I rule out startups because I'm not at a point in life where high risk makes sense - I have 3 teenagers in my family, so our home and life needs stability, not risk. Startups have some merit if you are young and ambitious and looking for your work to drive your life forward. But not everyone is at that stage of life.

I did startups the entire time my three boys were growing up - 0 to out of the house. It's not really risk. The job pays; if it goes away, the next job pays. Just have something in the bank.

The total comp from a big tech company is 2-3x what any startup will provide. The risk is from missing out on a big payout if there isn't an exit (and having to wait ~5 years to see that) vs. the guaranteed extra income from vesting RSUs.

This. I put 16 years into 3 startups. All were small (< 200 people), and I was VP Eng at the last one. Two were sold and one is still chugging along with no real growth left, but a nice business. Net value of my equity in all of those was -$500. My salary as a VP was $185k, which was about what my next company paid grads fresh out of school (salary, bonus, stock). At that gig, my initial offer was 2.5x my startup comp, and with stock appreciation, I was making close to 3.5x. In the following gig, that jumped to 4.5x.

While I loved my startup time, learned so much doing it, and wouldn't change anything about it, at this point in my life with a mortgage and teenager, I'd realistically need a startup to be able to at least 10-20x for the risk to be worth the opportunity cost of missing $BIGCO$ salary.

This might be true in the US, but not true in the EU (Zurich and London are not in the EU). I'm currently in the process of switching from Google to a startup, at the moment.

> It's not really risk. The job pays; if it goes away, the next job pays. Just have something in the bank

That's risk. The difference is that you're comfortable with the risk, but it is risk.

Don't understand. All sorts of jobs go away. How does it differ from any other gig?

You're basically saying you don't understand probability lol. The probability of Google going under is less than the probability of some random startup. If you disagree with that premise then we're at such fundamentally different points of view there's no point discussing further

While your job at Meta might go away its much less likely to go away than a job at Sliceline.

There is risk with all jobs but how many mass layoffs of eng have FAANG companies done in the last ten years? How many start ups have shut down in the last 10 years?

Because in startups, it is not just that a job goes away - the entire company is more likely to go away.

It might have found funding before fit, leading to the market never materializing. The leaders may not have enough experience to see the path before them while at the same time the VCs push for high-risk moves to drive their returns instead of making moves to ensure business stability.

Fundamentally, startups do not share the goal of a long-term sustainable growth pattern. They shoot for the stars, and either make it or crash.

....and how is that different for you? You can only lose one job at a time, regardless of how it happens.

Here's my other buffer against job loss: I consult in between jobs, sometimes for years. In fact I think of it the other way: I'm a consultant that occasionally takes a job for variety.

Author here. I used cord.co and got a several reachouts from founders. Just my opinion but I didn’t find any of the pitches compelling.