Have you tried offering other things? Like work from home, work remotely, more interesting work, various education ranging from various courses, conferences up to paid tuition at an university (and then actually giving people the time to do it)?. And please don't say you have snacks, have better working environments not snacks.

As a startup you mostly expect people to work 10+h a day.

It's not always about the money, but if all other things are equal, yeah everybody is gonna take the higher payed position.

I can do about twice as much work if I work 'fewer' hours. Actually it's not about the number of hours, but the expectation that I should be working at some time or for some number of hours. My best work happens in spurts of a few hours a day, or less frequently, a binge of 20 hours over a 2-3 days (after which I need to take a step back). So a company who can offer me this kind of flexibility, to work when and how I work best, could pay me half the BigCorp compensation and get more and better work out of me.

This. Unless I am figuratively on fire and flying through work, somewhere around the 4-6 hour mark I hit a slowdown patch and my quality/concentration goes through the floor.

I do six days of 4-6s for my current position and feel as effective as any of my co-workers, if not more-so.

> Have you tried offering other things?

as much as employers don't want to pay you more wages, they seem even _less_ inclined to offer anything that isn't wages.

respect? pfff. sooner get another 4% out of most employers.

install some sound dampening anything to make the working environment nicer? madness, instead the marketing folks will pick some new colors for the walls.

fire the toxic asshole who fucks up all the projects? whoa, that toxic asshole is critical to completing every project going at the moment; they'd sooner let mr polite&courteous go.

I've yet to find an employer that would give me more PTO instead of a pay raise. They'd rather pay an extra 10k between a pay raise and corresponding 401k matching increase, but they won't even consider giving me 5 extra vacation days so I'll have the time to enjoy stuff with the money I already have.

As a founder who is soon to start competing in the hiring market, I probably shouldn't be saying this, but there seems to be a huge arbitrage opportunity here available to smart startups.

Innovating on tired working practices (that most founders themselves would not enjoy in the least) offers an avenue to out-compete large companies for engineers while paying less cash and making your employees happier, more effective, and more loyal.

Please note, I'm not trying to say that startups should underpay employees, but financial reality for most founders does not allow for competing with the giants on salary (or even coming close). Since equity is now viewed dubiously by many, startups need to look for other things they can offer in lieu of 300k/yr that candidates will truly value. Things like flexible schedules (remote or partly remote), generous PTO, and good working conditions are often viewed by engineers as literally priceless. And for good reason. What's the point of tons of cash if you have no free time to spend it and your days consist of stress and drudgery? Sufficient wealth is a necessary component for quality of life, but beyond a certain baseline, other factors become more important.

Note: if you want to work on fun security, encryption, devops, and ux challenges, and enjoy your life at the same time, and R.intersection(["FP", "TypeScript", "Security", "Kubernetes", "Go", "Rails"], YOUR_SKILLS).length >= 2-or-3, and you can do 2-3 days per week onsite in SF (with some flexibility for remote stints) please send me a résumé: dane [at] envkey.com

> equity is now viewed dubiously by many

This could be merely viewing it with the correct amount of doubt, as the trend has been toward less information asymmetry between founders/employers and candidates/employees.

The small size of employee option pools (which then get diluted) doesn't help, either. I can't remember where/when I read it, but I believe YC is pushing to change that.

Agreed, I keep trying to go the opposite of "three times as much pay for twice as much work". I want half as much pay for 60% as much work. Zero companies are interested in that, which is why I work freelance right now.

Believe it or not, I got reverse catfished by a faceless global megacorp, during the hiring process. I interviewed with half real people, half Skype interviews, and it turned out all my co-workers were the ones on Skype.

It never entered my mind that they would do something like that to me. They certainly didn’t tell me it would be that way. Being on the other end of a nonstop video chat is like living a lie somewhere inbetween telemarketer and infomercial goon.

As a developer, I could not code with a constant video feed of remote assholes chiming in for more bullshit. I quit in a matter of weeks, and I’d do it again, the same thing, every time.

Jesus, this is too real. I'm experiencing this 100% right now.

" various education ranging from various courses, conferences up to paid tuition at an university (and then actually giving people the time to do it)"

If you can afford that, you can afford more money for salaries.

So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?

Besides work flexibility, culture, purpose, and equity, how is a new venture supposed to compete with an entrenched monopolist that is essentially printing money (see: Alphabet)? Sure, equity is a multiplier that can return a huge amount of money with huge risk, but even equity+salary can't come near total comp offered by these juggernauts. I mean, these companies generate mountains of profits after paying crazy salaries and perks.

