pick up momentum, but it was too late for me; I went on to try studying as no one was hiring. “Let’s get back to this after the summer [of 2003].” Took me over a year to get the next job.
This might be wrong to say, but my feeling is kids born around 1995 know OSX and Facebook, whereas my generation got special permits in high schools to take old computers and make a Linux servers out of them. Old-school shit, like compiling Joliet and ReiserFS support into the kernel and reading up on different SMTP servers and checking things out on http://freshmeat.net/ and installing them after classes.
I have a very good friend who’s born around 1988-1990 something and he never did any of that, but he has the attitude correct and reads constantly, and I’d hire him in a heartbeat. Very little formal education.
Maybe the really young ones of today aren’t as bad as my view of them, but I’m afraid formal education is becoming more and more important if hobbyism is going down. Formal education is seen here as a pass into work, but there are university graduates who don’t know git. And you can’t get them while they’re young if they’re in school.
“But, as far as I know, startups are the only way to get 20 years of experience in five. The reason to join a startup is because you are awesome, you’re willing to work hard, and you don’t want to wait 20 years to be making decisions that impact the business.”
This is why I generally gravitated towards smaller companies / founding a company after working for a fairly large company after college. The experience you (can) gain working at a startup can pay dividends later; either in engineering experience or in management experience.
Addendum: leave the bad startups immediately because there’s plenty of them to go around (and maybe don’t note them on LinkedIn so you don’t look like having commitment issues) and be prepared for opportunity costs in money the likes of which not even God has seen.
This is fucking off-the-mark, bordering on ridiculous. It undercounts the pitfalls and overstates the likelihood of the positive outcomes.
And if you go in with this mentality [of wanting early management experience, without focus on money, then] even when startups fail, you succeed. If you put five years into building a company and team, you will end up with a great network of talented and motivated people, lots of first-hand experience, and often some management experience as well.
Not all startups are full of “talented and motivated people”. Most jobs are average, startup or otherwise, and filled with so-so people. Also, when startups go bad, they go really bad: people getting fired, pivots and founder splits, aggressive politicking. You could just as easily build an “anti-network” of people who dislike you.
The risk in joining a startup isn’t whole-company failure, because that only happens if the investors let it, which means that it’s no different from a corporate project being cut. The risk is that startups often have bad cultures, long hours, unrealistic expectations, worse-than-useless management and founders. The same can happen at Google, but it’s less likely because the HR office isn’t going to be cool with a management position to go to the bro who is a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.
Also, many people join startups because they were promised executive positions, but never get them. That’s very common, in fact. I’ve seen startups hire 3 people at the same time for the same leadership position. Startups also lie about reporting structure (offer letter says you’ll be reporting to the CTO, you actually report to the kid that the CTO is grooming in multiple senses of the word). It’s the lack of ethics among startup management that makes startups risky, not the (smaller) risk of whole-company failure in the out-of-business sense.
Worst case, your next step could be going into Google at the VP level it would’ve taken you 15 years to get to joining out of college to “inject some startup DNA,” and catch up on salary within a few years.
That is not “worst case”. You do not get a VP level job just because you spent 5 years at a startup, not even if you were a founder. Much more often, you get the same regular crappy job that you would have gotten before– except, this time, you’re 5 years older. Companies like Google take in lots of people who were executive/founder level at failed startups and they’re lucky if they get Senior SWE.
Here’s how you get rich in tech, guaranteed. (It’ll take 30 years.) First, you arrange for us to get collective bargaining in a form similar to the Screen Actors Guild– a lightweight organization that doesn’t regulate compensation but gives us basic protections against bad behavior by employees, and that gets our compensation and (more importantly) level of respect/autonomy up to what we deserve. Second, you get really good at programming. Third, you work for 30 years and save most of what you earn. You’ll be rich at the end of it. The first of these 3 steps requires a bit of industry-wide cooperation, so it’s probably the hardest.
