So the question for me as an engineer becomes, do I grind it out at a FAANG company and try to be one of those level 7’s OR do I roll the dice on the startup? My intuition is that the former has a better outcome on average. Seems pretty rare to become staff/principal/whatever at a big co and based on the data from levels.fyi, you gotta be pretty far along in your career.
I worked at ~6 startups for about 10 years before google.
What do I have to show for it?
A slight beer belly and less motivation to build something from the ground up yet again only to see it burn down. Yeah, I had a ton of fun too.
Would I trade all those years at startups for going straight to google? eeh, maybe 4 of them.
On the other hand though, I don't think I would have made it through the interview without knowing a lot of random shit I learned at startups.
Also being a dad and working at a startup does not mix well.
Interesting. Maybe FAANG's do so well in SV because they have a nice pipeline of startup burnouts who learn all this weird shit that you only learn from working at startups for a decade, and then finally end up in FAANG's, use all their wisdom to build even better systems....
Or neither? Very few people will reach senior management and very few startups are successful. Any IT career is going to set you up for a comfortable life even if you're a mid-level non-management workhorse. Excelling is partially about skill, but vastly more about persistence and luck. Find something you enjoy and don't worry about where you'll be in 20 years.
