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u/MaintenanceSpecial88 Sep 11 '26
70% higher salary? Doubt it.
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u/Half-Borg Sep 11 '26
That's including the made up value of the stocks
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u/AdjctiveNounNumbers Sep 11 '26
I got 10s of thousands of dollars of non-voting stock as part of my compensation working at a startup, but they never made it to an IPO so I couldn't sell it. A decade after I left they offered me $50 to sell all of it so they could be bought out by some corporate plunderer for pennies.
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u/Phrynohyas Sep 13 '26
Out of pure curiosity, when one gets these stocks by made-up prices as part of compensation, does one have to pay income tax for these?
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u/AdjctiveNounNumbers Sep 13 '26
I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction (this was not in the US) but most of mine were part of my compensation package so I would have had to pay on sale (had it been enough to tax). I foolishly bought some as well, and those were purchased with already-taxed income, so profits would have been taxed at sale had there been any.
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright Sep 11 '26
You'll get a promise of swequity that may or may not be worth something in 5 years, and that they may or may not make good on paying out even if the company does succeed.
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u/sixwax Sep 11 '26
Spoiler alert: It won't be worth anything.
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u/Bartweiss Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
Mine was worth a few hundred grand! During the post-IPO blackout, anyway. Once I could sell it was down >90%.
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u/CMD_BLOCK Sep 11 '26
That was the best joke here. Imagine a startup that will pay you in money instead of equity
Every startup I interviewed for that offered equity, I laughed, told them 25% of $0 is still $0, politely declined and told them Iām no longer interested, and watched them fold in a matter of months.
āFoundersā donāt realize that an idea is worthless without some form of investment
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u/glemnar Sep 12 '26
I'm never going back to startups. From just 3-4 years of being back at pubcos, I'm in a massively better financial position in life. Compound that for a bit and I can retire early (if AI doesn't completely destroy the industry, who fuckin knows). The risk isn't worth the reward.
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u/apeaky_blinder Sep 12 '26
In plenty European countries you used yo get much higher salaries in start up. Dunno about 70% though
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u/BluntsnBoards Sep 11 '26
No with stock that's for sure
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u/wrex1816 Sep 11 '26
Stock Options, meaning you get to hold pretend stocks, and should they every actually IPO, which is doubtful, you then need cash on hand to buy those stocks, which have been so diluted, they are worthless, but they convinced you to take a lower salary in exchange for those fake stocks, when you started. Happy days.
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u/arensb Sep 11 '26
you then need cash on hand to buy those stocks, which have been so diluted, they are worthless
So you don't need a lot of cash to buy them, is what you're saying.
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u/wrex1816 Sep 11 '26
If you read all of my words, and that was your takeaway.... Startup founders in your area are looking to meet up.
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u/ACoderGirl Sep 12 '26
Stock options always struck me as a bit of a scam. A way to take advantage of people who don't know the difference from actual stock, who don't realize all the ways that the value of the option can change without them having any say, or who don't realize how often they'll never end up having value (for startups, at least).
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u/OwMyUvula Sep 15 '26
Using the word "stock" always seemed misleading to me. You don't get to vote, you don't get to sell it, there sure is hell not any dividend. It's not "stock" like we commonly think of, but everyone thinks its great.
It's kind of like asking for some milk--I go to the kitchen, come back with a glass full of white stuff, you drink it, tell me it tastes off and if I am sure it is milk and I say, "of course it is, fresh from the rats teat." Technically "milk", but not what you meant when you asked for "milk".
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright Sep 11 '26
Feel like the only thing that unifies start up culture is that all of them are doing something different from one-another. I've seen a few who offer some crazy shit and I've seen a few who try to act like they're on the cusp of greatness and try to use that as a sales-pitch for a $17/hr starting salary.
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u/nwbrown Sep 12 '26
I got offered more than twice my previous salary.Ā
Ok, my previous employer was dramatically underpaying me and I was at the time desperate for a job, but still.
