This is a question for general SWEs. I understand many people may have product specific ambitions, but the TC discrepancy seems to be pretty wide. Coming from Google, I constantly hear how large unicorns such as Instacart and Robinhood or fintech companies pay better for those with less experience. I'm considering leaving myself, so was curious why others stay at big 4 for larger tenures. Wlb can't be that terrible for all teams in these other companies, right?#tech #big4 #instacart #robinhood #startup #fintech
Startups come with a ton of risk associated with that payday. If I can comfortably pull in 300k with 5-6YOE at a stable company with steady stock appreciation. Is it really worth the risk to move and get 180k base and a lottery ticket? Hindsight is 20/20 here it’s easy to say joining PInterest or snowflake etc was a no brainer during their IPO…but maybe not as obvious 3 years before that
My (naive) understanding is most large tech startups in the past few years have been successful on IPO. Any idea how one can get a gauge if some of these startups would do well?
That’s because your filter for hearing about startups is heavily biased towards the successful ones (with we work being the notable exception) Gauging a startup is difficult but ultimately funding, leadership, vision, and addressable market are the critical pieces to evaluate
For every snowflake there’s probably 10 snow duds that ppl lost money on. I was in 2 startups both crash and burned
you do realize most startups are illiquid right?
You are right about large startups. Btw unicorn is a better term than startup for instacart, startup is the one that fails most of the time and you get nothing but these you mentioned are solid However, beware of fintech comrade. Depth of engineering is nothing and wlb is in fact terrible. You grow more and get higher tc after a few years in tech while your expertise from fintech is not transferrable either.
> your expertise from fintech is not transferable either @uTPO74g can you explain what you mean by this?
You likely hit a ceiling at fintech both in terms of scope and tc. Then after 6 years you apply to fb and you get E4 cause you haven’t done much distributed system design or any design. You’ve been in a different world so background is not much relevant or useful either. The ambitious dude after 6 years is a L6 at google and gets L6/M1 at FB, and only sky is the limit for his tc Disclaimer: I wrote the story from my ass, so take it with a grain of salt but that’s more or less how it happens
Is there evidence of fintech employees not transferring over time? My understanding was that the low turnover was due to lower TC in Big tech.
Interviewed with them .. none of them can beat my F TC .. unless their valuation doubles .. not worth the risk
Because at big 4 you end up with an accounting qualification and know how to run a business.
Which LinkedIn article did you base this post off of?
Based off recruiters reaching out and friends getting offers from such places
depth of engineering problems. You won't get the depth anywhere else.
I'm not fully certain what a deep engineering problem that you'd find at Google but not at Robinhood would be. I'm also only an L4 so I don't work on super deep problems at the moment. Could you provide an example?
Yeah, I am in applied ML. (it is true for infra and product as well). There are so many problems which are a direct result of scale and scope of business. These wouldn't exist outside the big companies. Note I am not saying that the problems there are not challenging. But bigger companies just provide a large number of very complex problems to solve. Classic fox and hedgehog situation.