You’re obviously overstating the FAANG SWE lifestyle.
But beyond that, it’s interesting you picked FAANG SWE and not startup SWE as the basis of your comparison.
The whole premise of the article is that startup employees are often sold a bag of goods about equity and upside that’s simply a terrible deal. Not terrible in the sense that it’s highly risky, but that it doesn’t even come close to compensating for that risk premium. Its sold as FAANG is low risk medium upside but startup SWE is high risks high upside but really its extreme risk and almost no upside because VCs find dozens of ways to carve it out. And people will say startups pay “market” compensation but they almost always mean base salary only, and the equity is such a horrible deal, it’s borderline fraudulent scam on the part of founders to sell startup employees on the equity as a fair deal.
As an aside, when people think SWEs don’t need unions/ professional associations, they think of teachers unions or autoworker unions where pay is standardized on seniority. Instead, we could have something where our lawyers in our camp could review equity terms and we could collectively advocate for things like liquidity deals. That will never ever happen if you only trust the deals the VCs and founders offer.
This 100%. Really the only reason to work at a startup as an engineer is if you really want to, because everyone pays low and the tiny bit of equity is essentially worthless in 99% of cases, which gives it a very low value.
And, if you exit the company -- either voluntarily or involuntarily -- you often only have 90 days to exercise your options. If you've gotten laid off, eating into your savings while searching for a job is a pretty risky proposition. If you have an appreciable amount of equity, that bill can be rather high. Then there's AMT. Many end up letting the options expire. So, taking that pay cut for equity really didn't work out -- you had less money to exercise the options and because you couldn't, the option portion of your compensation was effectively clawed back.
I very much appreciate the startups pushing to extend the exercise window out to 5 - 10 years, but that's far from the norm. I've debated this with a couple of investors and their stance is if you leave the company then you're not committed enough and shouldn't receive anything. I think that's quite debatable, but that's certainly not the case when folks are laid off. And we commonly discuss people thriving in one particular phase of a company. If you're not in that phase, it's no good for either the company or the employee to continue the relationship just to defer having to exercise options.
> I've debated this with a couple of investors and their stance is if you leave the company then you're not committed enough and shouldn't receive anything. I think that's quite debatable
I don't think that's debatable at all; I think it's bullshit. Once your options vest, they are yours. They are compensation for the work you have already done, not the work you will do in the future.
Once/if your company switches to RSU grants from option grants, then at vest day your stock is yours, and can't be taken away when you leave the company (well, I imagine they could write up a contract that says that, but that would be quite non-standard, and I would never work for a company that did something like that). The vested RSUs are, again, compensation for the work you have already done, not the work you will do in the future. I don't see why options and RSUs should be considered differently here.
(I might even stretch that into the idea that it's bullshit that startup options expire at all, even if you stay with the company forever, but I do think that's debatable.)
If equity is going to be a material component of compensation, then the argument "you're not committed enough, you deserve nothing if you leave..." is utter nonsense.
Imho, many/most of these draconian equity / option terms are nothing more than attempts at 'golden handcuffs' to make it more challenging for employees to leave these startups.
Sadly, they work: I know many who couldn't leave roles til they'd saved up for years, or could finally ink second mortgage on their home, etc in order to purchase all their equity in their 90 day post-exit windows....
> And, if you exit the company -- either voluntarily or involuntarily -- you often only have 90 days to exercise your options.
This is why I advise everyone that you must early exercise (exercise your option as soon as you start with the company) if you're going to join a startup.
Some startups don't let you early excercise. Run far, far away. Find a different startup. Never join a startup that does not let you early exercise.
> This is why I advise everyone that you must early exercise (exercise your option as soon as you start with the company) if you're going to join a startup.
That's terrible advice, if you present it in an absolutist, blanket way like that. I do wish I early-exercised at my last startup, since I had a nasty AMT bill when I finally did exercise, and I could have had better tax treatment under the small business qualified stock rules when I finally sold. But: a) early exercising my initial grants would have cost me $40k, which would have eaten into my savings to a degree I wasn't comfortable with at the time, and b) I early exercised at two previous startups, which failed, and that ended up being money flushed down the drain to the tune of around $9k.
Sometimes people want to wait a bit to get a better idea of the company's prospects before investing their own money into it. Maybe they want to hold off until the company has revenue, or hits/maintains a particular revenue or growth metric. Sure, if you're a super early employee and have 5-cent options, maybe you'll feel comfortable gambling that money away (but maybe you won't be!). Yes, there will likely be a tax penalty for waiting, but that can be a reasonable and sound financial decision.
I was (fortunately) a few years too young to get mired in the original '00s dot-com bust, but I know several people who were encouraged/pressured to take out loans in order to (early) exercise their startup stock options, and ended up with worthless or underwater stock, but still had to repay those loans. It would have to be a pretty exceptional situation for me to recommend anyone take that route.
(I do agree that a startup not allowing you to early exercise is a red flag, though.)
> Maybe they want to hold off until the company has revenue, or hits/maintains a particular revenue or growth metric.
It is far too late then.
One of the many benefits of doing early exercise is that you exercise the option when the grant price is the same as the current valuation so there is zero profit (and you file an 83(b)).
If you wait too long, your grant might've been at $0.01 but now the valuation is $5.00 (making up numbers but both of these are in the ballpark of my past startup experiences). It is way too late to exercise those options, you'll be paying tax on $4.99 of profit on a stock that you can't sell and might go down! If you waited that long, now you need to keep waiting until there is liquidity so you can do a same day sale.
> take out loans
That would be a terrible idea. Like I said in parallel comments, if the price is too high for your comfort level, don't join that startup.
> high risks high upside but really its extreme risk and almost no upside
Extreme risk? Some startups pay fair salaries.
I don't think startups are that risky (unless you start putting money into them, that is a suckers deal). Or if you work for free, what you naturally should not do. Not everyone can get a FAANG job so it is not very clear alternative.
If you get paid a slightly below market rate and get some worthless equity, what's the big deal? You can always quit any time and change to a corporate career. It is not an end of the world.
> If you get paid a slightly below market rate and get some worthless equity, what's the big deal?
If you really do, agree that it's ok and a fun ride.
But where are you going to find a startup that pays market rate? Never seen one.
Base salary can be very close! But at an established company you are also making money on RSUs, often more than your salary. And usually have a bonus, which can be quite significant.
