Startups also have more non-cash options. E.g. they can offer more than 4 weeks of vacation, unlike many enterprise companies. As a CEO, when I gave people 6 weeks of real vacation, they would never leave, since they cannot get that at bigger companies in the US. (We also stongly encouraged them to use their vacation, because a healthy work-life balance is better for the company.) Startups also have more flexibility on WFH, travel options, and other non-cash benefits like providing more authority over your schedule and tasks. They are typically strapped for cash, unless they are not actually startups anymore because they raised $100M, and just like the moniker.

I'm working at a mid-size company, c. 5,500 employees. We have unlimited vacation (for US employees). I have taken about 6 weeks every year with no issues. I made sure to check that this was okay before accepting the offer, because unlimited can also mean "no one ever takes vacation".

The problem with unlimited vacation is that the majority of engineers never have the guts to ask for it, just like they don't know how to negotiate. Unlimited vacation is a benefit for the company not the employee. It avoids taxes and complications due to carryover constraints.

To clarify, unlimited vacation is the company policy for all US employees. I'm just saying you don't need to work at a startup to get 6 weeks PTO.

Unlimited vacation is in no way the same thing as 6 weeks of actual vacation. Look into it a bit more. You'll see that unlimited vacation is really just a scam. In your case it's worked out. Actual vacation days are tracked and part of your salary. For example, if you leave, you are entitled to the wages of your remaining untaken vacation days. Unlimited vacation is a favor that your manager is granting. The company is not obligated to grant your request. You have no legal right to take the days off as you do with real vacation.

I do understand the difference, thanks. I think the degree to which it's a scam depends on the employer. Some say they have unlimited vacation and then the work culture discourages using it. Fortunately, that's not the case where I work.

The other benefit of not-unlimited is having it paid out when you leave. But if I had 6 weeks a year PTO, I'd just use it all anyway, so the part where it gets paid out isn't a big deal to me.

Maybe if you have 5+ years experience at FAANG or something.

I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.

There's been this vein of advice from the past decade that's in the realm of "just work at FAANG". Always rubbed me the wrong way; they make it sound so easy, lol. The couple of interviews I managed to get after hundreds of ghostings, I was absolutely demolished in the interviews. It seems like if you get nervous doing math problems in front of people who really don't want to be there (and tell you to your face), you don't get to work at FAANG.

Just started my own business instead.

Theres a difference between something being easy, and something being achievable given a large investment of time and effort. FAANG is the second. Not for everyone but if you have anxiety then practice, therapy and possibly prescribed medications for anxiety. I’m sure there whole groups of people who mutually pair mock interview to get over anxiety like this. Or that you can pay to interview you.

Totally; and big respect to the people who put in hundreds of hours of prep. I did leetcode, practice interviews, 4.0 gpa, all that. I think the big hang up for me was, no matter how many practice interviews I did, there were only 4 real ones, with long waiting periods between attempts. And honestly... 3/4 my FAANG interviewers were really rude/late/apathetic. I actually did make it to second round at Google on the third try, but at that point I was so exhausted with the process, I took an offer from a company that at least pretended to give a shit whether I joined them or not. Had a wonderful 3 years there building green-field B2C products.

Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.

Clearly the advice can’t be for the literal 50th percentile HN reader in 2025… because nowadays there are hundreds of thousands of readers.

And all the FAANG combined probably don’t even have half that many positions, with negotiable salaries, in total worldwide.

Yes. If advice can't be followed, it's probably just bragging.

i mean, even if we only include Apple Microsoft and Google you're already up to more than half a million employees

What do you mean? All standard engineering offers (and probably most non-engineering) roles at FAANG are negotiable; in fact, Netflix might be the least flexible - or at least used to be, because they tried to hit what they thought would be "top of market" for you, and would be much harder to budge unless you had an actual competing offer for more than they thought your market value was. (Might be less true today, since they've moved to having actual internal "levels", but idk.)

Because the total employee count as disclosed in annual reports are not limited to solely the typical engineering positions…?

Have you never read a report from any of the FAANGs?

e.g. Out of Google’s 183,000+ total headcount… maybe a quarter are engineering positions with negotiable salaries of any kind.

You may want to try moving to the bay area or NYC for a few years if you're not already in one of those places. It's much easier to get a good job, then you can move away after you have the "right" experience. Also follow the advice in the article, in particular find people you want to work for and DM them

Startup equity is the equivalent to the old Foxworthy bit

"You can't write me a check?" I said, "No, I -- a check? Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money. Tell you what, I'm just gonna pay the whole thing off right now! I'm gonna be a congressman when I grow up."