I stuck around for years as cofounder/CTO at a very toxic startup waiting for the vesting period to end, questioning if that made economic sense or psychological sense or any sense at all.
Getting out felt great, I got some compensation for my stock, but nowhere near enough to compensate for the low salary. Here’s the real downer, though:
Because the venerable cofounders pretty much despised code and the practice thereof, alienating the few coders they had (they have contractors instead nowadays I hear) I sometimes wonder if I could’ve learned more at a real job. On top of having a higher net income over the years.
There is “life experience” in startups but this anti-network is a real thing and like any bidirectional graph it works both ways.
Really careful about recommending startups for anyone. It’s a young man’s game and you’re too old to get in if you’ve turned 26.
Because the venerable cofounders pretty much despised code and the practice thereof, alienating the few coders they had (they have contractors instead nowadays I hear) I sometimes wonder if I could’ve learned more at a real job.
Ugh. I hate founders like that. They’re bad at business (which is why they’re in tech, even though they hate it, instead of the private equity jobs they want) and useless technically. Unfortunately, those tend to be the ones getting funded these days, now that VCs are throwing money around based on flashiness rather than technical merit.
Really careful about recommending startups for anyone. It’s a young man’s game and you’re too old to get in if you’ve turned 26.
I wouldn’t put a hard barrier at 26. I’m 32 and wouldn’t rule out every startup. I think that social connections and market conditions play a major role, and then there’s just stupid luck. The VC-funded unicorns tend to be full of young people not specifically because they’re ageist, but because they’re offering shitty deals.
I think that companies doing Real Technology tend not to have the ageism culture, and can remain options for a long time, but the problem is that there are so many garbage companies and garbage founders and it drowns out the substance. I think that adverse selection is also a huge factor in a typically uninformed (let’s be honest: most people don’t know what they’re getting into, most of the time) job hunt, because the VC-backed unicorns are always hiring where as the companies focused on intelligent, sustainable growth tend to post fewer jobs (and fill based on networks). I’d guess that finding a good tech job after 40 requires knowing where to look, and who to call, in a way that takes at least a decade of experience to attain.
The other factor worth noting is that it’s not just age but birth year that plays a major role in tech careers, because the boom-and-bust cycle is such a factor. 1980 is terrible: you’d come out of college in a time (2002) when programmer salaries were $60-70k in NYC and the Bay Area and, while you’d ride the increase, you’d often get shittier projects because of your weaker salary trajectory and the status imputed from that (let’s be honest again: firms don’t really assess merit; they compensate based on your leverage and negotiatory skills, and back-rationalize your level of merit). 1983 (my birth year) was a little better but still pretty lousy (we were too old to cash in on youth for the style-over-substance plays in froth times) and 1988 is probably ideal: you’d have no battle scars (which might improve your character, but hurt your CV and your virginality) from lean times and enter the market in peak froth, without the confidence-impeding negative experiences of your elders. But 1995 is a terrible birth year for VC-land tech, because it means you’re going to be entering the job market post-crash and after the people a few years older fucked everything up for you.
Being bad at business may be a thing. They had something set up before me, got me in as CTO (in name, mainly, I’m afraid) and we started on a slight riff of their original thing - and fairly soon boosted our tech demo into our main product.
There’s nothing wrong with changing the business, but the final product had very poor monetization. The original product may have been better in that regard, but in a more competed sector. I’d often get the feeling that the company wasn’t exactly founded to make money, which is a horrible way to start, because there’s no other practical way for a company to survive.
I don’t know about VCs throwing money. This started five-ish years ago, and we’re in Finland, so we didn’t have a real easy time getting investment. Our seed round lasted us quite a while and we did get people aboard, but it was a convertible (fortunately they didn’t exchange stock for debt when we didn’t hit the milestones).
