Why Startups Can Be Better Than FAANG For Career Growth

Whether you are just starting your career or have years of experience in Big Tech, startups can be a powerful accelerator for your career and expose you to unique opportunities.

[**Ben Rudolph**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brudolph/), cofounder and CTO of Peregrine, argues the value of startups in this talk. Ben built Peregrine from within the San Pablo homicide Investigations Unit where, among other cases, he worked with detectives to help solve a high profile cold homicide case. After spending a year embedded onsite with the customer and securing their first contract, Ben has overseen the growth of the company from 2 to 100+ people. Their technology now serves over 30 million citizens and ingests approximately a million data points every 10 minutes.

Topics covered:

- Understanding how the right startup can offer unique experiences not available in Big Tech.
- Deciding if and when to explore startups for your next career move.
- Effectively evaluating the potential of a startup.
- Common traits of top-performing startup engineers.
- Comparing the mindset required for success in startups vs large tech companies.

Related discussions on Taro:

- [**How to evaluate a startup?**](https://www.jointaro.com/question/UCG4XxyEOTjjyg4pEuwY/how-to-evaluate-a-startup/)
- [**How Effectively Do Big Tech Engineers Perform In Startups?**](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/TFhKpoVuu4iKdbrAiJ8d/how-effectively-do-big-tech-engineers-perform-in-startups/)
- [**What questions to ask a CTO of a startup?**](https://www.jointaro.com/question/R4FGhmGlZOQK7Lb1YAlt/what-questions-to-ask-a-cto-of-a-startup/)

Peregrine is hiring Senior Engineers in the SF/DC area (or open to relocation) who have 4+ years of experience. Taro members can use this link to get expedited feedback: [**https://www.peregrine.io/taro**](https://www.peregrine.io/taro)

- [**Connect with Ben on LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brudolph/)
- [**Learn more about Peregrine Technologies**](https://www.peregrine.io/)

Asking Great Questions [Part 24] - Give More Than You Take

The counterpart to asking a question is answering a question, but it's not exactly right to call them opposites as they actually go hand-in-hand! This lesson teaches you:

- How engineers fail to attract and even repel the best engineers to help them
- What you should do to make altruistic, high-performing engineers (i.e. the people you really want answering your questions) want to help you
- Why answering others' questions is one of the best ways to get great people to answer your own questions
- A very tactical self-serving benefit to answering questions and teaching others

Asking Great Questions [Part 8] - Explain The Impact

Every great software engineer faces the perpetual problem of *"Too much to do, not enough time"*. Great software engineers are who you want answering your questions, and you need to make a case as to why they should use some of their time to answer your question. This lesson teaches you:

- How to empathize with helpers when it comes to how they choose who to help
- Why showing the impact of your question is critical, especially at high-performance tech companies like FAANG
- What attaching the business impact to your question looks like, explained with an in-depth example
- A bonus type of impact you can illustrate with your question

[Become A Go-To Person 18/18] More Resources

- A course by [Jordan Cutler](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordancutler1/), Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest and Author of the [High Growth Engineer Newsletter](https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/)
- Discover more from Jordan across [videos, articles, and livestreams here](https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/p/resources-and-deals?open=false#%C2%A7find-me-in-other-media).
- Get a discount on Jordan's newsletter here: <https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/taro>

[Become A Go-To Person 11/18] Exactly What To Do - Be Visible

A course by [Jordan Cutler](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordancutler1/), Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest and Author of the [High Growth Engineer Newsletter](https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/)

[Become A Go-To Person 8/18] Other Ways To Develop Exptertise

Maximize Your Productivity As A Software Engineer [Part 11] - Not Every Meeting Needs You

Meetings are everywhere at tech companies, especially massive ones like FAANG. The unfortunate reality is that so many of these meetings are wasteful, especially for more junior engineers. This lesson teaches you:

- The huge mistake many n00b engineers make with meetings
- The most powerful tactic you can use to take control of your calendar
- How to figure out which meetings you can skip
- Tactics to safely delete meetings from your calendar

How To Be An Effective Tech Lead [Part 2] - Why Most Tech Leads Suck

There are far more bad tech leads than good tech leads. But why is that? This lesson teaches you:

- How tech leads struggle when they have bad intentions
- How tech leads struggle when they have good intentions

Maximizing a Severance Package 3/9 - Termination Circumstances

Let's talk about the different circumstances where you may need a package or to try and get a severance from a company.

- Connect with [**Ethan on LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/)
- Taro members get a discount to join [**Ethan's Level Up community**](https://levelupwithethanevans.substack.com/taro25)

[Timeless Career Advice] Promos and Relationships

[Timeless Career Advice] The Promotion Formula

[Timeless Career Advice] The Soft Skills

[Timeless Career Advice] How Software Engineers Create Value

Write A Stellar Resume As A Software Engineer [Part 18] - Non-Technical Experience

A lot of software engineers don't have a Computer Science degree and switched into software from a non-technical background. So how can those engineers succeed with their resume? This lesson teaches you:

- What transferable skills are
- How to best frame your non-technical experience on an engineering resume, broken down with an in-depth example

Negotiation Course: Negotiating With A Single Offer

It is possible to negotiate with a single offer, but you are in a weaker position here since you don’t have as much leverage.

