I Turned Down FAANG to Join a Startup. Three Months In.

I had offers from two companies. One was a FAANG company — you can probably guess which one based in Singapore. L5 role, solid TC, all the usual perks. The other was a 40-person fintech that had just raised Series A. I took the startup. My friends in tech thought I was insane. Maybe I am. But here's why and here's what it's actually like.

Why I said no to big tech

The FAANG offer was good. Around SGD 200K total comp. But the role was essentially maintaining a feature within a feature. I'd be one of maybe 300 engineers working on a product that already works. My impact would be incremental. Measurable but incremental. At the startup I'm employee number 12. I'm building the payments infrastructure from scratch. Go backend, PostgreSQL, event-driven architecture. The decisions I make today will shape the system for years. That's not something you get at a company with 100,000 employees.

What it's actually like

Messy. Really messy. There's no established architecture review process. The CI/CD pipeline was held together with duct tape when I joined. Documentation is whatever's in people's heads. But also exciting? I deployed to production on my second day. At FAANG the onboarding alone would have been two weeks of compliance training and getting access to internal tools. The pay is lower — about 140K total comp with equity that may or may not be worth something. I'm betting on the equity. Could be a great bet. Could be worthless.

Three months in

I've already shipped more impactful code than I did in my last two years at my previous company. I've also worked more weekends than I'd like. The work-life balance thing that people warn you about with startups is real. Would I do it again? Ask me in two years when I know if the equity is worth anything. For now I'm learning fast and building real things. That's enough.

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