So your base salary might be 250K in an established company and 200K at the startup. Not a huge difference. But total comp at the established company is more like 500K-600K vs. at the startup just 200K. Huge difference.
> But where are you going to find a startup that pays market rate? Never seen one.
I guess you're looking in the wrong places. Over the past 13 years, I've worked for five startups (both full-time and contract) that paid market rate (two paid a fair bit above, even). In my professional and social circles, this has been pretty common. Certainly some have worked below market rate for some companies, but that seems to be the exception, not the rule.
> But at an established company you are also making money on RSUs, often more than your salary
That's definitely not been my experience. At established companies, the RSUs are usually a nice quarterly bonus, in the wide range of 10-50% of base (annualized). Certainly there are some where the RSUs can end up being several multiples of base (I've worked at one like that, though my equity comp level was not common, and was mainly a consequence of my long tenure there from when they were small), but I don't think it's that common. A lot of people seem to assert that you can easily get that at a FAANG, but that doesn't seem to be true. Some people can, but not the median employee.
Also consider that a lot of the stories of high equity comp come from people talking about the FAANGs. Those companies were founded 20-25+ years ago, and matured into established companies 10-15+ years ago; the "rules" have changed quite a bit since then.
It's possible! I live in the silicon valley bubble.
I've worked for 5 startups (and had offers from about ~5 more to know what they would've paid). None have been close to total comp at a public company.
All of them have been very competitive (or even higher!) on base salary.
But there's no recurring RSUs in a startup (since there is no stock to trade), and rarely bonuses. So total comp is about 30-40% of my total comp when working at public companies.
Extreme risk is driving truck in Iraq or smuggling drugs to Singapore. Working in air conditioned office for double median US salary is not extreme risk by any means.
With that I agree with you that upside is often lower than people expect.
I think we're talking about the risk level when compared to various ways to work at a tech company, not risk level when compared against all possible occupations.
Let's not forget that FAANG companies were all startups at one point. Early employees at those companies experienced significant upside. Startups can be very high risk, and in rare cases, extreme upside.
This is the “startup myth” that lets the scam perpetuate.
The world has changed. Google IPOed just a few years after it founded. Now Stripe, objectively one of the most successful startups ever, still hasn’t IPOed after 15 years.
Liquidity preference
Dilution
Even the F in FAANG had a major movie made about early employees getting shafted by dilution!
FAANG is 5 companies founded a long time ago. Since then VCs have completely rewritten the rules of the game. But they’ll still point to extreme outliers in the old rules. The fairy tale of the Google masseuse has probably cost tens of thousands of engineers millions in compensation.
You need to get things in writing and do the math and startups make it as difficult as possible to do that and then the math never adds up. So they resort to fairy tales.
Many huge private companies, like Stripe, have found ways to provide liquidity to their employees without going public, e.g., through tender offers. Some more recent examples of companies where early employees did very well would be AirBnB, Coinbase and DoorDash.
Early executives at those companies did very well. Early employees did well, but risk-adjusted , not really. I know people who were fairly early at those companies and they own nice SFH in the Bay Area but they're still working as Directors or whatever.
Consider that if you could make 400k (including liquid stock) in compensation at FAANG but you take 180k at the startup, you're basically betting 220k a year on the company. Except unlike any other company you bet 220k on, you won't get a board seat, you won't get access to key metrics, your influence will be dominated by "real" investor's influence.
If your NW is less than 10M, which presumably it is, anyone who's heard even heard of the words "Kelly Criterion" would tell you your nuts for betting 220k a year on one startup. And yet, you get treated like "an employee" and not like "an investor" for taking that insane risk.
So YC has invested in 5000 companies, and you can name 3 that had top-notch outcomes, thats 0.06% success - and you had to work like a dog to realize it! And that money was locked up. Those same early employees could have taken that $220k/ year, put it on Bitcoin or Apple stock, and retired off that. And Bitcoin and Apple were much easier "picks" than an given startup.
The math simply does not add up and the whole system runs off mystique and naivety. And I've worked at startups that gave me a hard time about asking about outstanding shares, about asking about the cap table, about asking about liquidation preference. This is _critical_ information before you invest a significant portion of your life and net worth on a company and that they're guarded about and it should raise the ultimate alarm bells that they don't fall over themselves to explain every part of it.
There's a bunch of propaganda out there "Explaining ISOs, written by a16z" that's a smoke screen of the truth. The math does not add up.
The dream startup employee is really really good at Transformer architectures and really really bad at personal finance. Fortunately for startups, a shocking amount of these people exist. But it doesn't change that if sharp financiers looked at employee equity packages at startups objectively, every single one would agree it's a scam deal.
First of all, we're on the same page about the risk profile of working for larger companies being better for employees. But the reality is there aren't enough of those jobs for every single startup employee out there to get one. Some people also like the startup environment - move fast and break things, etc.
Your denominator (5000) is _all_ investments that YC has made. You need to look at investments of a certain vintage, e.g., 10 years or more. You also need to include all the other companies of that vintage where employees did well (way more companies in that cohort have sold or gone public). The result is 0.06% is a gross understimation of the success rate (where success is defined as successful enough for early employees to make a lot of money).
> Consider that if you could make 400k (including liquid stock) in compensation at FAANG
I'm very skeptical of the idea that this is common for new hires at FAANGs today. Certainly some people can command that level of comp, but I find it hard to believe the median employee can.
The median employee also isn't the guy who's going to make a killing by being an instrumental early employee at startup. It's apples and oranges. I'd argue that the person who is versatile and productive enough to help build a startup from zero is also in the upper tier of those FAANG employees, and commanding 400k+ per year isn't out of reach.
I personally have taken both paths, and made what I considered a ridiculous amount of money at a startup (after I'd been gone for a while, having bought my stock). When I got my cash out, I didn't quit my not-technically-FAANG-but-pretty-close job and that comp continues to grow. I never expected this, but my comp has grown to the point where the cumulative amount I've made here has actually surpassed the startup money. 7 years at each place, and the steady paycheck eventually outpaced the big windfall. The difference is I can keep the steady paycheck indefinitely, so it's definitely the win if I stick it out. Of course, now I'm itching to do a startup again. :)
I don't agree it's a myth. Is it an extreme risk? Yes, of course. Do people view the risks to be way too low? Yes. But I worked at Cloudflare pre-IPO, got shares at 1.73, and at one point CF was at 200 a share. That was more or less what I was "promised" from the equity.