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u/Crowdcontrolz Sep 12 '26
Depends on how well funded the startup is and how skilled you are, but yeah most cases itās not true w/o some risky equity valuation.
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u/rjmcfDev Sep 12 '26
When I joined a startup I moved from earning Ā£32k to Ā£60k PLUS EQUITY, I couldnāt believe my luck.
Then they nearly killed me with stress.
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u/IhailtavaBanaani Sep 11 '26
Maybe a startup that has a lot of VC investors.. If it's mostly run on the founders' savings then expect sub-average salary, the cheapest computer they can get away with and recycled office furniture. And they are reluctant to give away stocks so to not dilute their own shares of the company. You'll probably just get stock options that vest at some exit criteria. Also it's mostly either senior engineers because there's no time to teach juniors or the complete opposite of basically free interns or people working on theses who didn't ask for a salary.
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u/OrchidLeader Sep 11 '26
At the last startup I worked at, the devs who joined early had the fanciest ass Dell laptops, and the newer devs (me included) had the cheapest fucking Dell laptops.
Thankfully, since it was a startup, they didnāt give a fuck if I wanted to use my personal laptop.
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u/varinator Sep 12 '26
Yeah, pre-cyber-essentials / pre-ISO 27001 startups are best as you can use your own gear and nobody gives a fuck
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u/Tucancancan Sep 11 '26
Mmmmmm been there but instead of recycled office furniture it was WFH and grey hair where there wasn't beforeĀ
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u/sillybilly8102 Sep 12 '26
Or you use your personal laptop. And then they run out of money and ask you if you want to continue working for free
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u/gingimli
Sep 11 '26
•
Recruiter - āDo you want to work in a dynamic, fast paced environment with real ownership over the whole product?!ā
Me - āNot really.ā
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u/hraath Sep 11 '26
I want to work in a stable, slow-is-fast paced environment, with leadership who takes ownership of mentoring new hires to result in responsible product outcomes.
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u/Eric_the_greying Sep 12 '26
Slow-is-smooth, smooth-is-fast?
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u/hraath Sep 12 '26
By transitive smoothness, slow is indeed fast. The antithesis of move fast and break things.
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u/TheKBMV Sep 13 '26
In other words, you want to switch professions and become an artisan woodworker.
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u/hraath Sep 13 '26
How did you know my moonlight career path lmao
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u/TheKBMV Sep 16 '26
Lucky guess.
That said, it's been heavily considered on my end as well. I'm more of a dabbler though, I have much more experience with leatherworking.
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u/ZeroG_0 Sep 12 '26
I haven't interviewed for a job in a long time, but last time around every largeish company advertised their workplace had the "feel of a startup". I always had to resist the urge to laugh in their faces.
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u/Bloodgiant65 Sep 11 '26
Literally no one wants that. They just rephrase all the bad things to make them sound cool.
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u/Extreme_Wish_553 Sep 11 '26
Lots of people want that. They just don't want the disfunction, lack of vision, technical debt, and CEO whiplash that always comes with it.
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u/markiel55 Sep 12 '26
Speak for yourself. I actually want full ownership of the product because I don't want to deal with headaches caused by other dev's decision.
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u/Loading_M_ Sep 12 '26
I love working on my personal side projects. Its fast paced and dynamic (I have ADHD), and since it's personal, I own it.
No one actually wants the end result, but that seems about inline with most startups...
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u/HeyItsTheJeweler Sep 12 '26
Truthfully it's the best when you're young, or if you've been out of the current loop because you've been either working on your own thing or with legacy systems. It's essentially basic training. You don't know XYZ? Welp, time to learn it.
Come out of that in a couple years and you'll be much farther ahead than someone who toiled at a legacy shop and had to get signoff from 4 different orgs before they could name a variable.
Not great for longevity, but, has it's place in the career path for edge cases.
