What a helpful comment. Yes. How dare someone wish to maintain the work/life balance they have worked hard to attain. They must be lazy like your anecdotal associate.
Just a counterpoint to consider: Start-ups are a dirty fraction of the private sector. They burn through people to achieve short-term goals and reach IPO or takeover. They offset this wear and tear with direct remuneration and options. Most private sector work isn't X10 gigabros, it's real people doing a job, developing themselves and adding value to a long term business in a 9-5 setting. These jobs still exist.
Telling someone to stack shelves because they don't want to work at a start-up is contemptible.
That's precisely my point. Startup work is not any more meaningful or everlasting than work at a big company. GP claimed PMs at big companies only come up with meaningless work but I think the work is meaningless almost everywhere. Every human needs purpose but pouring yourself into something that is very likely to have so little permanent impact seems foolish. I think there is a desperate call for balance in life which is why work-life balance provided by stable companies is valuable, not because the work you do there is any more or less important than a startup.
I'm an entrepreneur too. I'm indicating that the philosophy you're sharing serves only the investors, and that's why they try to ingrain it into naive or inexperienced founders.
There is a problem when you allow your work to consume everything. Things are out of balance. That's true no matter how small or big the company is. It's not healthy for the founders or the employees to behave that way.
This isn't to say that one shouldn't spend a lot of time working on stuff or that strict insistence on a 40-hour week is always appropriate, but there is more to life than work, even when you're trying to get a startup off the ground!
Some equilibrium must be maintained, for the sanity of all. Specifically, delaying important familial developments like marriage and children or spending so much time engrossed in work that you become negligent of your familial responsibilities is absolutely an unfair trade, no matter how rich you get from the startup lottery (and realistically, you'll probably get 0 rich, which makes neglecting permanent, irrevocable relationships like family even less intelligent).
I understand that you disagree and would avoid hiring someone who is interested in work-life balance, and that's fine, but my belief is that this attitude is not good and you're not going to get good people with it. It artificially constrains your selection of talent to the naive and/or the desperate, neither of which make a good foundation for a company.
I agree. I was not trying to defend jobs at startups. We're hiring but can't afford high salaries so I totally understand that such jobs are no good for most people : not well paid, you lose it if the company fails, long hours, stressful. There are good points too (I wouldn't be doing it otherwise!).
Frankly I'm getting tired of this drum HN keeps beating about startups not offering a good work/life balance. Some startups don't, true. Some FAANGs don't either, what's the difference?
I know plenty of startups that have a sane working culture as a key point of differentiation in the job market.
Founders, in general, have to work really hard on themselves to avoid starting gazillions of projects, features, side hustles, and so on. And that's whilst being fully busy with their one business they're founding.
So I totally agree that in a regular job, it's just a matter of time until they bounce, at least mentally.
The problem today is the glamourisation of "starting your own thing". I did it and still do it because in a way, that's all I can do without losing my mind entirely, but it's far from being easy or fun or even at times enjoyable. It's just that a job would be worse for me. And I hate seeing people built for companies start their own and be completely miserable because they're barely using their skillset since they now have to do everything, everyday. (Talking about bootstrapped tech here.)
I agree wholeheartedly with Paul, but you do have to balance it against the amount of work involved. Something that's fulfilling at 40 hours a week can be grinding when you're at it 60+ hours a week.
The problem with working as an employee for a start-up is that you're required to have the commitment of a founder, without the upside. There may be some people who will knowingly invest their youth in buying someone else a yacht, but in my experience many startup employees are unrealistic about their chances. Most businesses aren't going to change the world or make average employees rich.
From a rational perspective at least, I think it's hard to justify being an employee at an early-stage startup unless you're there to build the experience and contacts necessary to start your own company. There are plenty of medium-sized companies out there that offer similar opportunities for employees without their bureaucracy of a bigcorp or the risk and time commitment of a startup.
I hope you don't mind me bookmarking this (very astute) comment and using it as part of my chat with folks as to why they shouldn't work for a startup.
Not everyone has a stable day job before they get into a startup. It's not in everyone's best interest to suffer through one for a few years first either.
I don't buy this argument at all. It fully depends on your mindset. No big company pays you to become lazy and entitled, at least not the FAANG ones referred to by most as the gold standard. If you cannot show initiative and growth in a big company you don't belong in a start up. People with initiative and a drive to do things thrive anywhere and in any condition. They solve problems no matter what the form is and forge ahead. I do see that working for a startup can be great, but this whole "work at a start up first" is just trying to glorify startups and nothing else.