Stripe is one example of a successful startup not going public, but there are tons of startups that are going public. And there are many startups that wish they could go public, but they simply don't have the finances or business to do so.
I don't think VCs changed much from when Google went public until COVID. We were seeing massive overvaluations of tech companies for years. Once through 2020, VCs got scared and now the landscape is a bit different. But the AI craze has started to get VCs back out of their shells taking bets on risky projects.
So, yeah, idk what I agree with this assessment. At least it's not been my experience in tech over the last 8+ years.
> I don't think VCs changed much from when Google went public until COVID.
VCs changed a ton over that time. In 2004 VCs were still smarting from the dot-com bust. And VCs were hardly spewing cash during and in the aftermath of the GFC of 2007/08. The days of easy VC money were mainly in the early-mid to late '10s.
And as you point out with your end date of COVID, VCs have now backed off again, as they did around 2000 and 2008 during those bust/bear cycles. I would credit interest rate increases with the current backoff, though, not COVID. During early COVID, funding was still fairly well available, assuming your business wasn't something that required in-person contact; even better if your business facilitated home-office work.
> At least it's not been my experience in tech over the last 8+ years.
That's only ~4 years pre-COVID; either seems like too short a horizon to make this sort of assessment. (Source: been in tech for 20-odd years.)
The expected value of startup equity is far, far, far below a casino. The ON bet at a craps table is 50% odds. Less than 1% of startups survive.
You might as well go to the casino. You will save years of sweat, heartache, and stress-induced mental decline.
Instead at a casino you get to blow your money quickly, enjoy fun, free drinks, and still have the upside potential to become super rich if you are in the 0.000001 luck percentile.
I think a better analogy would be a poker room than a craps table. You don't get to influence the outcome at a craps table, but your performance at a startup will influence its probability of success. Also your choice of which craps table to play at doesn't change your odds, but you can certainly change your odds of success at a startup by choosing which one to join. Obviously there are no sure things, but after a while you can at least weed out most of the dumb startup ideas and/or the incompetent founders.
I’m only excited to work on a product that’s my baby but by my definition , startups that I’m not la founder /exec of can’t offer that.
A stranger can’t tell me how to dress my baby. So if CEO overrides me on how my product looks it’s not my baby.
If you have a baby, you don’t hyper focus on just one aspect of raising it. But even the tiniest startups rarely let engineers do things like work on marketing and customer development, so it’s not my baby.
A baby can only be taken away from you in extreme circumstances of neglect. But a startup job can lay me off at any time so it’s not my baby.
For me the only real job that fulfills this desire is bootstrapped founder. Being a startup employee is more like being a nanny than a parent.
Google will pay a senior engineer 200k base and 250k in liquid stock a year for 450k TC. That stock is also incredibly low risk.
If a startup paying market means 450k cash, absolutely there’s no need for equity. But if it means matching the 200k base then obviously you’re screwed with no equity. And I’m theory it should be a lot of equity given the much higher risk premium.
According to levels.FYI, Google average for senior engineer is closer to 360k. But your point still stands.
You are getting equity either way, both are likely to appreciate, but one is likely to be more liquid. So you're trading liquidity for a higher return.
More than half of all startups fail within the first 10 years. They’re not just less liquid, they never experience a liquidity event at all. That equity is effectively $0.
The odds of any given big company going bust are dramatically lower than that. Their equity might depreciate but it’ll at least be worth something.
One thing people need to remember is the world runs on incentives. And on this topic, there is a HUGE incentive to mislead people.
The facts are:
1) Tech startups usually need a bunch of good engineers
2) Investors and founders want these engineers for as little money as possible, as almost every owner-labor relationship in history has gone
3) Stock options have mystique from once-in-a-lifetime companies like Google but are overall very complex financial instruments
4) Many engineers are a combination of poorly informed about these complexities and easily impressionable to be “sold” that these options are a good idea.
The end result is a massive amount of effort expended to hoodwink engineers on this topic. The existence of the term “founding engineer” is exhibit 1, they are an employee and could simply be called software engineer, the term was invented to add the mystique (and workload) of a founder to what’s just a regular employee without founder equity.
Exhibit 2 is this idea that being a founding engineer is a path to being a founder , this gets repeated ad nauseum despite being easily disproven by 5 minutes on linked, a slim percentage of hot startup founders had previously been “founding engineers” . Of course some startup experience might be useful but just as often you’re the code monkey hired precisely so that the actual founders have more time to do the founder stuff you’re not doing and therefore not learning.
YC is basically a VC firm so it’s like taking Exxon Mobiles PR about climate change risk at face value. There’s a huge potential for bias. And even by VC firm standards YC has been shown to be exceptionally employee- hostile in their communications to founders and the behavior of their portfolio companies.
Once again, people ask “what would a union do” and once again, here’s an answer. It could hire lawyers with a collective budget to review startup option terms and make them less likely to screw over early employees. Because the lawyers that the VCs hire are working to protect the VCs, not you. And the blog posts they publish on employee equity are written to serve their interests, not yours.
Basically, VCs optimize for many small bets, ie investing in many, many companies where only one needs to hit it big in order to recoup the investment cost, while startups focus only on their own success, so it's in the VCs' best interest to sell the dream of working on or at a startup, thereby increasing VCs' own success without necessarily materially affecting the success of the startup itself.
So tired of companies that raise hundreds of millions from some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world trying to pull the “we’re a startup” card. You’re not two dudes eating ramen in a garage and you don’t get to use that image to excuse your shitty behavior.
Also tired of the “other people in poverty are exploited even worse! You asking for basic labor protections shows your lack of empathy for them!”
I’m seriously having a hard time imagining any of this was written in good faith.
The real solution is, and always will be, collective bargaining. These VCs aren’t going to make sure you have healthcare. They could give it to you directly, or they could use their wealth and power to make sure the government gives it to you.
People ask “what can a union do? My office already has free kombucha”. Imagine if all the SWEs at all these VCs backed companies went on strike unless the laid off Convoy employees got six months of healthcare (it would have been in the initial employment contract). The money for this stuff would magically materialize. It doesn’t materialize because there’s no organization to advocate for it, it’s that simple.