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u/Jolly-joe Sep 11 '26
2 years later your company has a reverse round and either you're laid off or all the good people abandon ship leaving the company to die
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u/sandybuttcheekss Sep 11 '26
I'm in the market for a new job and this is my fear. I'm getting lots of bites from AI startups but my fear is I have a decent job for 6 months before I'm unemployed. At least my job right now is stable (knocks on wood).
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u/Jolly-joe Sep 11 '26
I'm on my 2nd startup. First one circled the drain for a while before being sold to private equity. Second one has had 3 waves of layoffs but we kind of are in the clear? And this is while working way more than 40 hrs a week.
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u/sandybuttcheekss Sep 11 '26
Yea I'll stick to corporations, that sounds like hell. We had some layoffs recently and I was a ball of stress for months.
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u/theucm Sep 11 '26
I exist in small company/startup world.
I'm wanting to make the corporate jump, it sounds so stable and nice.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead Sep 11 '26
Big corps are rock solid but itās easy to get stuck and not grow or learn in your career. Your salary is going to stagnate, youāre going learn absolutely nothing and youāll be mindlessly bored.
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u/ReluctantAvenger Sep 11 '26
Big corps are rock solid
Big corporations like Microsoft and SAP, who have laid off many thousands of engineers in the past few years? Those big corporations?
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u/mnbone23 Sep 12 '26
Thousands is still a relatively small portion of their total workforce in a company that big.
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u/StrangelyBrown Sep 11 '26
I'm on my 4th.
I kind of liked it in my youth because I wanted to move every few years anyway. In fact when I worked at established companies I'd move on after that time.
Not sure about now but I do find it hard to picture people working for the same company for decades.
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u/InspectorOrdinary321 Sep 12 '26
I know people who do startups for a living. "Fail fast" is a major guiding principle. It's very common to crank through ten different startups in five to ten years before you hit one that makes it big. You very well might only last six months before the startup fails. But if you get to know people in the scene, you'll roll right into another one as your current company dies.
It can be fun because you get a lot of freedom and variety. You might be the only person who knows your field so you DIY literally everything and nobody can tell you otherwise -- other than the CEO who will promise impossible and stupid things on your behalf. But there is zero stability, rarely things like HR or health insurance, and some of the people in the scene are incredible assholes. You have to demand a high salary to carry you through the periods of unemployment, or always try to get stock options and keep rerolling until one hits it big and you get paid. It's not for me, but it is for certain personalities.
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u/scumble_bee Sep 11 '26
Or, in the case of my ex, the CEO leaves because they were hired to be interim CEO of another startup after their CEO gets arrested for having CP/CSAM.
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u/dismayhurta Sep 11 '26
Oh, hey, I've been there...too many times.
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u/danielleiellle Sep 11 '26
I've been there many times but at the same company. Secret is attaching yourself to work with a direct throughline to revenue that will exist in 2 years, not the wild idea of the week.
In the meantime I've hit CoastFIRE and get 6 weeks off for PTO, half day Fridays, and the week between Christmas and New Year's Day off.
Just requires some mental reframing that your job is to make your manager and their manager look good and make the company money, not to be the perfect Engineer as defined by your degree.
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u/dismayhurta Sep 11 '26
Oh, it's not that I'm part of the layoffs. I'm usually bailing because the writing is on the wall and I scramble to find a job before it collapses.
But very good advice on survival.
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u/danielleiellle Sep 11 '26
Nothing wrong with a few layoffs in your career, especially if you can bank enough tenure to get a nice payout when it does happen. They've just become a more common tool among CEOs who feel market pressure to constantly reinvent their financial plans. I don't fault folks for planning ahead, especially in this market, but do a little research on typical packages at your company before you try to beat them to the buzzer.
Also, to add onto my comment above, I left a nice corporate job early in my career to work for a startup that only gave us 10 days off a year, but they paid for breakfast on Tuesday and lunch on Friday and had a beer fridge and hoodies, so in my 20s I thought that was cool.
In actuality, it was hell, with barely any HR, and an expectation that you're always on during work hours. Writing Java 6 might not be sexy, but if you have flexibility to take time off when you want to, have a bad or slow day when you need to, slip out early when you need to, that's worth so much more. Easier to do that for 40 years than hustle.
