Ask HN: Tired of startups – want a normal job. Help

What is preventing you from finding such normal job?

I went through a similar phase, and after my previous company was acquired, i very much enjoyed working at a corporation. But the 'startup bug' is a thing and that lasted two years, now I am back at doing a startup and so far still enjoying it (5 years into my startup 2.0 life).

You would be fine with some looking assuming you have common tech stack experience, also do you have a technical degree?

In either case the leet code nonsense is probably unavoidable so worth some time as well.

Have you tried who's hiring and who wants to be hired posts here?

First of all, don't see yourself as a loser! Having worked in startups for so many years, the experience you've accumulated is a huge asset. The previous startup experiences might have affected your interviews because you didn't highlight the transferable skills you gained from those experiences, such as rapid learning, complex problem - solving, and adaptability. You might as well focus on these general skills in your resume and interviews and downplay the label of startup failure. As for the job - hunting direction, apart from traditional tech companies, some emerging industries, such as green technology and medical technology, also have growing demand for people with technical and product experience, and the competition is relatively less intense. Have you considered them? Also, you mentioned the salary level of new graduates. In fact, with your experience, you can definitely strive for a higher salary. Have you studied how to highlight your experience advantages in job - hunting to match positions that meet your expected salary better?

Frankly, few mature companies need a "engineer/product guy" and your split experience will work against you unless you make it clear that you're earnestly committed to one of those roles in particular (are you?), or you specifically look for work close to sales at B2B or contract development firms, where the combination of those skills is an asset when selling and sometimes prototyping custom work.

You're selling a product right now (yourself) and you need a clear understanding of what the product is. It's not a typical engineer and it's not a typical product person. It's not even an practiced corporate drone. So don't expect to sell it as one of those things and don't distract yourself applying for work that needs them (your resume will be ignored in this market). Instead, figure out what niche value your background brings and focus directly on selling that to the customers (employers) that would need it.

Work at a non-tech company. Every company has computers. I’ve worked in small business loans, ticket sales, music publishing and others.

There's no way you are a loser. 1 successful exit, flaunt it man. No one cares about the exit value. The fact that you had a successful exit is a huge win. I would say that you can certainly strive for a 250-300K salary in the bay area at least.

You should try Walmart for an IC role. Glacial pace of working and a shit ton of bureaucracy, but looks like it might just be the right environment for you now.

Other companies that I can think of along similar lines - JPM, Cisco, Arista or any of the traditional companies.

Your best bet is to network with the hiring managers. I think if you just meet them and speak about your experiences in an event or something you might be able to articulate your experiences better than just in a resume.

Also I have found that drafting your resume and asking ChatGPT or another LLM to refine the wording really works. These LLMs know the ATS or resume scanning keywords and will tailor your resume accordingly.

Good luck

There are plenty of startups and “startups” that are about a decade old and would benefit from someone who has both an understanding of how real startups work, how to ship things, and also has enough experience to be reliable in what is no longer an early stage company, and maybe isn’t really a startup anymore.

A lot of these companies make reasonable money and pay well enough. Not $100k and “$10MM in stock if it works out”, but probably between 170-300 depending on where they’re at, the structure, etc and it’ll be real cash money. The company will probably do something boring but very necessary. You’ll make great friends and have fun.

Keep an eye out, see what’s out there.

Can you share more about your experience? What type of tech are you experienced with, what industries, etc

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> I feel like a freaking loser given my age and my relative career stagnation / my inability to actually turn my mildly above average skills into any real money.

There's a lot of noise out there that tells us we're supposed to get rich off of entrepreneurship or VC money, and not enough telling of the truth that those success stories are pretty rare. No one who is doing something they at least minimally enjoy and not breaking their body doing it, and getting paid in the top 20% of income earners, is a loser.

Plenty of Gov programming jobs in the lower CoL areas.

City of Fresno is hiring a few in the $90-110k range, which goes a heck of a lot further there than in the Bay, while being close enough to hybrid work if you decide to (I have friends there who work at Google, Nvidia, etc. hybrid).

Gov work can be boring, but it's rarely stressful.

Do you have a good story that will resonate with hiring managers on why you are making the switch from small to big? Most won’t be excited to hire the guy that pushed hard for years and now “wants to coast”. I’m not saying that’s you, but it can easily come across like that.

I worked at two startups before realizing that they weren’t what I wanted out of life. Work is important to me, but so is life. I was duped into this vision of entrepreneurship and making it big in startups. While every startup founder likes to spin the story of wanting to be a unicorn, in practice, few do. I happened to work at ones with an insane workload and a less-than-survivable payout.

I interviewed like crazy and landed a position at one of those well-known companies. Large companies have their fair share of problems, but it suits my lifestyle. I do my work diligently and then clock out. It’s liberating to know that if I don’t respond to a pager, the world isn’t going to end and some third-grade CEO/CTO won’t scream in my face.

Different people want different things out of life, and I made a vow never to join a startup or scale-up with fewer than a thousand employees.

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My suggestion is this: Founders often underwhelm on paper, but knock it out of the park when in person. Network in your city with leadership of companies at any stage.

Example: Last month, I was just messing around with an idea, told my vision for it in 5 years to someone that works at a company that should do $400M revenue this year, $800M in 2 years. He had never met his CEO.... his CEO heard my thoughts and offered to FLY cross country out to meet me... someone who doesn't even work there.

> I feel like a freaking loser given my age and my relative career stagnation / my inability to actually turn my mildly above average skills into any real money.