> tired of companies that raise hundreds of millions from some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world trying to pull the “we’re a startup” card
But they are one! If those wealthy people were getting perks in this failure, the way e.g. workers at Good got screwed, I'd agree with you. But if you're running with massive fixed costs and volatile revenue, knowing whether you're weeks or months from shutdown is difficult.
And again, people are assuming if he shut down six months ago everyone could have gotten severance. Convoy is $100+ million in debt. Wages are privileged; new severance obligations are not.
> real solution is, and always will be, collective bargaining
The closer solution is civic participation. How many people in Silicon Valley have written to their state elected to raise unemployment benefits? (Note: I'm not saying anyone deserves what's happening. But union participation in America is stubborn and dropping. We need another drum to beat.)
tech is fundamentally incompatible with unions for several reasons:
1. it will drive down the wages and give power to just another bureacracy
2. Union participation does not differentiate between highly skilled (and sought after) tech worker, from mediocre tech worker who gets by using copilot and chatgpt
3. I dont need union to negotiate with company on my behalf - I can negotiate by myself just fine
4. If startup goes bust - I can easily find a job at another startup, probably will even get a pay raise - just because my skills are highly sought after and in demand. There is literally zero upside for me that union can do
5. I dont want to share my specialist employee's power with faceless union burearacy
I know what it means to be a union worker - and trust me, it will never gonna work in software engineering
1. Hollywood unions disprove this
2. Hollywood unions (SAG, DGA) disprove this
3. Unions don't mean you can no longer negotiate. DiCaprio still does
4. One upside: Unions represent members who are no longer able to work
5. Hollywood unions have some pretty specialized folk and it works well for them
As an individual - you only bargaining chip is your ability to do work. If you lose capacity to work - temporarily or otherwise - you lose the ability to negotiate. Unions don't suffer from that weakness.
The things you can negotiate for are capped at the value of your work. You can't forbid your employer from replacing you/your teammates with AI foe instance, but unions can, because the collective value of their output is beyond what the employers may gain from ML models. Not so on the individual level.
You skipped the downsides of hollywood unionization:
Cost of hiring increases and there are fewer gigs around. Unionisation adds nontrivial transaction costs, so there will be fewer opportunities for new entrants, and fierce competition among existing workers for shrinking number of gigs.
For example look at how women actors get their cast roles with harvey weinstein studio - did union protect them from sexual predators?
Look at average unionized actor - very few are making big bucks, most are just surviving and have other day jobs.
UAW workers are still at the mercy of their employers, and are only dragging their companies down, while non-unionized automakers are taking over market share.
I am totally fine that my bargaining chip is my ability to work - it is the only austainable way. Otherwise there will be a lot of useless dead weights who dont contribute to the topline, and leech off of bottomline. (There is already unemployment for this use case).
Look at NYC MTA - all unionized and completely inefficient, unionisation can only work in monopoly situation.
Tech in the other hand is high growth particularly because all monopolies are being attacked by more flexible and lean startups.
Hollywood is not growing at all, while big tech is carrying the whole world
you are looking at the wrong stuff, box office revenues go to Motion Picture companies and Hollywood fat cats like harvey weinstein.
just look at labor data: it is not pretty. $28/hr mean pay in Hollywood! Much less in other areas.
There is a reason why successful actors prefer to become producers/directors: because it pays better to be your own boss, rather than be at a mercy of union. and you don't have to engage in high end prostituion and literally sell your ass to people like Weinstein and Epstein, just to get a role at a high profile movie.
SAG really is a gold-standard union. Critically, it has a monopoly to multiple buyers of its talent. (Sort of like the UAW.) Single-employer unions are more constrained.
You're taking a remarkably short sighted position here. Blacksmiths and cobblers were once highly in demand workers as well. Do you really think writing code is such a special beautiful skill that it's immune to the same forces of automation?
Software development is a trade skill, like any other. We're in a very brief window of time where it's a very lucrative skill to have. Don't expect that to last forever. When that stops being the case you'll want something between you and the harder facts of life that you might have had the privilege of ignoring for a while. There's a reason people bled and died to make these organizations. The moment it's possible the capital class will grind you into a fine paste and sell you in tubes to make a few extra percent on the quarterly financials.
> You're taking a remarkably short sighted position here. Blacksmiths and cobblers were once highly in demand workers as well. Do you really think writing code is such a special beautiful skill that it's immune to the same forces of automation?
No, but that's not required for the argument. Do you think any amount of unionisation would have forced society to keep lots of well paid blacksmiths and cobblers around?
(And if the answer to that is Yes, isn't that an argument against tolerating unions?)
I am not at the mercy of my employer or capitalist class for that matter.
And I will be the first one to automate my job and reap the benefits of automation myself.
This is the way of life - if you cannot adapt - those more flexible, more adaptable, smarter, younger, hungrier - will eat your lunch.
There is no way any tech union can enforce monopoly, because there will always be new entrants ( ew grads) and offshore workers and immigrants willing to take the job, if union workers decide to strike.
In fact, I will be the first one to create outsourcing and offshoring consulting company to help companies fight unionisation.
This is the way of capitalism, the way of life. Smarter, faster, nimbler will get larger piece of the pie.
If union is willing to get $xxx mln in labor costs from a company, I will happily help this company fight unionisation for a fraction of that - to drive unions out of business while pocketing the profits by myself
I hate to break it to you but if your job is automatable it won't be you reaping the benefits, it will be the people who have the most capital to deploy automating. That ain't you buddy, sorry. Your world view is basically peak HN techbro-iterianisim. I hope you never get the opportunity to experience exactly how wrong you are.
it shows that you have zero experience in automation, because no high value job is fully automatable.
Human augmented+automation will always be more superior/flexible/valuable and large corporations with a lot of capital will never be able to be as flexible and nimble for all customers and all their use cases, as a small player like myself can be
> it shows that you have zero experience in automation, because no high value job is fully automatable.
That's sort-of a tautology. What used to be a high value job can become a lower value job with some automation, and then be automated completely later.
Up to about a hundred years ago, many reasonably well-off people in the US and Europe used to have domestic servants. Those jobs could go to fairly high levels of skills and value. Nimbleness was rewarded. (But to be fair, they also could go down to pretty menial labour.)
Nowadays even really well-off people barely have any domestic servants. Instead they have dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and order their food delivered to their doorstep, and perhaps hire a part time cleaner for a few hours a week.
When stakes are high you are not going to ask a robot. When you have serious health condition or legal problem - you will find youself the best doctor/lawyer and seek their counsel.