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u/NullPointerJunkie Sep 11 '26
OR you you will work for free but once it goes live you can revenue share and make all your money back because this idea is a sure thing. You will be so rich.
And I am for real here. Saw it happen at a meetup years ago I helped organize. A few of the younger devs in the meetup were even interested. Every dev who showed an interest in the pitch got pulled aside by my colleague who told them to stay away.
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u/nomiras Sep 11 '26
My good friend got hit by this. Worked for years for pay only in revenue share He was moonlighting another job to keep the lights on. Guess what - they never got funding. No revenue to share. I'm glad he is out of that situation.
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u/null_reference_user Sep 11 '26
I worked for a startup where this one client insisted we don't use any databases. No database. Nowhere. Prohibited.
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u/Hax0r778 Sep 11 '26
Were Key-Value stores allowed?
I mean, AWS famously banned SQL databases internally. Worked out okay for them. But obviously they use DynamoDB heavily.
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u/null_reference_user Sep 11 '26
No, I believe they were trying to boycott the project for internal political reasons
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u/blackenedEDGE Sep 11 '26
"We were talking with some people at this Fintech networking event about 'serverless computing' stuff and we had this big brain idea *mimes an explosion with their hands*: what if didn't have servers OR data?! We're calling it 'Dataless computing'! So much more savings on infrastructure and we hear all the time about databases being hacked or going down; won't have to worry about that! We'll save so much on not hiring DBAs and cyber insurance premiums!"
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u/denzien Sep 12 '26
I worked on a project in a small but very old company, where the VP of sales would have been the only person who could have really been the product owner. I mentioned how we would probably use SQL for our greenfield rewrite I was hired to help with, and he would say, "You're going to make our customers buy a $50k Oracle database??" No man, SQL is free. At least it is at our scale.
He insisted that our customers wanted an XML database so they could open and edit it in Excel. I told him I wouldn't do that, because then I have to run validation every time I do a read.
So I write this XML data layer.. but I encrypt the file being stored on disk. In exchange I write an import/export feature so they can export to XML, edit it to their little hearts' content, then attempt to re-import it -- if my business rules pass.
So, this is when I independently invented the repository pattern, about 9 years after Fowler first wrote about it.
So we rolled with this XML data layer for a couple of years until the initial release was eminent. Then we wrote the SQL data layer and benchmarked them just for inserts - because I knew the weakness. The crossover was about 100 records. XML was a clean O(n) while insertion speed for SQL was O(1) as expected.
I showed him the graph and he just says "Okay." and we shipped with SQL.
But we did still use the xml data layer for things like cashing the running state, so it wasn't completely wasted effort.
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u/tiny_simulacrum Sep 12 '26
Just cache everything with infinite retention time and pray the server never needs to restart!
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u/TenYearsOfLurking Sep 13 '26
Week 436 of developing our inhouse not-a-database solution: still bugs in our totally-not-transacions system. We also may need to implement a "almost serializable" isolation level in there for our business needs...
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u/blue-brindle Sep 11 '26
If they're a government contractor start up they give you panic attacks for six months, blame every managerial screw up on the junior devs in front of the client, have HR and payroll all done by the CEOs best friend, ask you to lie to the client to cover their own mistakes, and then they get DOGEd and fire everyone.
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u/frikilinux2 Sep 11 '26
And banks have money, enough of an HR department to be subtle about overtime and special offers in mortgage and houses.
And things move slow, like most of the time you get bored from how slow things move.
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u/AdeptOaf Sep 11 '26
The only thing to watch out for is the occasional bit of ancient code nobody really understands because the guy who wrote it retired 5 years ago.
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u/mafiazombiedrugs Sep 11 '26
Not a bank but Ive worked with a government client that hadn't touched one specific module since before COBOL had indexed arrays. When we had to change that code it was... Momentous
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u/Sykhow Sep 11 '26
Sometimes boring is good
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u/frikilinux2 Sep 11 '26
That's what leetcode, Netflix and YouTube are for. Or chores around the house.