How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?

> So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?

I'm saying the reasons startups typically give to justify their low salaries are largely bullshit and not persuasive.

> How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?

Outside of paying more, they really can't compete head-to-head with the behemoths. They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for Google/Facebook. Case in point: someone wants to work on self-driving cars but Google won't hire them to work in that group. That's someone a self-driving car startup has a shot at hiring.

> They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for Google/Facebook.

This is also antithetical to (some) startups' way of thinking, which is that they must hire only senior/"top" engineers because that's the only way to get a product out fast enough.

Similarly, mentorship (something TFA does advocate) is seen as too much of a time/resource sink, a luxury only behemoths can afford.

This attitude makes some sense at seed stage, but after a few dozen senior engineers on staff, it loses credibility.

Either raise more funding or have technical cofounders who stay technical? You are essentially asking how they can compete with money against competitors with more money. And the answer is that they should focus on culture/flexibility/equity as you mentioned. Especially culture and flexibility, since for small orgs these can easily be set from the top. Allowing fully remote working is a great move because it allows you to widen your talent pool and potentially pay less (at least less than Bay Area market rate)

> How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?

Breath and depth of responsibility, and rapid growth in your responsibilities. I can't pay you as much, but I can put as the lead on our main product, and when you go for your next job, you can point at that and say, "I lead the team that made that happen".

Pay the 10x developers 3x to join your company. A lot of startups are just groups of very skilled engineers who have identified each other and left a behemoth together to work for themselves.

It's very hard to give 15+% raises at behemoths so there's always people who are very underpaid for what they do.

The startup should raise more money from its VCs to compete with the behemoths.

This may be obvious to the candidates but it isn't that obvious to startups. I have seen startups that ask the same interview questions asked at FB. Why would anyone who can solve these questions join your loss making startup? IMO startups should scale the difficulty of their interview process with the liquid compensation they are willing to offer. Also, reduce the number of steps in the interview, especially for experienced candidates. Make the process smooth and effortless for the candidate. That's something FB and Goog cannot do at their scale.

Yeah, I don’t understand why pay is so depressed. Often times, junior engineers get paid like 60-120k.

I would say senior engineers usually output double, if not more, than a junior engineer. Why doesn’t pay scale with productivity?

Like, maybe I'm seriously missing something. Maybe Junior engineers at other orgs are ridiculously productivity? Maybe the expectation for senior engineers is ridiculously undproductive. Maybe the risk-reward of hiring senior engineers (and them getting hit by a bus) levels it out?

If the efficiency / dollar doesn't scale, then what's wrong?

What you're missing is that pay is not based entirely on merit, productivity or any objective measure. A significant fraction of pay is based on social status in the org, and programmers are on the lowest bar as far as that goes.

It’s called wage compression and is seen in many fields. I agree it’s somewhat perplexing, though.

The paragraph right after that explains how startups can get ahead. I work with a lot of startups just for the learning opportunity and career progression. Even with the high probability of startup deaths, you can hit real manager experience, at the age of 30 and move on to manager jobs with big corporations.

That particular one, "career progression" only seems to apply to those who consider it a progression to move into management. That seems to be a minority opinion among engineers, but, more importantly, there are far fewer management roles than engineering ones, especially at a startup.

I was going to say that there's career progression towards being a 10x programmer too. But that's a much more debatable topic.

You get more flexibility to take on multiple roles. More pressure driving you forward. Much, much less bureaucracy to worry about. No more 2 month discussions over code that takes 2 weeks to write.

The downside is that you could get tied up putting out fires, being unfocused. And there's little room for deliberate training.

Indeed, all of this are debatable, and the article only specifically mentions "rise up through the ranks", which means management.

Of course, even that's a questionable proposition. It calls out the youth of a Chief Product Officer at Facebook, which may well be cherry-picking/selection-bias.

As I've researched the managers at startups I consider working for, I routinely see on LinkedIn profiles that a high "rank" at a startup turns into a much lower one when an individual moves to a much larger company, though it does tend to go back up once that individual returns to startup work.

It's really tough for companies with low profiles or who need to hire for boring work. Not everyone can afford top dollar either. My current shop needs a lot of legacy system support and we have absolutely no choice but to hire second rate talent or rent them from body shops.