The worst thing to happen to us is government money. That’s so common here it’s not even funny; the most common grant is the government matching the amount privately invested in shares, into an r&d project that’s allowed to fail. It makes a mess of the dynamics, because investors may require you to get that grant in order to double the worth of the investment. So from a government POV your project may fail, but the investors need to make sure you don’t. They don’t invest much, because “it’s only half anyway”, so they can afford to lose or convert (and then maybe lose) the money. The investors aren’t necessarily professional or knowing so they don’t know how to help out. Oh, and the government demands constant reporting, so it distracts the business guys from their work.
Especially for larger startups, larger companies in general, this system is really broken. They can chip off money from their bank account, get it matched by the government, and have have people work on someone’s pet project that every operative person knows will never pay itself back.
I had had to fire someone, who looked like a great candidate and did good work in the beginning, but flopped later on. It’s also hard to fire people in Finland, and I wanted to do this while this was easy on his trial period, but the cofounders didn’t agree because “it’s tax money paying his salary” and “it’s better to have an extra pair of hands than not.” sigh
(We had a talk when the government-granted r&d project was over and failed, and we had neither money nor product, and he quit so we didn’t have to hassle with firing. An honest thank you in order.)
I’m soon 34 (early 1982) and I almost would. Maybe individual companies can work, I wish my friends in startups the very best, but the entire startup scene is ruined for me. Maybe it’s personal bitterness, but short-sighted circle-jerking isn’t my thing anymore.
My age barrier is somewhat biological in nature. Three years is the generally talked-about make-it-or-break-it period; starting at 26 leaves you knowing where you are at 29, which is not an uncommon due date for having kids. Uncertainty and bad salary doesn’t really help taking care of your family, no matter the assumed double income. Youth unemployment’s so high here that it helps to expect taking care of your family, 70s style, and be the father who keeps it all together anyway.
Having to worry about pay reductions and late salaries while your girlfriend’s giving birth can’t be any more fun than waking up to teething at age 38.
Sorry, not sure what that means. That’s after things turned to shit, right?
This might also be different over here.
I entered the workforce in 2001, without any formal education, as a junior who knew enough from his hobbies that he could be paid to learn from documentation and whenever the experienced people could help out. This was a startup, one that ran into financial troubles later, but my salary was very nice for a 19-year-old kid in 2001. At the first wave of layoffs they put a cap on my working hours and in wave two I went out. They actually managed to pick up momentum, but it was too late for me; I went on to try studying as no one was hiring. “Let’s get back to this after the summer [of 2003].” Took me over a year to get the next job.
This might be wrong to say, but my feeling is kids born around 1995 know OSX and Facebook, whereas my generation got special permits in high schools to take old computers and make a Linux servers out of them. Old-school shit, like compiling Joliet and ReiserFS support into the kernel and reading up on different SMTP servers and checking things out on http://freshmeat.net/ and installing them after classes.
I have a very good friend who’s born around 1988-1990 something and he never did any of that, but he has the attitude correct and reads constantly, and I’d hire him in a heartbeat. Very little formal education.
Maybe the really young ones of today aren’t as bad as my view of them, but I’m afraid formal education is becoming more and more important if hobbyism is going down. Formal education is seen here as a pass into work, but there are university graduates who don’t know git. And you can’t get them while they’re young if they’re in school.
“But, as far as I know, startups are the only way to get 20 years of experience in five. The reason to join a startup is because you are awesome, you’re willing to work hard, and you don’t want to wait 20 years to be making decisions that impact the business.”
This is why I generally gravitated towards smaller companies / founding a company after working for a fairly large company after college. The experience you (can) gain working at a startup can pay dividends later; either in engineering experience or in management experience.
Great and IMO accurate article.
TL;DR Join a startup to learn, not to get rich.
I thought this was somewhat common knowledge.
Addendum: leave the bad startups immediately because there’s plenty of them to go around (and maybe don’t note them on LinkedIn so you don’t look like having commitment issues) and be prepared for opportunity costs in money the likes of which not even God has seen.