It is okay to feel like that for a bit. But, this story that you are telling yourself is not going to help you if you keep on telling this. Whenever I have felt negatively about myself like that in the past, it has helped to stack some wins -- even if little ones -- to get out of the rut.

So, if you want to try to be an engineer, start building things using tools/tech that you are interested in and put them in the open source. Or better yet, help out some open source projects that you respect and have benefited from in the past, if you can. Hiring managers (and I have been one) look for real evidence of skills mentioned in the resume and a well-rounded Github repo increases the likelihood of a callback in any kind of market. Stack some little wins there.

OR, if you want to be a product person, do the equivalent of stacking some wins in that realm. I have very little experience in that space so maybe someone else here can identify a concrete thing or two that you could do to attract hiring managers in that line of work.

If you want a job, start interviewing and prepare yourself or interviews. If you didn't get the job, reflect on your gaps. Maybe you are unhireable (I doubt it), but you need to get data. Some places will dismiss having a ton of 1 year stints, but if you make it to the interview stage your resume matters less.

Did you make any friends at any previous job? Where are they all now? Referrals and nepotism are the keys to hiring in most places.

I'd just describe this job market as competitive and every company appears to be looking for some specific persona now. Believe it or not you could thrive in this job market. For you, I'd say you'll have figure out what you love to do, figure out how to speak positively/enthusiastically about your previous experience, and find companies that value what you bring to the table. AI is not taking all the jobs yet (seems clear that it produces garbage code that's untenable at scale), and neither is off-shoring (it's very out of trend).

Question - what can you actually control about companies you're applying to? The answer is not a whole lot, so why stress about it? What you can control is a funnel:

1. How many jobs you've applied to

2. What quality those companies are

3. How much they're aligned with your skill set

Other than that, you're stressing about stuff you can't change. Let it go, gain inner peace. There's a lot to unpack in your post, step back examine the stories you're telling yourself. Are they actually real? Is there something more nuanced going on?

140k? What job is that?

> I feel like between AI and offshoring I might just need to do something else all-together.

Let me address this one upfront, both for you and for the other job seekers out there fretting over the same thing. AI won't replace a competent Engineer anytime soon, and offshoring/outsourcing is a continuous part of any business cycle. While tech companies are very much in the early days of outsourcing and offshoring, non-technical companies are actually at the opposite end - looking to bring talent back in house after years of outsourcing with decreasing satisfaction or results.

It's just a part of the cycle, really, if you're looking to transition into "stable" work. Companies will always be chasing fads that claim to make everything better while also lowering costs, be it AI, some hot new tech hub in a cheaper economy, leveraging MSPs, or just flatly trimming headcount and "increasing velocity". You're gonna have to learn to roll with those rhythms and punches if you want to thrive.

> I feel like a freaking loser given my age and my relative career stagnation / my inability to actually turn my mildly above average skills into any real money.

Imposter syndrome sucks. From my perspective as one of these technical "normies", I'd consider you more successful by simple fact you actually sold a company - not an easy feat! Think of it as just switching to a different "lane", with different expectations; you're not a failure, you're just growing in a different way with different challenges than you're used to.

With all that being said, and without really understanding your specific skills/fields, here's some generalized advice about the "normal" tech world:

First, figure out where you want to work in terms of "vertical", as tech is often divided into "enterprise" or "business" technology (as in, the folks supporting how business gets done), and "product" technology (the folks making and supporting the way the business makes money). Some companies may try to combine the two, but they're often like oil and water in that they don't mix well.

* BizTech is often a slower pace because you generally want people to do work, not figure out how to do work, and so there's a stronger emphasis on stability, reliability, and repeatability.

* Product tech is more fast-paced and focused on solving new problems, building new things, and delivering on roadmaps. This sounds like it might be more directly transferable skills-wise since you're coming from Startup World, but that market is a hot mess right now thanks to Big Tech layoffs and AI hype.

Next, identify where your existing skills fit within that vertical, and rewrite your resume to highlight those capabilities.

* Focus on the specific technical achievements with all the buzzwords you used along the way. Don't pitch stuff like "delivered an app with 10k concurrent users and five-nines uptime on a budget of $X", because most companies don't care about your company. They want relatable achievements, like "Built ArgoCD Pipeline to orchestrate production Kubernetes clusters using GitHub Actions."

* For developers, focus on languages known and share your GitHub. For Infrastructure/Network/Storage/Systems folks, focus on vendor suites and how you stitched products together with automations.

* Two big topics in companies right now are cost discipline and flexibility in hires. Play up both, since you have them from your startup days. Highlight cross-domain shoestring budget deliverables in particular, companies will eat that up as it shows you're both multi-disciplined and cost-conscious.

* Consider some certifications to shore up your bone fides, especially if you're going into BizTech/IT. Those almost always get preferential treatment by employers, at least for interviews.

When you get...

First of all congrats:

You actually got "some" success in a startup ... In your twenties... Thereby seeing most of it and getting the regrets out of your system.

These are amazing combinations. Which means you know how to call out the BS when you get approached by Hussle pornos.

Second as a newly 30 year old for perspective if you were to join a faang (or a pre IPO startup) even as a junior, and are willing to stay put, learn corporate speak/politics etc (assuming you want) you actually have a shot at 3-4 promotions in 10 years. Which is really good by the time you get to 40. For context 4 promos gets you to senior staff at Goog/Meta. Again that is really good and 10 years is neither a Hussle or slack.