Comment by MattyMc
6 years ago
Completely agree.
I worked for Microsoft this year. Had an amazing experience, learned a ton, built a great network, had benefits and was well compensated. I did this all while taking almost 0 risk. The idea that working for a tech giant is "maintaining the status quo," but working for a startup is "making something new," is perhaps not accurate.
Working at a startup can be great. Working at a tech giant can be great. Just don't make your decision based on one guy who turned down a personal offer from Peter Thiel (and was later employee #10).
Working for a consulting firm with a lot of startup clients can also be a great experience if you plan to go that way yourself down the road, at least in what YC would call "hard tech."
You get to see the inner workings of a bunch of startups in your field, and you get to see which ones work out and which ones don't. Of course, the pay isn't great, but you do get to work on a lot of cool stuff in a "startup-ish" environment.
When you work for a giant corporation of any sort, you are inherently breaking capitalism as it is.
There's no foreseeable way around this , it's irresponsible, and all the suffering you're seeing it the world is the cost of many many millions of people giving themselves a pass on this.
I strongly urge you to recognize that any of the life benefits you get from working at one of these places are reaped from the lives of others. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQEO2P9j_vU)
Please don't take HN on generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive, tedious, and off topic here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As opposed to working for a small money losing company backed by VCs who hoped to be bought out by big tech companies....
Well this is why it's important to work on something that you believe in. I think there is a fatalism to think all small companies are going to fail. Individual employees should use their own judgment when thinking about whether a startup will work— they are often more right than not since startups tend to be self-fulfilling prophecy. If lots of smart people like you want to join too, then it actually becomes a lot more likely.
That being said by the numbers most startups fail, and there is no guarantee a startup role will get you a positive outcome vs other alternatives.
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I don't disagree with you in theory, but when an article is suggesting that you should instead make $200M in equity by working for a venture capitalist - and not just any venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, the man who is sad about women's suffrage because it means unchecked libertarianism is less likely to be chosen by free elections - for spy firm Palantir?
Go work for a big tech company, it's far more ethical if you think capitalism is bad.
Also keep in mind that there simply isn't $200M to go around for every software engineer, let alone every human. These concentrated payoffs only come at the expense of others. It's not universal advice and it can't be.
> These concentrated payoffs only come at the expense of others
Capital creation is not zero sum. It's positive sum and makes us all better off. This idea that if one person succeeds, it's because he's stolen from someone else has led to immense misery in history.
So all the suffering in the world is the fault of giant corporations? How giant do they have to be to go from being the building blocks of capitalism to breaking it?
Obviously not all. You know how english is with these words.
There's a gradient. The point at which there's no point in going up against them is definitely too far. Competition is important to a healthy capitalist economy.
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