- Use "market data" to justify a higher pay, and talk about how your experience and background should justify being on the top end of that range.
- Talk about the ***potential*** of other opportunities that you could pursue but you choose not to for the sake of expediency and the fact that you like this job. "*I could get another offer, but I don't want to if I you can give me a competitive offer.*"

Two scenarios to consider:

1. If you’re currently employed, use that to your advantage. Pretend that you like your current job (maybe you actually do!) and that you have to be "pried away". Talk about what you're leaving on the table, e.g. unvested equity or bonus payouts.
2. The **Close the Deal** tactic is nice here. "For an extra $10k, you can snatch me away instantly."

Negotiation Course: Negotiating Your Current Salary

Negotiating your current comp is harder. You can no longer sell on potential, you have to show the outcome of what you have achieved. There are generally also fewer levers to adjust, usually just salary and equity refresh grants.

A few tips: 

- Time when you ask to coincide when your company normally does pay evaluations and merit increases
- Share market data or another offer

If you ask for money and reference another job, be careful about the impact it may have on your manager relationship, who may give you less scope or responsibility.

Negotiation Course: Prefer Async Communication

Recruiters have much more information and practice with negotiation relative to job candidates. The pressure of a phone call and our desire to please others means that phone calls become dangerous places where engineers shoot themselves in the foot. Too many tech employees keep speaking on the phone call and end up revealing too much.

- Recruiters have orders of magnitude more knowledge about the job, the range of possible offers from the company, and even the range of possible offers are peer companies. 
- On the other hand, most job candidates have a handful of data points around their compensation could be, based on their past jobs and what their friends have told them.

This information asymmetry clearly favors the recruiter, who can read your emotions and take advantage of the knowledge gap to lowball you.

For that reason, you should prefer to eliminate phone calls or keep them short, and then be deliberate about your emails where you can craft the exact message you want to send. Async communication is also better for clarity and you can research on your own.

Negotiation Course: The Importance Of Equity In Negotiation

Most companies have larger allowable bands in the equity component of their compensation. For this reason, you should treat it with additional importance as a way to best meet your compensation target. 

There are 2 reasons why companies are more willing to increase equity (RSUs or stock options) compared to other parts of the offer: 

1. Equity doesn’t hurt the profit and loss (P&L) statement of the company. This is especially important for startups.
2. Equity has inherent incentive alignment between the company and the employee. The employee will be more motivated to grow the company because the equity is worth more when the company succeeds.

In addition, equity is generally less understood by employees. Rahul's friend at Uber shared stories of people who rejected an equity grant and simply asked for an additional salary (when they could have gotten significantly more in equity). The risk tolerance for receiving stock compensation is less understood outside the US, e.g. in European countries.

For many people in tech, their base salary is enough to cover their day-to-day living expenses. In a major metro area, an engineer's base salary in a Big Tech co can range from $100K - $300K. This can cover things like rent, food, travel, and even some savings.

If you are in this scenario, Rahul's advice is to be **very aggressive** about increasing the equity component of the comp package. You should tell the recruiter that you want to "*take part in the success that you'll help to create at the company*" and therefore want to be at the highest possible range for equity. 

We'll share more about sample phrases you can use later in the course.

Negotiation Course: Determine Compensation Benchmarks

The key inputs to determine compensation are level, role/title, industry, geography

Use tools like [levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi) and glassdoor to understand what the typical market rate for the job is.

- **Level**: Offers are formulaic based on level, so you can obviously expect. Don’t reveal this to the recruiter.
- **Industry**: if your job as a SWE is a supportive role for the main product of the company, you’ll typically be paid less (e.g. engineer in healthcare compared to engineer in FAANG)
- **Geography**: California and New York are more expensive than other parts of the US and certainly more expensive than most of the world.

One pro tip here: use <https://h1bdata.info/> to see salary data that companies are legally required to report to the government

However, these sources can be out of date or show an incomplete picture, so the best source is talking to friends or people in the community, like in Taro.

In Rahul’s case, he had a pretty good idea that Snap gave out a lot of equity, Meta gave out huge signing bonuses, etc.

Negotiation Course: How To Practice Negotiation Skills

Just like anything else, practice makes perfect. But conceptually understanding negotiation and practicing negotiation is very, very different.

Be aware of the difference in the incentives and working model between a job negotiation (once every 2 years) and your operational model on the job (every day).

- One (the job) is built on shared understanding, sharing vulnerability. There's a clear incentive to make life more comfortable for people around you.
- One (the negotiation) is **not** built on shared understanding. The person who wins is the person who can tolerate discomfort.

The upshot of all this is that negotiation is extremely important but you don’t get to practice much. Verbalize the advice and practice in conversation with a friend or family member.

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