New grad joining startup or FANNG

[preston1982]

I always wanted to build startups eventually and actually tried and failed once in college.

I have no background as my schools are no-names

As I’m graduating, I have two offers at hand:

1. A founding engineer position at a seed-stage startup
2. An entry level SWE position at Amazon

Both has pros and cons. The startup comes with great scope and impact and I get to work on the business side too. But it’s also very risky at this stage, though it already has decent revenue and good VC backing.

Amazon’s main benefit is just the brand name, which I think YC kinda cares to some extent based on the admitted founders I observed. I still don’t know which org I’ll be joining so not clear about the learning potential.

Money wise: startup offers 30k higher than Amazon but Amazon has sign on bonus, stocks etc.

Visa wise: startup can help with o1 whereas Amazon can prob only do H1b

If you have built successful startups, I’d love to hear about your opinions on which choice would position myself better for building startups later.

 

[walkedthroughthefire]

@preston1982 1 year or less at FAANG as your first job will give you instant credibility and open lots of doors.

2-3 years at FAANG as your first job will tech you how to navigate corporate hierarchies, how incredibly and stable large software projects are run; but it will also establish a much lower bar in your head on what a single person or a team can achieve in a day, week, month, or year. But it's not yet all lost at this point; you can still recover by joining a startup or starting one.

4+ years at FAANG as your first job will permanently change you, and you will not notice. You will likely no longer want to do a startup, or anything remotely ambitious for that matter.

If you were to spend 2 or 3 years at FAANG, it's far better to do it at 3 companies than at one. The job hopping concern is a corporate lie designed to keep employees from increasing their value in the market.

Hope this helps!

 

[preston1982]

@walkedthroughthefire Thanks for the mental framework for thinking about this. Wonder what to make the best of FAANG if I work there for 1-2 years?

I know Amazon is an enterprise so paying attention to its problems and pain points can be a good way to generate ideas and potential leads.

Any advice on networking? I interned there before but couldn’t find ppl with startup mindsets easily

 

[walkedthroughthefire]

@preston1982 Position yourself as close to "strategic revenue" as possible. Every company, no matter how new or how large, makes money and spends money. You'd want to be the person whose work directly impacts that revenue - near the "profit centre". This often coincides with talking directly to users or customers. And you don't want to be the person whose work merely saves money or does some other kind of "internal good", even if everyone agrees that it's important. 10 years from now, you will want to be able to clearly articulate on your resume in simple terms what did you build and how much money it made Amazon. At Google such mission critical suborg is likely Search; for Amazon likely the e-commerce platform or AWS.

Now to the "strategic" bit. Take the Google example. Search is obviously the cash cow; but it's also in the "smooth running" mode for many years (or not so smooth as per recent reporting "the man who killed Google search"). To leadership it's obviously a headache; how to maintain their dominant position? There are likely a few "major bets" internal projects at Google aimed at that. Chrome was one such, and it succeeded spectacularly in creating a distribution moat. Today there's likely something going on about LLMs, Gemini or smth else, because of the threat from OpenAI and others. Revenue from such projects may be small or even zero, but they are strategic bets - and you'd want to be there while they're still small, and grow with them. A bit like a startup.

 

[preston1982]

@walkedthroughthefire Wow this is very good advice. I hope the internal mobility is good at Amazon for me to get closer to the cash cows

 

[marigoldmom]

@walkedthroughthefire Hey, just want to say I'm currently leaving my first job (big tech) for a startup that is super fast-growing (series E) and your response here + replies are exactly how I've been feeling.

I felt like my first year was worth it - I honestly didn't know anything going in, got to see what's behind a core piece of our company (recommendations infra), and the resume boost was huge, even if my work wasn't that deep. However, the last ten months have been a mixed bag. On one hand, I've learned how to manage up, how to create impact (or make it look like I have), and even led my own design/initiative across 2 other teams. On the other hand, my technical skills are dog shit. There's a lot of things I could have done better, but I really found it hard to get into the right projects within my team. Language/cultural barriers played a piece in it, but I really felt boxed into a corner.

