Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies.
To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side.
Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made.
1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me to be engineer #7 and completely own the mobile app and strategy, which is the single point of interaction for their customers. They offered me 0.1% and spun some story about how much it would be worth when they were worth $800mm. Their last valuation was about $35mm. Even if their numbers were real, I’d still make more at a big tech company in equity alone. They also made it clear they wouldn’t budge.
2. Bad work/life balance: the big tech company where I accepted apparently has no issue with people taking off whatever time they need (avg is about 25 days per year), working normal 40 hour weeks, and working from home if needed. By contrast, the startups felt way more restrictive here.
3. Terrible interview process: almost all these startups had pretty disorganized process. Worse: they did the standard whiteboard algorithms interviews, whereas multiple bigger tech companies had more iOS-specific interview loops. Even worse, the startups tended to have a higher bar for hiring than the bigger tech companies. This one is subjective and could be random or misperception on my part too.
4. Most infuriating of all, all of these startups (except coinbase) had a 60-90 day option exercise window for employees who left before a liquidity window. Let me be clear: fuck you if you think this is fair. IPO might be 7-10 years out and if I stay and add value for anything short of that, you’re going to ask me to take a huge risk to exercise my options (and pay the taxes) on your probably worthless stock, otherwise you’ll just keep it? Fuck you.
The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s pretty clear that these founders and investors don’t give much of a fuck about their talent, and watching them get squeezed by big tech companies offering sky high comp fills me with glee.
Be a founder, investor, or big co employee. Fuck being an employee for a startup so they can bleed you dry.
From your post, it sounds like you value:
1) Safety and predictability in compensation
2) Ownership over your company’s strategy (e.g. mobile) only if you’re paid highly for doing it (not a bad thing, but many other people exist who would willingly take a pay cut for the ability to have an actual impact on company strategy)
3) A highly organized and logical hiring process and qualification evaluation
4) Custom negotiated options contract outside of industry norms OR BigCo stock that has value today
5) 5 weeks of paid vacation
It definitely sounds like you made the correct decision by choosing BigCo over startup.
The norm is changing. Good startups today generally offer 5-10y exercise windows. [1] This is something Triplebyte started, and they have a guide for how to implement it. [2]
[1] https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows
[2] https://triplebyte.com/blog/extending-stock-option-exercise-...