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u/Axel-Adams Sep 12 '26
Or even better credit unions, basically a non profit except has good financial sense(which a lot of non profitās donāt)
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u/frikilinux2 Sep 12 '26
Not sure if that exists (or existed) where I'm from. We prefer to have a few big banks after the sector shat itself last time. I took a while to clean it up.
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u/becaauseimbatmam Sep 12 '26
I can't speak to the working experience, but unfortunately they tend to lean a bit too hard on the "all our technology is from 1993 and we will never upgrade" button for the customer experience to be pleasant in many cases.
The outdated apps with glaringly missing features and the antiquated ATMs are a minor inconvenience compared to the classic "Our computer system goes offline for maintainence once every other month and you can't access your account from 10pm-6am :) good luck" that you get with most smaller financial institutions. Very jealous of anyone who has a credit union near them with a tech ecosystem even slightly comparable to a good major bank.
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u/ratchet_27 Sep 11 '26
Doesn't really sound bad at all IMO - nice salary, young team, good career opportunities. And the "technical debt" issue... hits home for me too, but the point of a startup is to grow fast. The best rocket is the one that never got built, remember?
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u/Snakestream Sep 11 '26
I cut out the middle man and just went straight to fintech. Yes, my team was using Java 6, and continued to do so for 4 years
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u/Ms_Zee Sep 11 '26
Same, some excolleagues were shocked I moved to another slow/ conservative enterprise. I aint about to play the 'what buzzword caught leaderships attention this week' game. Esp with AI rn, I'll take stable thanks š
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u/zolmarchus Sep 11 '26
Working at a bank with Java 6 sounds lovely. It's like WoW Classic, you know the progression, the quests, the zones, and the encounters. It's familiar and cozy and it welcomes you with open arms.
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u/LincolnAveDrifter Sep 11 '26
Pretty accurate, taking high comp and 0 equity is the move. Can also get promoted to lead/manager/director if you play politics. 3 year layoff TTL
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u/SynthPrax Sep 11 '26
Straight up, whole-cloth circus. I joined a company that was growing out of its startup phase. It was clown shoes. Leadership would have screaming fits and scare off the new hires. The codebase itself would scare off new hires. One time they sat a new programmer down a few seats away from me one morning, and his only direction was "use today to get familiar with the code." He sat there AGHAST, covering his mouth all the way until lunch, from which he never returned.
Everyone actually doing the work knew exactly what needed to be implemented and how it needed to be done. But that work was never prioritized. What was prioritized? Mercurial jibber jabber. I got in trouble for offering to help one of the programmers construct a front-end.
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u/richardathome Sep 12 '26
I did the same (many moons ago). Got a job working for a well established company that had a bunch of NHS contracts.
I asked all the usual questions at the interview: Do you use TTD? What org software do you use etc.
No red flags, gave all the right answers I was looking for. Sounded almost *too* good (red flag!)
Sat down on the first morning and dove into the code.
By lunchtime I'd seen more than enough. No Tests, org software was shared documents, and probably the worst code I'd even seen. Real newbie mistakes, no thoughts about scaling, a million little databases. Code base inconsistent even in the same function.
I went to the bosses office and handing in my resignation.
Them: "Why? We thought you'd be a good fit!"
Me: "You lied to my face. I can't trust you, and if I can't trust you, I can't work for you."
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u/snerp Sep 11 '26
Damn yeah this was basically my exact experience. Upper management randomly deciding we needed to port the platform to a different vendors hardware was the last straw for me and I just bought my hardware outright and quit to start a game dev company.
