Some key things to consider:
* What comp are you giving up?
* Will your options be worth more than Facebook/Google/Amazon/Apple RSUs?
* Can you even afford your options?
* Will the options ever be liquid?
* Are you willing to earn-out after an acquisition?
* Will you have to do extra work? Are you compensated for it?
* Less bureaucracy, more building
* Larger impact on a product; not just being a cog
* Generalist rather than one narrowly defined job
* Ability to learn many new skills
* Experience for starting their own startup
* Working on something they believe in
* Working with newer technologies
* Can't get a job at a larger company (due to skillsets)
* Easier place to make a jump into product management or people management
* Flexibility (work from home, set own hours, etc)I have less meetings than I had at most startups by a significant fraction. I have total technical direction on the product I work on (within reason). I have gotten to code in more languages than at any other shop I’ve been at, most of which I had zero professional experience in prior. I work on an internal product that excites me & is more complex than anything else I have worked with prior professionally. I work with any technology I like that does the job, new or old. Have no competition to jump into management because not enough engineers want to become managers. I also have flexibility to take days off unofficially because I work hard of my own volition, as well as work from home, and almost all of the flexibility I have gotten from startups.
Not to say I don’t like some things about startups - after all, I worked at them for about 75% of my career spanning over 5 years. There are a lot of myths about bigger companies out there though I have found at my current job, and friends at similar companies like Facebook and Netflix.
* Less bureaucracy, more building
* Larger impact on a product; not just being a cog
* Generalist rather than one narrowly defined job
* Ability to learn many new skills
* Working on something they believe in
* Working with newer technologies
* Flexibility (work from home, set own hours, etc)
Less bureaucracy, more building - Only if the founders give you autonomy. Lots of micromanagers in the startup world.
Working on something they believe in - When you're hired, they try to hook you with this line. But startups are not charities. The longer you work at one, the more cynical you get.
Flexibility (work from home, set own hours, etc) - In my experience, startups want you to work more than 40 hours a week, and expect you to check your email during your free time, in case something urgent comes up. You can call that flexibility, but it's not in the employee's favor.
I've found the rest of your points to be true, more or less.
Here's some situations where you might prefer a startup.
1. Do you want to change career paths? A startup provides a much lower barrier of entry than traditional companies.
2. Do you want to pursue a career without having the credentials i.e. skip school completely and become a programmer, salesman, businessman? An internship or job at a startup might be a good choice.
3. Do you want less bureaucracy, a lot of ownership, challenging problems, but not have to have the weight of everything on your shoulders (like when you're a cofounder).
Monetarily, its almost always going to be a bad choice to work at a startup (unless #1 or #2 are your reasons and you want to jump into a career where you can long-term earn more). But there are a lot of other things in life to consider besides money, and money isn't a motivator for everyone, some people weight more control over their day to day work, flat hierarchies, and working on innovative products, etc. - all over money that's all. I don't think, knowing that, there's enough to make any hard recommendations for anyone.
Working at a startup can be a form of investing in yourself. Obviously you shouldn't invest in yourself unless you think that investment will pay off in the longterm. At the same time though, if you don't invest in yourself then it's almost certain that no one else will either.
Everyone's situation is different so try not to assert that any choice is incorrect based on a single, somewhat vacuous metric.
Wouldn't you ask the same set of questions that you describe for this position as well? Why is the outcome different? Arguably, you're taking so much risk as a founder that your expected financial outcome will almost certainly be worse than working at Facebook/Google/Amazon in the early days.
One of the best ways to get into YC is by working for a YC startup, especially if you don't come from a top tier school or company.
However if you want to break into software engineering then startups can be a great place for a hungry developer to make their own waves, and potentially ride them to success.
- A background blind technical skills evaluation is our application process in lieu of submitting your resume.
- We don't introduce you to all the companies we work with, only the ones where our data predicts you have a high chance of receiving an offer.
- Companies expedite their own hiring process for Triplebyte candidates skipping technical phone screens/coding challenges.
- Each engineer gets a Talent Manager who offers them career advice, interview and negotiation help and general support throughout the job search process.
- Work with non-YC companies e.g. Apple, Asana and Coursera.
I'd say that Work at a Startup is a good way to get in front of a lot of startups at once and run a breadth first job search. Triplebyte is a good way to run a targeted job search optimizing your offer to interview ratio.
Right now since we only target software folks, you're correct that the two services do indeed overlap quite a bit. I think the differentiation will be more clear once we expand beyond software engineers, which we're hoping to do soon.
The two services also differ in that Work at a Startup does not attempt to do any technical vetting; simply start conversations. The reasoning for this is that when founders are hiring their first handful of employees, it's often more important to find people that believe in your company's product/mission rather than people with a particular background. Founders are often constrained by how big of a "friend tree" they have to shake. Simply put, Work at a Startup gives founders the opportunity to pitch a lot more potential early employees than they'd otherwise have access to.
All this being said, TripleByte is certainly still a great option to go with for a lot of folks and does indeed have a close relationship with a lot of YC companies!
You'll get the most reach by using both.
Is there an alternative for those looking to work remotely?
You can take equity instead of cash though.