It's not really, because it's finite. You don't generally dilute the options pool when you hire new employees, you give them some slice of a scarce options pool

Sure, but there's an extent to which the the board and its constitutive shareholders already expect to be giving away options for new employees, and as such will have allocated a pool for such purpose -- both for the "standard" package, and for "hard negotiators". For traditional tech startups (i.e. ones not so flush with cash as OpenAI), giving these away is far easier than giving away more real-world, honest-to-god cashflow, because that directly drains your runway, while all equity does is make your cap sheet look marginally worse.

> all equity does is make your cap sheet look marginally worse

But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %

My bank account says otherwise, but it depends.

So do all the lottery winners. It doesn't really change how a lottery works, or the likely financial result.

What fraction of lottery participants win, vs startup employees? It's rare and there is luck, but the quantities matter. You are much more likely to make money from a startup and it's much more under your control as an employee

That’s an interesting thought experiment actually.

If you think about the amount of money given up as a startup employee you will definitely get some winnings.

For example, say as a startup employee you are earning/being compensated 80,000 a year in equity. If you bought $80,000 of lottery ticket’s each year how much would you win. Depends on the lottery but most lottery’s have a rough payout of approximately 50-70%. Let’s say it’s 50%. So you would expect to receive back $40,000 per year.

Do half of all startups equity turn into cash, I think not. So probably more likely to make money from the lottery.

You are confusing expected value with probability of "winning".

The purpose is to trade EV for a small probability of high payout. It's less extreme than the big ticket lotteries but more extreme than a scratcher. If that's not for you, don't do it

Also your last point is either obviously not true (if you're talking about big lottery winnings) or trivially true (if you're talking about $1000 scratcher prizes). More people made life changing money from a single company (Facebook) than all California lottery winners combined across all time

I think you are confusing how lotteries work, most lotteries have additional prizes not just the big grand prize. There are a range of prizes.

as an aside, I got to reading some lottery winning tips (https://www.smartluck.com/free-lottery-tips/california-fanta...). A real interesting hodge podge of statistical fallacies and other wishful thinkings but at the same time it does pull at our brains somehow. Like for example even though I know a run of numbers in a row are just as likely to happen as any other number I'm really unlikely to actually pick it as my guess - I suppose my brain just thinks I need some "balance" or the likelihood of this pattern happening is low. Randomness is hard.

Pick a prize amount that is anywhere in the same order of magnitude as any engineers total compensation. For any such amount, there are more people receiving prizes above this amount from startups than lotteries

But why can't you win n smaller prizes, money being fungible and all we can just tot up the smaller prizes.

The total number of lottery winners who have won, in total, an amount of say 50,000 USD is at least 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the number of people who have received that amount or more from startup equity

You are making an empirical claim that can be made rigorous, it's just off by several orders of magnitude

But why are you not including all the people who have won.

Surely the calc is, the number of money gambled in startup equity versus the amount of money gambled in the lottery.

Do startups payout at .5 or above, I think not.

Most startup gambling is on the form of time.

Less than half of startups have exits…

But most startup people don’t work at most startups.

I've worked at startups that have had exits and the employees got zilch. I think even in the startups with exits the probability of an employee having their equity turn into cash money is very low (also I doubt 50% of startups have exits - I hear a number of 10% more often and even that seems high, I'd imagine 10% of YC startups have an exit and they are the most likely to succeed so I imagine when you add in all the other startups that percentage gets far far lower).

I thought this was sarcasm initially, but I think on looking at the rest of your comments that you are actually being serious. wow. Glad I've never had the pleasure of working with you.

Building a business has some luck/lottery components, but not nearly as much as HN comments would lead you to believe.

For the most part, outcomes largely track from strategy and execution.

Of course.

Also…the lottery and startups work very differently.

Yes, the lottery has rules and governance. It's a much safer bet. Startups can decide to devalue their employees' shares. I'd venture that the odds are at least stated on the back of the ticket with the lottery. Employees of privately held startups are often sold a dream of future riches that rarely happens. Even where there is an exit, often even founding employees get taken for a ride.

> At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary

Never take equity over salary. Equity at a startup is a lottery ticket. Would you agree to be paid $10,000 less for $10,000 in lottery tickets? For $20,000 in lottery tickets?

Only consider equity if there is actually a market value for it. Early stage startups hand out equity options that likely will not ever be worth anything.

Do tell.