Ask HN: Tired of startups – want a normal job. Help

88 points · mertleee · 1 days ago

All but the first few years out of school I spent the better part of my 20's working in startups. I've networked well enough, had some ups and some downs. Initially just working for startups as an IC eventually moving into product / technical product and later actually founding / co-founding two companies.

One fizzled out, the other was acquired in a way I sort of made money.

Recently the market has been a bit of a mess and although I took a break to avoid burnout I'm realizing startups (at least with my level of ability and intelligence) are likely just not a great way to make money.

I'm newly 30 and starting to realize I kind of just want a life and a reasonable tech salary. Nothing insane, just something that could support me in a b-tier city with my own place where I have enough time to actually have a girlfriend and well... a normal life.

I'm freaking out because the market is beyond fucked and it seems like my only real choice if I want to "grow" as an engineer / product guy is founding another company. Fortunately I got into some solid accelerators in the valley with a friend from a few years back. It feels good, but at the same time, I feel old and just want a normal job. Even shooting around what new college grads are getting would be fine ($120-140k). I feel like a freaking loser given my age and my relative career stagnation / my inability to actually turn my mildly above average skills into any real money.

Last time I interviewed, my litany of previous startups seemed to totally kneecap my chances of getting return callbacks led alone offers. Any advice where I should look next - I feel like between AI and offshoring I might just need to do something else all-together.

Any advice here is appreciated :)

91 comments

bdcravens · 1 days ago

> I feel like a freaking loser given my age and my relative career stagnation / my inability to actually turn my mildly above average skills into any real money.

There's a lot of noise out there that tells us we're supposed to get rich off of entrepreneurship or VC money, and not enough telling of the truth that those success stories are pretty rare. No one who is doing something they at least minimally enjoy and not breaking their body doing it, and getting paid in the top 20% of income earners, is a loser.

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Moto7451 · 1 days ago

There are plenty of startups and “startups” that are about a decade old and would benefit from someone who has both an understanding of how real startups work, how to ship things, and also has enough experience to be reliable in what is no longer an early stage company, and maybe isn’t really a startup anymore.

A lot of these companies make reasonable money and pay well enough. Not $100k and “$10MM in stock if it works out”, but probably between 170-300 depending on where they’re at, the structure, etc and it’ll be real cash money. The company will probably do something boring but very necessary. You’ll make great friends and have fun.

Keep an eye out, see what’s out there.

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danjl · 1 days ago

Startups are a terrible way to make money. It is far far easier to make money at a larger company than it is at a startup. It's even worse if you start the company yourself. The chances that you'll ever make money are pretty small, and getting to a regular salary can take 3-7 years. Even the chances of making life-changing quantities of money are much smaller. I've been working in this industry for 40 years and all the people I know who are rich did it at big companies, most recently at Nvidia, earlier at Apple, Sun, Facebook and similar. I know tons of startup founders. Almost none of them made significant money. It's more like authors and artists - start a new company because you are driven by an invisible force and you want to do things that you can't do anywhere else. Maybe you want to run your company differently. Maybe you want to work on something that nobody has figured out how to make profitable. A great reason to take a job at a startup is that you like working with small teams and You think you can learn from your coworkers. Do it because you have no other choice, not because you want to make money.

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rednafi · 1 days ago

I worked at two startups before realizing that they weren’t what I wanted out of life. Work is important to me, but so is life. I was duped into this vision of entrepreneurship and making it big in startups. While every startup founder likes to spin the story of wanting to be a unicorn, in practice, few do. I happened to work at ones with an insane workload and a less-than-survivable payout.

I interviewed like crazy and landed a position at one of those well-known companies. Large companies have their fair share of problems, but it suits my lifestyle. I do my work diligently and then clock out. It’s liberating to know that if I don’t respond to a pager, the world isn’t going to end and some third-grade CEO/CTO won’t scream in my face.

Different people want different things out of life, and I made a vow never to join a startup or scale-up with fewer than a thousand employees.

curious_cat_163 · 1 days ago

> I feel like a freaking loser given my age and my relative career stagnation / my inability to actually turn my mildly above average skills into any real money.

It is okay to feel like that for a bit. But, this story that you are telling yourself is not going to help you if you keep on telling this. Whenever I have felt negatively about myself like that in the past, it has helped to stack some wins -- even if little ones -- to get out of the rut.

So, if you want to try to be an engineer, start building things using tools/tech that you are interested in and put them in the open source. Or better yet, help out some open source projects that you respect and have benefited from in the past, if you can. Hiring managers (and I have been one) look for real evidence of skills mentioned in the resume and a well-rounded Github repo increases the likelihood of a callback in any kind of market. Stack some little wins there.

OR, if you want to be a product person, do the equivalent of stacking some wins in that realm. I have very little experience in that space so maybe someone else here can identify a concrete thing or two that you could do to attract hiring managers in that line of work.

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