Doesn't this mean, full stop, that good developers should not even consider working for such start-ups? You know from day one that your contribution is not valued, and that if you are hired it's because management viewed you as a bargain basement sort of developer who could get the (easy, insignificant) tech job done and no more.

I don't see how the premise of the post can coexist with the phenomenon of clamoring to "only hire the best" and obsessing over e.g. HackerRank interview submissions or something.

Also, what of acqui-hires? I've seen and been part of some big corporate acquisitions in which a company buys a start-up that is not doing good work and has a stupid product, solely to get their 10-person engineering team and then drop the other employees. In which case that start-up succeeding mostly by not giving a shit about any actual business problem and just hiring a group of excellent engineers.

Experience suggests this may be wise.

I feel there's a huge "repricing" of the value of early-stage tech employment occurring as capable developers realize just how shitty the standard 90k + .1% job offer for 50-60 hours/wk, little autonomy, and zero chance for promotion is, in a city where apartments cost 3400/mo, gas is 3.50/gal and income taxes are 9.4%. (And the city wants a "tech tax" on payroll of companies)

I worked in this kind of environment for a few years, gained some great experience/connections, and enjoyed it to a large extent, but probably wouldn't do it again.

I've noticed both sides of this repricing - it works both ways.

Good, experienced American developers are realizing that $90K + 0.1% equity is a really shitty deal relative to what the rest of the tech industry pays, and they're giving up startup work for AmaGooAppBook.

At the same time, entrepreneurs are realizing that they don't actually need a good engineer to build v1 of their product, and so they're relying more on international contractors sourced through UpWork, Alibaba, etc. Most startups I know actually have entirely-international dev teams now, and hiring your first local engineer is considered a milestone like getting funded (and often comes after getting funded).

I suspect that the real losers in this are entrepreneurs - the startup field has become so competitive lately that there's likely to be a shake-out where the vast majority of startups fail, and many founders are paying for these outsourced dev teams out-of-pocket.

Thank you for the very insightful comment.

This is yet another example of what I call the "Hollywood-ization of tech", where the industry (we?) are trying to sort out the relative value of being attached to something big vs. money vs. relationships.

I think our industry is maturing. I see it all around me. The industry-wide career ladder is starting to solidify, we're getting more concerned about credentials/pedigree, salaries are going way up, people are getting more concerned about their "careers", etc. I don't know that it'll ever get to the point of, say, law or banking, but it's a hell of a lot closer than it was 15-20 years ago, when there was much more of a "homesteading" feel to everything, and the suggestion that software could be a prestigious career choice was the last thing on anyone's mind.

To be clear, I don't know if any of this is good or bad, but it's definitely happening.

Another thing (sorry for double reply but it's really a totally different comment)

I think you have to frame "losers" in a financial context.

Let's assume the hypothetical "entrepreneur" of your comment is an ambitious 25-30 year old male (they usually are), then the relevant question becomes, "am I better off being an entrepreneur or working for someone else". I think that's as much a question about the value of autonomy vs. money. I have little doubt most people, given that they could work at say, Goldman, would be better off financially doing that than trying to do a tech startup. So in that sense, they've definitely "lost".

Then there's the investor's perspective...a company that takes a $100k investment and turns it into $1M for the investor is a pretty good outcome. And I think there's a lot of potential for wins on that scale, but that's not how things are being done today. Instead, money is piling into OKish opportunities by the truckload, because every investor has the hubris to think their deal flow is as good as Greylock/a16z/USV/KPCB, etc. They'll win because they have their pick of what deal to do, and there certainly are great companies; there just aren't enough to go around to all the low-tier family offices and rich-doctor syndicates, and other "fools" who are piling into tech equity.

The point is, I think you have to frame win vs. loss in terms of opportunity cost. If the broad market declines 10% and you only lose 2%, that might be a "win" even though, objectively, it's a "loss".

> You know from day one that your contribution is not valued

It doesn't mean the tech isn't valued, but that whether or not it's a marvel of elegance and cleanness is less important than whether or not it works and delivers sufficient value early on.

So you should go into a startup being prepared to do what it takes do meet business needs, and be less concerned about building something clean.

If you can do both, great. If your quest for technical elegance sacrifices functionality in the short term, in a startup that can often kill the business.

I've been part of discussions like that more often than I care, where e.g. some engineer wanted to go off and spend six months cleaning up a codebase that was ugly but functional, but where what mattered to the business was getting more functionality in place even if it meant having to spend 10x the amount to clean up the codebase a year later.