0: http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/New-law-bans...
If you do make a decision that only vetted applicants should have access to apply, you should make it way more enticing to commit. Seeing some interesting jobs and then getting excited will get the user more willing to forkout so much information.
As it is, it felt like people harvesting and I just left the site.
Quite the opposite, i find it a plus. I want to be found by people who need exactly my skills and profile.
As for the concern on harvesting peoples' information, we try to be very open about the fact that applications will indeed be made available to founders of YC companies to facilitate employment opportunities. Are you not comfortable with the "all or nothing" nature of that?
Knowing that I don't have to fork out any information visiting "Who is Hiring" makes it a tough sell.
I think there is a question on why here. Lets say you add company job listings: why see them here and not on angellist (shows lots of information) or who is hiring (no commitment) or the companies job page.
The beginning of the page mentions all big name companies which I would already know and would just go to their pages for job postings where I can better prepare my CV. It might be VERY different if the companies here are small and unknown, and are somehow vetted or show unique YC information about them. Angelist is too expensive for a 2-3 man shop just out of a batch.
I guess I picture a YC official page to be about segmentation, not open-wide job listing competition with other big sites.
For example, I would love to know at a glance what the applicants' interests/passions are by sector/product type — in addition to technological passion/experience.
While I recognize that each field adds friction, I'd take a high expected quality (e.g. qualified technical and passion match) candidate over a high volume of candidates any day.
You are engaged in one of the more basic forms of information arbitrage: a "gather info from users and sell it as a searchable database" model. To make this work, your cost of acquiring information must be very low because the incremental value is very low (the value is in the aggregate).
Most startups like this crawl the web or otherwise index their own data from somewhere like LinkedIn because it provides an easier path to mvp/scale, but also because its a balance that HN types will respect: "I did the work finding the information and I can so what I want with it."
Asking users to provide the information that you then sell is shifting the cost of that data acquisition cost burden from you to your users, and is comparatively rather expensive in terms of the currency that you are expecting someone to spend to provide you with value, i.e. time. Its more expensive than passive data acquisition. You are, in a very real sense, charging for your users to access the site.
So when you have a link that says "Sign in with HN and get started" and that link essentially forwards to the order page, and that ordering page is (or looks) expensive, you have some sales work to do beyond "make it a bit cheaper by asking for less" or being open about what you'll do with it. You are doing almost zero sales work on your current landing and ordering page beyond adding a big sign saying "Pay".
Also, something else to keep in mind, how much information you ask for is, again in a very real sense, a form of price discrimination.
Any model which includes an element of price discrimination requires a mechanism to charge different users differently to maximize the overall profit. Otherwise you are facing an existential risk in the form of mispricing risk and have no ability to iterate out of it, because each change you make to the price will shift your entire userbase to people who are willing to pay that price, so you can't learn from it.
Just saying "most things are optional but more is better" actually hurts in most cases because it implies that you are unsure what pieces of data are actually valuable and rather than figure it out and only asking those things, you're, again shifting that cognitive/time cost to your users to figure out. A business with a sign saying "pay as much as you like and you'll maybe get more value out of it but maybe not we don't know either" does not inspire a lot of confidence.
The best companies in the business of arbitraging data explicitly provided by users charge the lowest price possible before they provide value, and then provide incremental value as the users pay more. LinkedIn has figured this out, that's why you can be in the site searching after just a very basic profile, and then they ask for more over time as users are getting value from the lower pricing tier.
By insisting on all or nothing, you are ignoring the lessons learned by arguably the most successful example of active user information arbitrage the world has ever seen.
> Which software engineering roles are you interested in?
Startups are an increasingly popular place to work in the tech industry. At the same time, the most common problem founders need help with is hiring people. Work at a Startup is a new way to help solve this pain point for both parties by connecting people interested in working at startups directly with the founders of the 1100+ active YC companies by completing a common application.
This the next iteration of the "Work at a Startup Day" idea that YC started hosting way back in 2010 [0][1][2]!
For now, Work at a Startup is targeted at software engineers who want to work at US-based companies since that’s the most common need of YC companies. We will be expanding to other roles and countries once we've validated the product for applicants and founders.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346103
Go YC!
FWIW, the reasoning for not doing that from the start is that we wanted the site to be very closely associated with the act of searching for "I want to work at a startup". Perhaps that's a bit old school, but I still like to think there's a little bit of value in it...either way, we'll likely just redirect workatastartup.com to something on the ycombinator.com domain.
I think you meant:
> Apply to get started
Work at a Startup serves primarily as a matchmaker for potential employees and founders and isn't directly involved in facilitating visa sponsorships or other details of employment. While YC advises our companies on how to best navigate and obtain visas, they are still ultimately the responsibility of the founders/company.
Gettings a visa is hard, startups do not sponsor visas and the large majority of startup roles are onsite. Unfortunately, this is yet another waste of time for me along with many other similar opportunities to find a job when you aren't part of a network of people working with startups.
That said, this seems like an interesting program by YC and I am looking forward to see how it will continue and how the other countries' expansion will actually work.
Congrats @mattlong.
Do you plan to integrate with ATS?