Fellow Blinders, I would love to see your take on this observation- Why tech founders can be teenagers, young college grads or dropouts, and investors are ready to pour in millions to fund their ventures but… Tech workers need to have x years of experience, climb corporate ladder and constantly perform to get decent pay? A recent set of events in my personal circle made me ponder this - college grads securing YC funding, and on the other hand highly talented people getting rejected in interviews because not enough YOE. What am I missing here? #tech
Risk vs reward? Funding requires a rock solid and polished pitch deck, and usually an mvp, and a gtm Strat. You are essentially relatively lower risk for investors at that point if you check the boxes. You make your own job by lowering investor risk enough.
Also, usually founders take a small salary (relative to market rate) + equity, to preserve the investment capital for the business. So in other words, a big tech company can give you better compensation in the short term than the salary you pull from the results of the seed round.
Founders don’t make a lot of money till the company because successful
The rich kids have figured out that tech workers are treated as factory workers. That's it. You are of no more value to the share holders and execs. They view you as fungible headcount. The rich kids don't want to live their life like factory workers. They will never slave for money. They will try their hardest to get funding and hire said factory workers to do their job for them.
Rich kids also can afford to take more chances of (one of) their startups succeeding and don't need to worry about making enough to pay for rent and so on as much. It's best described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
Took me way too long to realize this
nah people who like CS work for universities
Lmao that might have been mostly true in 2014. Even then, my peers in university who hated it and got Cs were just in it because of the promise of a $60k/yr job afterwards. Those people discovered Leetcode and became your coworkers as late as 2017. Frankly 2016 is when I noticed more candidates than not were able to blaze through my questions* when most couldn't before so I bet that's when it really started to spread. *I used to ask candidates two questions that were on the level of Leetcode easy. For a long time, most people struggled to complete the first one. Then in 2016 I noticed more and more blazing through quickly, to the point that most candidates could finish both in an interview and still have time to talk afterwards. Even after changing questions, whenever I used two easy questions most people would get through both with time spare. Tech workers nowadays are your average normie who was told Leetcode is their last chance at the middle class. They're not even wrong. But they certainly don't like CS or any field of study and only learned anything at all because that was the only way to eat.
Visa is the big issue. Earlier it was easy to get green cards and so many companies were formed. These days it takes so long to get a GC that you have family and kids by the time you are ready to take the risk
Why do actors who know people get acting work but someone who doesn't know anyone will move to LA and spend their life waiting tables while hoping they get a chance to act? It's about who your friends are, OP.
The founders are getting the money to run the company not just their comp
Because tech workers actually do work and can’t fuck up to complete a vision. It’s more defined. A founder is more of a creative and lead role. If something doesn’t work out, just change things until it does (or die). For the hardcore tech startups that relies on the founder’s technical abilities then VC funding is only possible if they’ve already proven themselves.
Most tech workers are inventing their own work because once the company grows large enough, all of that vision trickles through 10 layers of management to become nothingness. It takes a lot of creativity to define your own work as leaf nodes.
Following