Google search or chatgpt wont gonna cut it.
Same with tech - if you create a startup with big ambitions - copilot and chatgpt wont gonna cut it for your product.
and I see no mechanism for union to provide any value to tech workers. Hell, there is no even a category of tech workers: thousands of different specializations. I would never wanna be in a union with grandpas coding in COBOL for example
You sure make a lot of declarations about who is right and wrong and the poster is literally talking about their job. Is it possible you want unions in software so badly that you’re blind to successful models that work without them?
Physicians and Lawyers have been around forever and they don’t unionize.
technically they dont unionize, but they have cartel that regulates supply of specialists to the market (State Bar for lawyers and State Medical Board for doctors).
the reason why healthcare is such a mess and so expensive - is because Medical Board artificially limits supply of doctors to the market, by allowing very very few Medical Residencies perspecialty. This severely limits supply of doctors, keeps their pay high and leads to ever increasing cost of medical care for patients
Raising lots of money doesn’t mean it’s a sustainable business. I don’t think you know the colloquial definition of startup in Silicon Valley.
Raising millions doesn’t mean making millions either. If you took a bunch of investor money and just paid it all out to your employees and closed up shop that’s a misappropriation of funds.
> Imagine if all the SWEs at all these VCs backed companies went on strike unless the laid off Convoy employees got six months of healthcare
Why would they do that? I’m not going to go on strike because other employees are incapable of understanding the risks of joining an unprofitable company that is default dead. If you want 6 months of paid healthcare, quote it and demand it as a signing bonus before you start.
Startups blow up. It’s your responsibility to prepare for it. Established companies blow up too. Sometimes you even just get fired because you suck.
SWEs have zero excuse to not have saved enough money to pay for cobra for six months if things fall apart.
> Imagine if all the SWEs at all these VCs backed companies went on strike unless the laid off Convoy employees got six months of healthcare (it would have been in the initial employment contract).
Congress made secondary strikes illegal a long time ago. Maybe it would still be OK since that wouldn't technically be cross-industry; I'm not sure.
There was a time when US unions striked despite being met by a risk of people getting outright murdered. Without hyperbole, the 8 hour working day was won with blood. The question needs to be whether you think a strike is right and morally justified, and worth the potential consequences, not whether it is legal.
> In economics, a normal good is a type of a good which experiences an increase in demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand rises due to the wage increase, is referred as a normal good. Conversely, the demand for normal goods declines when the income decreases, for example due to a wage decrease or layoffs.
It's entirely expected that people will want to consume more comfort and safety at their income increases.
If you compare different countries, you will find that these kinds of things track with income much more than with history of union activism.
For a striking example see https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ which is an article on the divergence between Japan and India. Japan has a long history of labour repression, especially compared to India. But by and large Japanese workers have a it a lot better today than workers in India, especially if you go by what's happening in reality and not just by what's promised on paper.
And that difference tracks with the difference in incomes between the two countries, but stands in stark contrast to what we would expect from your sketched theory of union activism driving these things.
"Will want to" yes. But it was not being offered until after that extensive union activism despite decades of demands. To the point that people died for it. May 1st is the international day for labour demonstrations because of the US union fight for the 8 hour day. The demand long preceded a rise in income allowing people to risk walking over it, or be able to afford to offer to take less pay for less work.
It took decades from the demand was there until it became normalised to offer it, with concession after concession won as direct and explicit outcomes of industrial action.
That good conditions are offered far more easily when a working population is in a financial position to walk if it's not offered is entirely unsurprising and irrelevant. That you can't possibly win the same level of outcomes when the financial position of employers doesn't allow it is also entirely unsurprising and irrelevant.
Nobody expects magic. Nor does anyone suggest that there aren't other factors also at play.
Given we can look back at history and see direct causal links between industrial action and subsequent improvements, there is no way to take this seriously.
I have no doubt you're right that it correlates neatly with different income levels, but I find it comical that you think that addresses the issue.
I also note that you claimed working hours as a normal good whose demand would rise with income but ignored the point that the demand far preceded the economic ability to bargain for it with money, and that the demand was not constrained by lack of money. The notion that it fits your description at all is bizarre.
EDIT: I'll also note that after having had time to skim the article you linked, it does not appear to even attempt to make an argument aligned with yours. The author very specifically points out significant confounding factors, such as whether or not unions resistance in the specific given conditions affected productivity negatively or hindered productivity improvements.
A union certainly can make a wrong tradeoff - Indian unions prioritised keeping the intensity of the work down, at the cost of reducing their then-future ability to demand higher incomes. But they were only able to have that negative effect on future wages because their activism had a substantial effect on working conditions and by extension productivity.
That their goal was short sighted does not change that if anything it is a demonstration of the substantial impact unions do have.
That there is a risk that a too successful union can end up having an adverse effect by accident is nothing new either - it's if anything one of the historical conflicts within the labour movement in terms of outlook on the approach between seeing it as about conditions at individual workplaces or tied to local concerns vs. inherently a political and society-wide and international concern.
> I also note that you claimed working hours as a normal good whose demand would rise with income [...]
No, leisure is the normal good. And so is safe food and clean air etc.
> Given we can look back at history and see direct causal links [...]
How do 'see' direct causal links? Just because people work to achieve X, and then X happens, is not a direct causal link. Eg praying for winter to be over, doesn't mean that there is a direct causal link with spring coming eventually. And fans cheering for their sports team to win, don't have much of an influence on whether their team actually wins.
Or to give an example from history: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is often seen as the event that triggered the Great War; but few people assign it much importance as an underlying cause.
> I have no doubt you're right that it correlates neatly with different income levels, but I find it comical that you think that addresses the issue.
If income levels explain all the variation between countries, and levels of union activism are just noise, I am not sure why you need to appeal to union activism as a cause?
It's like looking at the correlation between taking antibiotics and recovery from infection, but then adding fervent prayer as a causal explanation for some reason.
The tide eventually receded from King Canute, but that's not because of anything he did.
EDIT: I mostly agree with your edit. A parasite should be careful not to kill the host.
> No, leisure is the normal good. And so is safe food and clean air etc.
You got what I meant unless you're being obtuse. The point remains that the demand preceded the financial ability to bargain for it. It was independent of income.
> How do 'see' direct causal links?