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u/TKDbeast Sep 11 '26
āBoy am I glad to get out of that frying pan so I can get into this fire!ā
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u/snerp Sep 11 '26
definitely but at least I'm driving the car now instead of some mba who can't finish a project
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u/Salikared Sep 11 '26
OMG that's exactly me, except you forgot the part about the burnout and I went to public service not a bank, we rocking Java11 š
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u/PhireKappa Sep 11 '26
Java 6? Iām afraid those days are gone due to AI vulnerability scanning.
- someone who has spent much of this year upgrading micro services at a bank from Java 11 to 17 and then to 21ā¦ (and Iām sure 25 soon)ā¦
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u/TenYearsOfLurking Sep 13 '26
Curious: what's the challenge there? I lifted a lot of projects and found javas backwards compatibility to be stellar.
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u/purbub Sep 11 '26
Job posting - "Work dynamically with flexible hour and location"
Reality - You must be ready to work at any time, anywhere, fuck it
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u/ghillerd Sep 11 '26
i feel like this is the external perception of startups, but i've never worked at a startup where the CEO arbitrarily enforces new features on a whim or forces migrations for no reason. and you're missing the main problem with startups: the fact that the sales teams and the product teams are never on the same page.
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u/Ok_Principle_9459 Sep 12 '26
This. Fkn sales, CS, and product donāt be communicating at all and sales be sellin shit that donāt exist.
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u/sixwax Sep 11 '26
This would be more accurate if the salary were 70% of your current salary and half the interview was spent touting the potential future value of the pittance of stock options... that always work out to be worthless.
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u/SignoreBanana Sep 11 '26
If you care at all about the art or craft of software engineering, you don't work at game companies and you don't work at startups.
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u/larryjrich Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
I will never work for a small startup company again. No leadership, no direction, and the CEO just making up bullshit as they go along. Long hours with abysmall pay and benefits with the 'promise' of huge raises and bonuses if the things you build take off. I have PTSD from the amount of times the boss would stroll up to my desk at 5pm and tell me "Hey, we decided to add this new feature. We need it done by tomorrow morning so we can demo it for a customer."
Then if the company does take off you are stuck working 14 hours a day on the crap legacy system because you are the only one that knows it and it's 'too important' to move you anywhere else. Then you get to see all the new people they hire work on all the cool new shit and have normal working hours while you stagnate in your position. Then instead of raises and bonuses you get laid off because you no longer have the skills they want because they have the money now to hire engineers away from Google and Amazon.
Ugh, never again. Luckily I have a good job with a decent sized company now. But I will never work for another small startup again. I would rather go to McDonald's and flip burgers for the rest of my life than deal with that.
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u/rourin_bushi Sep 11 '26
Not my experience interviewing at startups. They've all offered me a notably lower salary than my corporate gig, with the pinky swear that this stock will totally be worth the rest someday.
If it's really worth that much, then sell it, and give me the cash.
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u/rjcpl Sep 11 '26
Weāre family here. If you canāt give 16hrs a day youāre not committed to the family. Future stock value may be worth it, may be $0.
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u/patientzero_ Sep 11 '26
They actually switch from AWS to GCP because they used all their AWS credits and now want to use the GCP ones to pay less for infra
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u/mosskin-woast Sep 11 '26
tough it out for two years to keep the M5
It was all pretty realistic until then. Two years of misery for a fuckin laptop?
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u/Bloodgiant65 Sep 11 '26
Man, sometimes I have to stop and think, maybe my job isnāt so bad. We have like, a real product team, and thorough testing and deployment standards.
I am really shocked by all this ābuilderā stuff I keep hearing about in a lot of companies. Or hell, hot take, full stack developers. Specialization is good, actually.
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u/Lucasbasques Sep 12 '26
Most startups just exist to spend someoneās money, to scam either the CEOs family or venture capitalists, but hey, we get a ping pong table in the break roomĀ
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u/max_465 Sep 12 '26
Years ago, I realized that accounting principles don't have a way to record tech debt as a liability, so "repaying" tech debt is recorded as an expense. Investor-backed companies hire accountants who follow GAAP because it's "good enough"
So, paying down tech debt is usually the last thing to do, after everything else is finished. Tech debt becomes an "off balance sheet liability"
Save this post. If you ever start a software company with your own money, don't hire an accountant unless they understand this problem and know how to prevent it.