Ultimately the fear of stagnation caused me to look elsewhere. I know I could have kept making good money and performance reviews, but was really scared of what happens after. My new company is very fast paced, much smaller, and growing super quickly. I'm incredibly scared of whether I will have the chops to keep up and succeed, but there's no time like the present.

 

[timiboiy23]

@walkedthroughthefire This sums it up perfectly and is consistent with my experience. The number of engineers I met on year 4+ who still wistfully talk about wanting to do a startup, but are tied by golden handcuffs, kids, mortgage...

If I could do it again, I'd say two years is the sweet spot: resume cred, solid training as an engineer as you'll probably be promoted once, while still being unencumbered and hungry enough to go on your own.

 

[musicluvr83]

@walkedthroughthefire 3 years at FAANG -> startup here

 

[karliah]

@walkedthroughthefire I would disagree. 2-3 year startup experience from pre-seed to series, beats FANNG.

 

[jg76]

@preston1982 I went to a no name school and worked a couple big tech jobs (Amazon was one of them) for about 4 years. I left last year to found a company and participated in YC W24.

My thoughts are:
- The FAANG stamp of approval will help you a lot in the startup world. I hate that people care about that but they do, especially if you don’t have pedigree of a top 5 uni. The story you will tell investors, customers, employees is “I left Amazon to…” and that will be good enough even with no other pedigree. This advice applies less to Stanford/MIT/Harvard grads.
- If I could go back and do it again, I would take the FAANG job for 1-2 years tops. Then immediately go work on your own startup or join an early stage startup. If you get a cool opportunity sooner, feel free to leave earlier—nobody cares if you left after six months.
- I would try to meet and build rapport with as many recent college grads @ Amazon as you can—this is your most likely pool of future cofounders. Try to have a roster of 10 people you could realistically try to recruit.
- Don’t focus on getting promoted. Instead focus on learning, networking, and hacking on side projects. Minimize the time you spend doing tasks for Amazon, maximize the time you spend on yourself. Your goal is to leave before you get promoted, otherwise you’ve probably conditioned your brain to optimize for the wrong thing.

 

[preston1982]

@jg76 Great to see a similar profile! How has working at these big techs helped with ideation and problem hunting?

 

[jg76]

@preston1982 It didn’t really help with that. It did help me develop some good coding chops though. I would’ve had no idea how to build “real” products straight out of college tbh.

 

[jayl40065]

@jg76 Holy fuck this is golden advice. New grad at a FAANG company here too. Gona be trying this out.

 

[jg76]

@jayl40065 GL, you got this!

 

[3t3rnity]

@jg76 How do you minimise time spent doing tasks for Amazon with all the pip and stack ranking?

 

[jg76]

@3t3rnity Every situation is different, so I don’t have a good answer. But consider it good practice at learning resourcefulness, time management, and doing more with less. All of these are skills that are critical as a founder and if you can’t learn to execute on them at a FAANG company (easy mode) you will not be able to as a founder (hard mode).

 

[natanyah]

@preston1982 A seed-stage startup hiring founding engineer straight out of college with no background. Am I reading that correctly? I only heard really bad things about these "late founding engineer" roles but at least they were experienced developers. This seems like a borderline scam.

Go to Amazon.

 

[shadowlife]

@preston1982 i haven't built a successful startup (working on it!) but i worked at FAANG for ~8 years.

num 1 could be a good option IF there's a good CTO/lead engineer to support you. it's hard to learn everything about business/scale on your own without mentorship and if you're the most senior engineer there it's going to be hard to grow and not build bad habits.

at my prev company we hired junior engineers who only worked at startups and there was a lot of unlearning they had to do.

if that's not the case i'd suggest amazon because at least you'd get that name on your resume and find and opportunity to network

 

[jmzr]

@preston1982 Do you have student loans?

You don't have the experience/skills to be a founding engineer as a new grad (no offense intended). You'll learn more working with a variety of senior engineers for your first 12-36 months in the wilderness. Software engineering is similar to the master-journeyman-apprentice model found in the trades.

I would recommend taking the Amazon job to build your network, and keep networking/searching while you're there. Switch teams to meet more people.

Keep your expenses modest and avoid lifestyle creep, so you can save up and do something riskier in a few years.

Good luck!