By looking at when employers offered concessions in order to end strikes etc. Now you are being obtuse. Go back and look at newspaper archives from major labour conflicts and the concessions negotiated with the union actions as the direct and immediate reason cited by employers themselves, even at times after having spent fortunes on people like Pinkerton to try to intimidate and harm workers to get them back to work first.
> If income levels explain all the variation between countries, and levels of union activism are just noise, I am not sure why you need to appeal to union activism as a cause?
I've seen no evidence that they explain all the variation. I've agreed they likely correlate with much of it. Now consider that income-differences do not just magically spring into existence either, and while there are certainly multiple factors again we have extensive examples of direct cause and effect in terms of negotiation and subsequent agreements.
> A parasite should be careful not to kill the host.
When you describe workers as parasites, that is utterly vile and explains a lot. And so we are done here.
Unions are bureaucracies and have an organisational life of their own. You can't just equate them with workers. (In addition, there are also non-unionised workers.)
> but ignored the point that the demand far preceded the economic ability to bargain for it with money, and that the demand was not constrained by lack of money
You don’t know what demand means in an economic context here. Ops point is that as wages increase, people aren’t going to accept 70 hour workweeks if they can get by on 40.
> Given we can look back at history and see direct causal links between industrial action and subsequent improvements, there is no way to take this seriously.
Feel free to point them out and show how unions were required in every country to get the same thing. Things happening around the same time does not imply causation.
Union members were likely emboldened as pay increased because they could ride out strikes. At the same time, people could just get by on fewer shifts because pay increased. This creates downward pressure on required weekly hours (because many people to value their time), regardless of the union activities.
“The 8 hour work day was paid for in blood” is a great signal that you’re already very pro union (it’s literally union propaganda), so I don’t expect your view to shift much here. But consider that many professions flourished without unions (tech, law, banks, engineering, etc).
> You don’t know what demand means in an economic context here. Ops point is that as wages increase, people aren’t going to accept 70 hour workweeks if they can get by on 40.
Which misses the point that when these changes started being demanded and won people couldn't afford to walk away.
> Feel free to point them out and show how unions were required in every country to get the same thing.
Nice try, but that was not the claim I made, nor one I even agree with. The 8 hour working day was largely won by US unions, after which it became substantially easier to win elsewhere as the doom and gloom predicted by employers didn't materialise and reduced the perceived need to resist it.
With respect to US unions, there is plenty of material you can easily google, but you can start by looking at e.g. the 1835 Paterson textile strike, which was one of the first major ones, and which "failed" when employers only offered about half the reduction in working hours employers demanded, but it nevertheless gained them a significant reduction as a direct result of the strike.
> Union members were likely emboldened as pay increased because they could ride out strikes.
History largely shows the opposite. Workers coming to the cities facing lack of employment opportunities were relentlessly exploited, and were a major factor in the growth of labour unions.
In the US you also saw major effects of actual salary drops in some cases, e.g. the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
Union members risked life and limb and imprisonment early on because the conditions they were working in were horrific. Unions have softened and their membership has cratered as pay then increased because if anything better paid workers are less interested in disrupting what they already have and tend to be less interested in putting effort into it.
> At the same time, people could just get by on fewer shifts because pay increased. This creates downward pressure on required weekly hours (because many people to value their time), regardless of the union activities.
This is just entirely counterfactual. Taking fewer shifts wasn't generally an option on offer, and didn't become an option until decades into the fight to lower working hours.
> (it’s literally union propaganda)
It's literally true, whether you're pro union or not.
See e.g. the Bay View Massacre, when the Wisconsin National Guard fired at strikers demanding an 8 hour working day and 7 people died as a result. It is by no means the only incidence of US government or Pinkerton agents and others firing directly at strikers.
The reason May 1st is the international day for labour demonstrations are incidentally a direct after-effect of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre, also an outcome of the eight hour working day demonstrations. I gave the Bay View Massacre because it's a simpler one - not nearly as murky. Preceding the Haymarket massacre police murdered workers the day before. During the demonstrations at Haymarket, someone - who is unknown - threw a bomb, and so while the police ended up killing multiple murders, it's unclear how to assign blame. Several union organizers were then executed without any evidence they had anything to do with the bomb.
> But consider that many professions flourished without unions (tech, law, banks, engineering, etc).
>
> They are by no means requisite for improvements.
Yes, in roles that are either highly regulated and/or high skilled so there is a reasonable balance of supply and demand people can do well, yes. Nobody has claimed no improvement can happen without them, nor that there are no groups who won't do well without them, so that is irrelevant to the claims I've made.
Im not sure I agree with your normal good characterization. It only applies to goods purchased with money - not ones purchased with time, blood, or death.
Someone with more income might exchange more money for time/comfort, if all things are held equal including the price.
I think the inverse is true when you consider exchanging things other than money for more comforts.
That is to say, people will pay more money because they have more of it the higher their income (because the marginal value of each dollar goes down)
Asking would you be willing to risk your life for more comfort, that answer changes. The higher your income/comfort/happiness, the less willing you are to risk your life for more comfort.
The less people have to work, the less they are willing to risk their lives for more free time.
Who would risk death protesting for more leisure: someone working 80, 40, 20, or 2 hours?
> . The higher your income/comfort/happiness, the less willing you are to risk your life for more comfort.
And indeed both the level of union membership and the militancy of union actions supports that. Union membership cratered in developed countries and conditions have improved, and labour conflicts have gone from being outright armed in some cases in the past to being mostly relatively tame and regulated affairs.
Counter argument: Every crypto coin is, more or less, the same. Sure there's some underlying difference in how they work (proof of stake vs proof of work) but they don't do anything wildly different.
AI companies, on the other hand, ARE fairly different in the products they're offering. So while it can make sense to talk about the crypto world as a whole when on a thread about an individual coin, that makes less sense when discussing individual AI companies IMO.
I really don't know of anyone using crypto other than for investing and get rich quick scheme. Crypto was overvalued as investors mostly have vested interest in coins. And funding startups is the cheapest way to inflate the coin value. And AI is solving real problems for me.
Silicon Valley used to have engineering managers who managed engineering.
As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical.
This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architecture “.
This is toxic to an engineering org in many ways. Firstly you now have a bunch of highly paid technical employees completely removed from how things actually work. But what’s worse is you created a culture where you’re incentived to follow - a senior engineer who wants to get promoted should write less code because coding is associated with being a low level employee.
