Working at startups is terrible

Startups life. No sleep, late nights, weekends, no Diwali holidays, not seeing your family for years, unethical Founders, difficulty to build trust with friends and ex colleagues after you moved to startups, what has been your story.

I'm seeing so many posts where startup employees are cribbing about things like layoffs, work culture etc etc. Doesn't seem like they have perspective on everything it takes to build a startup. I've built a failed startup myself and have immense respect for founders who are grinding it out there in such difficult recessionary circumstances. And then you have so many of the engineers and PMs cribbing about basics without talking about important things like learning growth, building for the future etc. Why such myopia? I work at a big tech and envy the speed at which startups move, the big responsibility everyone gets to handle, the fast career growth. All these things are being cribbed about. They crib about founders wanting more. Their job is to ensure success, not to give lifetime jobs to entitled people. They have more headaches you can imagine. In my small startup I had a million headaches. I can only imagine how hard it must be to run larger ships. Is everyone joining a startup these days looking for a get rich quick scheme?

I completed education from tier 1 colleges (MBA and Engineering both from coveted IIM and IIT). After MBA, I joined Wall Street bank and life was really good. Was enjoying the perks of a MNC although the work was also excruciating but was an overall good experience. Left it for a startup (fast growth kida in me led this decision). Worked in the startup across multiple roles, learned a lot of new things. Tried staying away from office politics and earned a good name in the circle. But growth (read pay) was not that enticing and was not growing hence decided to leave. Was naive enough to quote this reason to business head and HR as well. Obviously it didn't go well with anyone. Joined startup2, changed cities and joined it. The role was similar, although my manager was an epitome of a toxic manager. Was doing good but he always was able to find some or the other mistake in my work. If he would not find any mistake then he would suggest some tangential hypothesis and then reprimand me for not thinking about it. Was so toxic that I didn't take leave when my wife was hospitalized and giving birth to our child. Tried doing everything possible but couldn't save the job and got laid off in the 1st lay off wave. Was shattered. Confidence was at rock bottom. Tried searching for roles. Luckily I got into startup3 who had remote work at that time. Although I joined the marketing team (which was not at all related to my previous work) thus creating a mess of my profile. Worked hard but in a "restructuring" exercise got laid off again. Within a year 2 lay offs with random work and no concrete direction in work. Now searching for roles but not able to find anything suitable as I was in non-core roles and in this difficult time everyone is looking for cheap resources with 1-3 yoe and not looking for 7+ yoe with generalist profile. Contemplating starting from zero in Marketing or learning coding/Data science so that can start my career again with right basics.

Got a following message from a strong founder: "For the part-time role, we require 20 hours of work per week, and for full-time, we expect 40 hours of work per week. We are currently raising Seed to launch our product, and while the challenge is significant, the impact you can make is also substantial. Currently, none of our team members receive a salary and work for future equity, and you would be in the same situation. However, as we raise more funds (which we have already started to do), we plan to pay market wages. This is standard practice for pre-seed startups." What do you guys think?

I am a 6 yrs experienced Software developer and part of a mid-stage startup. This is my third job; I have been working here for 3 years. I was involved here as one of the core engineers at the start in developing the overall platform, After that, my growth as an engineer stagnated for 2 years . Constant importance and priority are given to business requirements and hacky work getting pushed to production in the name of fast iterations and business impact every week. My engineering manager lacks proper engineering skills and doesn't respect engineers even after their impact on the company and constantly keeps saying the engineering team doesn't contribute to the revenue of the company despite us pushing work that improves business positively. Last year around November, around 80% of the engineering team was subtly suggested to start looking out for work (basically a soft layoff) because management was too scared of a social media backlash Due to all this,2 years' worth of technical debt has accumulated on the overall codebase and apart from giving justification for every code improvement that we try to make there, we still have to work on business/product requirements. My growth as an engineer has stopped and I am worried about missing out on the latest developments in the tech industry, especially with AI in the picture, and want to make my skillset somewhat AI-proof. I have come back to hands-on coding this year , so that's a positive start. I am considering taking a 3-4 month break after resigning from my company to study, develop side projects, develop a portfolio etc Has anyone else been in this boat ? How did you come out strong?

Zerodha pe hai hum

Leadership is clueless and one of the most toxic workplaces where people are bullied and no boundaries are considered .Just a week before the appraisal cycle, the let go of 100+ folks both billed onsite and offsite without even informing anyone in the team which impacted the work and morale of existing people. When asked about this to the management, all they cared about was the reviews on the ambition box and Glassdoor being low. They asked employees to give good reviews and when it was not working they used the marketing team to give good reviews, you can check the reviews yourself to verify this. The next big thing is , keeping org wide evaluations from manager level also and calling it some development program and mandating the employees to take it along with delivery work. So we can expect more rounds to happen going forward. What is more sad is the blackmailing and forcing employees to take down reviews and employees who are planning to goo

I received 2 offers recently, for context I'm graduating this year- 1 - a PPO for an early stage startup I have been interning for. TC - 10 base + share of revenue generated. Essentially it is a founders office role, but will be closing sales too. Good culture, profitable. 2- Browserstack for SDET role, TC - 11 base + 5 performance pay+bonus. Conflict is - should I choose the startup due to its potential high returns and my preference for the founders office role or BS for stable income and brand value ?

Hi Folks, Want to understand what makes you stay at a startup vs shop around in other companies or leave after 6months- an year? Please tell things other than initial compensation because you can always find someone paying more. Assume a market standard here.