That half-arsed stuff in the middle is called living, and it's the only way you can do this sustainably.
Startups are like going to Hollywood. Your goal might be to become as successful as Clooney, but that's not likely to work out. Still, if you're talented & dedicated, you can make a living in this industry and enjoy it.
I've been working for startups for the past 12 years. I won't be a millionaire even if my current company sells for $.5b - there are preferred stock, dilutions down the road, taxes etc. But I hope to be in startups for the rest of my career, simply because it's fun to create something from scratch, work in a small company with relatively little office politics etc.
It's not fun to sleep under a desk, though, or consistently work 12 hours/day. If your boss expects you to do that, he's a poor manager. If your VC tells you to do it, he's trying to exploit you, as JWZ correctly points out.
Incorrect. I for one hate my day job at a large corporation and will quit soon. Many of the things that PG says about big companies resonates with me. I truly feel like a caged animal and I look around me and I see some of the things that PG describes. I feel so different from people that work here that sometimes I wonder if I'm a different breed of person. I have a rebellious inclination toward all of the rules and traditions here. From this experience I've become more inclined to work in a smaller company or as a researcher (and possibly a startup some day).
However, I found the article to assume too much about what is natural and fulfilling for programmers. I realize that there are reasons for being biased towards creating startups, but the essay really does come across as being very skewed and not very well rounded because of it. Jumping into a startup can come with huge risks and sacrifices that can be anything but natural and fulfilling for some people. Startup companies can vary widely in the actual benefit they have to their customers as well, which is an important criteria for some people's fulfillment. Is the startup just about satisfying the customers' desires for entertainment and socializing, or is it helping people in a much deeper way? Is it just about pandering to the flawed values of the audience, or is it about pushing the state of the art? For many people it can't just be about financial freedom and being bought out. There are so many different aspects of "natural" and "fulfilling" and Paul seems to ignore a lot of them, possibly even misrepresenting some.
Some of these points are correct, strictly speaking, but the analysis is pretty one-sided, imo. This is very "Anyone who's not an idiot should just found a start-up because 'regular jobs' are full of immature monkeys that can't appreciate you." That hasn't been my experience at all and it sounds more like 'being your own boss' is a way to avoid having any people skills or being able to work as part of a team. There are a ton of great reasons not to found a start-up, even if you could. For example, if you prefer living life instead of working, a start-up is probably not a great choice. If you need stability more than a lotto ticket, a start-up is probably not a great choice. If you want to just work in your field and not spend your time worrying about fundraising and
finance and marketing and hiring and HR and revenue cycles and payroll and .... , then founding a start-up is probably not a great choice. The list goes on...
I think there's a general myth that you can't have your cake and eat it. Startup - work 24/7 or it'll tank. Work for a corporate - work 24/7 or you won't get noticed and be in the typing pool your entire life. Work in finance - work 24/7 or you'll miss the deal that makes you millions.
The irony is, most people (but by no means all) actually realise that balance is important at a certain point and scale back willingly. The startup boom is no different from people starting small home businesses like they've done for years. We've slapped on a sexy name, told people you can become one of the world's richest people but fundamentally, it's the same as making pies in your kitchen. Some people will be happy making pies for the local market, others will want a deal to get them into a supermarket.
There's space for everyone, you just need to find the level that makes you happy. In my opinion ;)
I was just pointing out a trend. It seems that more and more companies are trying to appeal to the start-up types. I'm not too optimistic that these big-corp-in-start-up-mode ideas will work, most people are not up to the task. I view this kind of mode as an exception not the norm.
Personally I don't mind working hard. In my case the work has been interesting enough and I'm viewing the long hours as an investment to acquire certain technology experience. At the same time I do feel an increasing urge to go and start working for real start-ups again.
Just a counterpoint to consider: Start-ups are a dirty fraction of the private sector. They burn through people to achieve short-term goals and reach IPO or takeover. They offset this wear and tear with direct remuneration and options. Most private sector work isn't X10 gigabros, it's real people doing a job, developing themselves and adding value to a long term business in a 9-5 setting. These jobs still exist.
Telling someone to stack shelves because they don't want to work at a start-up is contemptible.
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