The fundamental root cause is a misunderstanding of code as low level factory work and not intrinsically tied to the design and architecture. But it’s one of many ways in which traditional business structures and software engineering do not mesh and you need an extremely strong engineering leader to keep software culture on track, which very few organizations have.
> As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types.
That. Same for all the decorative functions with low value added.
> make management non technical
This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business.
> making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding.
There is little that revolts me more than people working in technical companies, and seeing themselves as above the technical layer. I don't mind people not being software engineers, a lot of them are great, willing to learn a bit of context in order to do their job efficiently and facilitate mine. The same way I learn about the other functions. But I've worked with quite a number of managers, PMs and TPMs who talk down to me the moment I tell something even remotely technical, like I'm some sort of amateurish geek only tolerated at the adult's table. I do my best to stay away from these folks.
MBAs succeeded in making management a distinct discipline that has been divorced from the work, only connected through metrics and KPIs. If you cannot talk to them on their terms, they are happy to impose sanctions on you.
They’re very effective at solving first order optimization problems. Increasing revenue and reducing costs can all be done in a spreadsheet. This is the value they contribute.
If you’re dealing with problems that are closely coupled, are non-linear, or have emergent phenomena, their contributions are not just ineffective, they’re counterproductive and destructive. You need creative, skeptical, and technical people for these problems. Closing feedback loops and building fault trees help you more than a Gantt chart and flashy buzzwords.
> This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business.
I have mixed feelings about this.
I used to have a manager (who later became vp) that was technical, and it’s been the worst. Of my professional life so far. He would dictate the technical solution and shut down every initiative, making people below him mere executioners. No room for dissent, he had the last word on everything.
The problem being, this person worked for like ~5 years as a developer, then became a manager, then got in charge of infrastructure.
And oh boy, infrastructure was not his core competency.
So prod infrastructure was essentially at a hobbyist level (everything in the same subnet, some dev stuff along with prod stuff, no network segmentation, a number of things implicitly relied on virtual machines not being rebooted or getting the same ipv4 if rebooted, dns was a patchwork etc). In all this he avoided solutions that he wouldn’t understand (no matter if people below him would understand them). Oh and he would have the console access to cloud services and the authority to do all the testing he wanted, we did not (hence perpetuating some thoroughly artificial knowledge gap).
GP: "This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business."
You: "And oh boy, infrastructure was not his core competency."
> But I've worked with quite a number of managers, PMs and TPMs who talk down to me the moment I tell something even remotely technical, like I'm some sort of amateurish geek only tolerated at the adult's table.
Wow. You've also just described oil and gas Operator engineering departments perfectly. It's got to the point in oil and gas operating companies, where even the simplest piece of technical work is outsourced, and even if you wanted to produce quality engineering deliverables yourself, it's hard to hunt down someone who is willing to review and sign them off because so few have that competency themselves. Of course nobody admits to that, so they're just slippery and try to reassign or deprioritise any work that involves actually doing a calculation.
I moved over to Silicon Valley fairly late (in 2018), and I was immediately shocked at how frowned upon... even disincentivized technical knowledge was at the management level.
To the extent that people started removing hard numbers from their presentations and replacing them with smiley faces.
Needless to say, I left and that company TANKED.
I think Steve Jobs said something about A people versus C people... well he was right (even though he was bullshitting, b/c as we all know, Wozniak had the A team at Apple, and Jobs at the C team)
The A/B/C quote isn't about lone wolf devs, but is "A players hire A players, B players hire C players". Meaning really good devs want to work with other really good devs, but mediocre devs want to work with crappy devs to make themselves look better.
I still think it is kind of full of bunk, although it has some truth. A players do typically want to work with A players, but a lot of "B" players just want to have a mildly interesting job where they don't kill themselves and are happy to hire and be around other B players with the same attitude.
I've worked in software and I've flown jets off an aircraft carrier. Egos are not an unfamiliar concept. And while there are "A" players, there are also arrogant prima donnas who think they're "A" players, which is why I'm skeptical of sentences like this.
In my previous life, there were plenty of people who could water your eyes in the jet, but who couldn't mentor or bring along new folks to save their lives. Which made them useless in the long term because they couldn't train their replacement.
The real gold are the "A" players who can mentor "B" players into becoming "A" players. Because in any field, there are three kinds of people. The natural freaks of nature who need no help, the vast middle, and the incompetent who shouldn't be there. Organizations who crush it understand that they need the best team players out of Group 1 to mentor the crap out of as much of Group 2 as they can, and they only need to fire Group 3. But the prima donnas of Group 1 make it sound like they can carry an organization . . . and they largely can't.
This is how you get the Office Space "I have eight different bosses" environment. And they all play "hide the problem, fluff the status" games so the leaders above++ have no idea how big of a shit show the ground level is.
> As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical.
God I hate this, having to attend all of these "brown bag" meetings where we get talked down to by these grifter types about "devops mentality" or whatever or BS they've latched onto
Who gave these people the right to wave their hands in the air and talk about bullshit all day? Where do these people come from? Is it nepotism or something?
To be frank, I'd rather trade some money to never have to interact with these fuckers ever again. They're literally a disease. Or at least, unionize, but don't demand money, demand that these people shut the fuck up, permanently, or gtfo
This is true for every tech company outside of Silicon Valley as well.
I doubt the process is even specific to tech companies. Code is work, and the one thing that signals moving up the social ladder is not having to work. That has been true for a large part of history.
Programming is often a bit of a special case when in the context of work because we it so completely isolated from the physical process of work. Programming fundamentally is describing processes at multiple abstraction levels all at once, and therefore inseparable from software architecture. This is also why it can be hard to humans to learn.
(This, incidentally, is also why I despise each and every one using the term automation in a programming context. Running a command and clicking a web interface is conceptually identical, one is not more automated than the other.)
Fantastic comment. Btw the same dynamic also exists in other areas such as other engineering disciplines, finance, etc, as Im told. Software was probably an outlier until people realized you could make a good career out of it
Well with size comes management. Management of money and architecture.
I am also not a particular fan of excessive management structure, but as an architect I have to completely reject your proposition that non-coding roles are toxic or excess. I work with highly brilliant minds, with coding and non coding architects and one thing is very clear: the non coding architects are contribute more value to the end product than the coding principle engineers. And why not: they are a specialization which focus on one part of the engineering while a traditional coder focuses on another part.
