Startup VS Faang
Folks who have worked in early stage startup vs FAANG companies, how do you compare both in terms of learning, career growth, compensation and WLB?
Startups are better for learning. WLB is debatable, but you can absolutely find startups with significantly better WLB than FAANG. FAANG is better for career growth in my opinion. Path to promotion is usually not well defined at startups. Besides, even if you get promoted at a startup, that doesn’t mean much because they tend to promote folks arbitrarily and levels are not properly defined / vary a lot between companies. A lot of folks get promoted when the company is not doing well and it uses promotion as a way to prevent attrition. So, experienced recruiters are skeptical about levels at startups. Compensation is trickier. Theoretically, if you find a startup that IPOs, you can make more money than at FAANG. At the same time, the likelihood of a series A/B/C/D company going public is always a speculation. You might as well end up working for peanuts for years and your options will eventually be worthless. My verdict is go to startups to learn and work on cool things that you really enjoy. Go to FAANG to advance your career and earn stable and good income. This is my experience. YMMV
Completely my experience as well. You can learn a lot of the wrong management lessons at startups and leadership may have no idea what they're doing, even at the best companies. You can't listen to "seniors" at a startup since a lot of them will teach you the wrong thing and you're too junior to discern. You'll need to learn on your own. At FANG, the process is a lot slower but it's a steady grind in skill improvement. So it's just like comp, you might get lucky and earn/learn a lot. Or you might get unlucky and 4 years out, be an E3 at FB. Do you wanna roll the dice? Edit: for reference, I'm an E6 at FB so I got lucky in one of the startups and learned. But I've seen many others where it was just a waste of money and time. And yes, they were all successful enough that you've heard of them.
Spend a year or two in FAANG is good, just to learn how things are organized, the good and the bad of a large org. It’s hard to make real money in FAANG or learn things related to entrepreneurship. You can join a startup instead for those purposes.
TC: startups that are on track to IPO in less than 2 years > FAANG > Anything else Learning: Depends on what you want to learn. For software engineering best practices, system design, architecture, and coding disciplines: FAANG. They have all the sweet time in the world to code/design doc review until it meets the high eng bar (at least my experience at G). Plus you have access to all the source code, past design docs, and industry experts to consult for anything you need to accomplish For building a product from scratch, wearing many different hats, learning how to run a startup, getting exposed to full stack from frontend to infra, and trying new technologies: startups. You don't have the luxury of FAANG giving you white glove devOps/SRE support, your team is likely understaffed for engs, PMs, UX research, designs, so people need to pitch in and do it all Career growth: You should be getting promotions faster at startups due to faster company growth, and therefore ever expanding company needs you can help fulfill. You get to learn a wider spectrum of experience in a much shorter timeframe. So you'll be growing horizontally easier and be familiar with lots of things But if you want to grow in depth, vertically, in a certain area or expertise, and be an expert at something, FAANG employees are naturally more specialized and probably have more resources and experts you can learn from in your area of interest Ultimately I think both startups and FAANG experiences help you grow as an engineer. And finding the right balance of impact, interest, WLB, and compensation is subjective and changes over time, depending on your life stages and priorities (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, etc.)
Good point! For the grow in depth part, from my experience you may be able to learn more in certain area if you join the right startup. In big tech firm, every org is so big that most people don’t have a big picture or insight of the product they are working on, they may just own a page or something within the product. Startups on the other hand may be a better place to build expertise because you need to think hard about product growth and competing with competitors.
How do you make sure you get proper WLB before joining? How to ask it properly during interview?
I've interviewed lots of candidates and am always glad when they bring up WLB! I personally consider it a good signal, since burnout is so ugly Typically people ask about "company culture", "team culture", "is there a lot of firefightings", "how is the WLB at CZI?", etc.. That should be enough to get you a good picture of how the company and the team operate
What are frequent red flags which indicates that WLB is messed up if we don’t get a straight answer? Usually people manipulate with answers like it’s not 9 to 5 job in a startup, customer obsession etc etc.
Learning and career growth has been incredible. Comp has been decent. WLB sucked early on, but is wayyy better now.