Sooner or later you pay the price, but paying the price later can often be far cheaper, because you may, e.g., be paying with ongoing revenue instead of paying with seed money or early stage VC funding, which has a very high cost.

This is different in a more established business, where cost of capital is less likely to decline as rapidly, which makes it more likely that you get into scenarios where deferring technical debt may actually be a net negative.

In a startup I'd value a developer that is sensitive to business needs and willing to take calculated shortcuts (as long as they also make the business aware when they do) over a technical perfectionist any day.

> Doesn't this mean, full stop, that good developers should not even consider working for such start-ups? You know from day one that your contribution is not valued, and that if you are hired it's because management viewed you as a bargain basement sort of developer who could get the (easy, insignificant) tech job done and no more.

Yes, absolutely, good developers probably shouldn't bother working for a typical consumer app or SaaS tool. If your skills are technical then you want to be working on something where the technical part is the hard part.

> Also, what of acqui-hires? I've seen and been part of some big corporate acquisitions in which a company buys a start-up that is not doing good work and has a stupid product, solely to get their 10-person engineering team and then drop the other employees. In which case that start-up succeeding mostly by not giving a shit about any actual business problem and just hiring a group of excellent engineers.

Depends how successful they were. Often such an outcome is a loser for the VC.

"Doesn't this mean, full stop, that good developers should not even consider working for such start-ups?"

No, I don't think so. Just because you're not doing novel computer science or engineering doesn't mean you aren't doing interesting work, or that your work isn't valued. I think the point is that from an investor's perspective you aren't going to learn much from poking around the code and saying "why'd you use this library rather than that library?"

I can offer my own personal perspective on the value of developer talent as a quasi-technical (I'd say on a good day I'm maybe a 0.9x engineer, most days more like 0.5x :) co-founder of a SaaS company that definitely isn't doing any ground-breaking computer science. To me, the value of a top-flight engineer isn't that they are going to overcome a problem so hard that no "normal human" (like myself) could ever solve it. It's that they are able to look at the fairly vanilla problems we are facing (usability, scalability, etc.), see better solutions than I see, implement them faster and more robustly, and avoid pitfalls that are obvious to them but aren't obvious to me (because I lack the experience to spot them). Maybe we could hire someone cheaper to do the same work, but it would be half as good, take twice as long, and be four times harder to build on in the future.

So to me, having top-notch developers is a business issue, not a computer science issue. Let's face it, even at companies that are doing novel computer science, most of the work that most engineers do is going to be pretty mundane from a CS perspective: Google may be doing amazing work at the boundaries of technology, but someone still needs to maintain the mouseover behaviors in Gmail...

Which is not to say that development work not at the boundaries of technology is inherently uninteresting! I think most people who code (even sub-par coders like myself) get off on a lot of things other people would consider pretty boring, like (in my case with some work I'm doing right now) figuring out a reasonable stop-gap way to manage state when creating a new object that requires putting some hooks into multiple third-party APIs. This is not a novel problem, but there are a lot of ways to solve it, and it made me happy to implement one that is simple and fails in a reasonable way even if it isn't maximally flexible/robust.

Of course, not all founders/managers/executives "get it". And those that don't may opt to just hire the cheapest while paying lip service to hiring the best. But I think (shamelessly tooting my own horn) that people with some experience in the weeds, or with personal exposure to the range of engineering talent out there in the world, recognize hiring sub-par talent is a false economy.

And of course there are all sorts of other factors that go into choosing where to work: can I stomach working with these people every day, does the job fit with my personal life, is the executive team technically illiterate and prone to giving us impossible tasks, etc.

TL;DR: Engineers can be highly valued even when their work isn't "novel" to the point of requiring technical DD at the time of an early stage investment (there are those of us out there who recognize the value of craft), technical work doesn't have to be groundbreaking to be interesting, and making the choice to hire top-notch talent is usually a business decision, not a technical one.

  In which case that start-up succeeding mostly by 
  not giving a shit about any actual business problem 
  and just hiring a group of excellent engineers.

But I think the acquisition amount in these cases will be small; maybe 2x? Anyhow, just enough to pay off obligations, give the founder a little money, and cover the costs of folding the acquired company.

Well... most really good devs don't work at early stage startups, except as co-founders/founders. Certainly not for $90k/0.1%