> I have to completely reject your proposition that non-coding roles are toxic or excess. I work with highly brilliant minds, with coding and non coding architects and one thing is very clear: the non coding architects are contribute more value to the end product than the coding principle engineers.
I reject your rejection. In my experience any architect/staff/whatever high level ivory tower guy worth anything will look for every technical opportunity they can and will often bemoan the fact that at their level most of their day involves meetings and powerpoint when they'd really like to be digging into the code.
If a sr. technical leadership position seems happy to have their day full of PowerPoints and committee meetings the most they are ever going to contribute to their field is an amusing/horrifying story on TheDailyWTF.
I think you're right on the money, with a single exception: there is a value to engineering managers being trained in professional management skills.
Honestly, most of the dysfunction I see in orgs is as a result of "senior" (read: tenured, not skilled) engineers being put in charge of teams/work without having the competencies needed to be successful.
On the other hand, manager writing production code is a terrible footgun for the team. Time/resource conflict between helping a team and shipping code has no good outcome, either I let team down by decrease their productivity, or I let team down by slacking behind.
What I saw is that role isn't working either way. TLM don't have manager's power (can't reward and cannot punish) and at the same time expected to churn out production code, carving continuous focus hours out of manager's schedule.
That’s the opposite of what would be better. We need more engineer solidarity not more divisiveness. Give me a list of your past employers and I can guarantee I can find some sketchball business practice you indirectly contributed to and make some tenuous argument for you to be blackballed.
95% of shitty tech industry practices can be root caused to people identify more strongly with their employer than with their profession. We desperately need a professional organization / union with teeth and the main thing that should be shunned is rhetoric that divides rather than unites it
.
You must subscribe to the idea that the employees can change the culture of a company from bottom up. I strongly disagree. Company culture is dictated from top down, and only rarely does the bottom get to make substantive changes. However, I'm willing to have my mind change with examples of companies changing their culture based on employees changing the minds of the execs.
We can't, but many of us are forced by circumstances we can't control to stay on board even if we don't like where the company is heading. The most recent and probably most nastiest story I'm aware of is post-Musk Twitter - Musk ordered that everyone put in effort like hell, people slept in conference rooms... so, naturally, many people left but one group had to stay because their literal legal existence in the US was tied to that job: H1B employees.
Other cases include if you've got a house that's not paid off, a child on the way... that's where common sense says to not change anything major due to the consequences of shit going down very very VERY hard.
A lot of "rich" tech CEOs don't have massive amounts of cash, they have big equity stakes in their companies. It's paper wealth strongly tied to their company's share price.
Many of these companies' share prices is heavily influenced because a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares. For example, look at Pinterest: the general public makes of 11.7% of share owners while institutional investors make up 74% of share owners.
If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich. Most of these tech companies also have compensation structure where employee income is also significantly in stock, a price dump could cause mass attrition which can trigger a death spiral.
If you look at activist investors letters to Twitter, Pinterest, Google from hedge funds like Elliott Management, their pressure to cut employees compensation, employee perks, etc....this isn't some conspiracy theory. Wall Street hedge funds absolutely have massive influence on Silicon Valley tech companies because ultimately they do still control the purse strings.
> a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares
> institutional investors
Hedge funds are a minority of institutional investors. Most of those institutional investors are companies like Vanguard or BlackRock, who in turn just hold shares on behalf of their customers; basically, anyone who contributes to a 401k with a "Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 Fund" or whatever.
> If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich.
This is true, but the funds will also lose money (or miss out on gains in the future). Activist investors like Elliott absolutely do exist, but most AUM is managed by non-activist investors. Elliott, for example, had $71B in AUM as of last year; Vanguard alone was over 100x the size in that same year.
Let’s not forget that Flexport is one of the darling representatives of YCs portfolio. YC has some verbiage about ethical behavior on their website, but when it’s come to actual tough ethical situations like DoorDash pocketing drivers tips, Flexport reneging on signed offers, or all sorts of insanely narcissistic behavior by other YC founders, it’s been shown their “ethics” are words and not actions.
This shouldn’t just reflect poorly on Flexport leadership but on their investors. Especially because the more time you spend in Silicon Valley you learn that your “scrappy startup” is really a product division of the VCs who really call the shots.
Pay close attention to what you hear from pg, Garry Tan, Michael Seibel, etc on this issue. Very very easy to talk ethics in the abstract. Real ethics and integrity are defined in exactly tough times like this. And if you see the cowardice that I expect like we saw with DoorDash, keep that in mind before you “Work at a Startup”
It’s weird too because this doesn’t seem like the usual “fish rots from the head” scenario. Admittedly I’ve never done YC, but I’ve been in that orbit via HN and friends since the beginning, and pg seemed like a really ethical guy from day one.
I’m looking in from the outside, so who knows, but it seems like level of ambition early YC was filtering on brought this dark triad shit into the bloodstream and that in turn shifted pg’s worldview.
pg is obviously ambitious, but inherently “get to the top at any cost” people don’t spend a bunch of time writing books about Common Lisp and learning some painting and hanging out in art galleries a bunch. Part of what drew me to HN and the essays and the whole thing was a wholesome attitude that kind of said “work hard don’t try to game the system”, at least in the beginning.
The YC portfolio is full of unethical behavior like you said, but HN is full of "temporarily embarrassed founders" so you won't get much sympathy here with these types of comments. Good on you for bringing this up!
But beyond that, it’s interesting you picked FAANG SWE and not startup SWE as the basis of your comparison.
The whole premise of the article is that startup employees are often sold a bag of goods about equity and upside that’s simply a terrible deal. Not terrible in the sense that it’s highly risky, but that it doesn’t even come close to compensating for that risk premium. Its sold as FAANG is low risk medium upside but startup SWE is high risks high upside but really its extreme risk and almost no upside because VCs find dozens of ways to carve it out. And people will say startups pay “market” compensation but they almost always mean base salary only, and the equity is such a horrible deal, it’s borderline fraudulent scam on the part of founders to sell startup employees on the equity as a fair deal.
As an aside, when people think SWEs don’t need unions/ professional associations, they think of teachers unions or autoworker unions where pay is standardized on seniority. Instead, we could have something where our lawyers in our camp could review equity terms and we could collectively advocate for things like liquidity deals. That will never ever happen if you only trust the deals the VCs and founders offer.