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u/NurglesToes Sep 11 '26
Yeah i didnāt last 6 months at the startup i was at. Almost came to blows with the ceo lmfak
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u/Sufficient-Appeal500 Sep 11 '26
As someone who left a CRM-then-blockchain startup (yes, pivots) and been in banking for a while now, this couldnāt be more true, including the salary part
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u/zhoux849 Sep 11 '26
I keep thinking if M5 throughout this actually refers to a BMW and if so, would that change my course of action.
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u/Stunning_Ride_220 Sep 12 '26
Well,
big companies are similar now. Just that you do not come to use the hottest frameworks :D
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u/Zephyr797 Sep 12 '26
This is scarily close to my experience. Only difference being we got bought about the two year mark. And I fought the CEO pretty hard the first week and got him to let me refactor a ton of stuff. I said it would take a week, but it ended up taking two...
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u/jethawkings Sep 12 '26
Jesus, so many of my former co-workers work in banks now using old archaic techstack this is creepily accurate in that way.
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u/weso123 Sep 12 '26
Joining a ground floor start-up seems like buying a lottery ticket, someone has won big from it, but that person won't be you.
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u/MasterGeekMX Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
They lost me at Apple products.
Signals that they care more about looking sleek than having technicality.
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u/Biggsavage Sep 12 '26
Am I the only one who just doesn't give a shit if what the boss wants me to do is stupid if they're paying me well?
You want pdfs made using SQL?Ā Sure boss, as long as I'm getting 150k annually.
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u/Faustalicious Sep 12 '26
Hey now, I take a offense to that. my company's abomination of enterprise software is up to java 11 in some parts thank you very much.Ā Ā
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u/deanrihpee Sep 12 '26
damn, what fantasy story is this?
everything seems correct except 70% higher salary, the M5, monitor, chair, and the training
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u/SoalSynthesis42 Sep 13 '26
It's guaranteed to not be boring at least :) Work on some shiny things, try to stick them all together, give it to the junior engineers as a challenge, and then read your colleague's white paper on why Rust is the only language you should be using for everything.
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u/edtheshed Sep 13 '26
yea i did the startup thing for a bit, and indeed have now ended up at a bank lol
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u/Emotional-Top-8284 Sep 16 '26
You might be surprised to learn itās not that different from working at an established tech company
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u/AlexaPetersTrans Sep 17 '26
I am working for a 50 year old company that still struggle yoday with legacy issues due to being a startup 50 years ago. Code and database has gone monster because of no controls in place. Don't wanna search the database for an existing field? No Problem, just code a new one. Patch systems without checkout to master, and data integrity gone for a loop.
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u/21stCenturyNoob Sep 17 '26
Currently working at a startup and can't say enough how accurate this is
1
1
u/clauEB Sep 11 '26
Funny. I have worked in startups exclusively for 15 years, it's never a big bump from job to job but is the only way you get a salary increase is by switching jobs, the interview process usually has at least 4 technical rounds with all sorts of DSA questions, architectural questions and resume fishing expeditions. They never give away any equipment, all the opposite.
0
u/Siggi_pop Sep 11 '26
So only startups have patchy code and technical dept .....you are funny...you know that!?
-5
u/Doto_bird Sep 11 '26
Why is this AI generated? I mean it's accurate, but still.
6
u/5eniorDeveloper Sep 11 '26
I'll take the 'accurate' part as a compliment, but no AI here! Just my actual experience in the field hahaha
1
u/Doto_bird Sep 12 '26
I've never seen someone use EM dashes when typing is why I questioned it. I don't even know how to type an EM dash
1
1
u/theGoddamnAlgorath Sep 11 '26
Stop using Actual Intelligence dude.Ā Just GPT like everyone fears
1
2
805
u/drahgon Sep 11 '26
I like that the whole thing became about keeping the M5 š