Leaving for a startup?
Hi everyone, I'm sitting with a bit of a dilemma. A startup reached out to me and long story short I am now making a decision between my current, somewhat stable contracting role and joining a pretty well funded seed-stage startup. My current role gives me a great hybrid/WFH balance, a clean break at the end of the day, and leaves me mental energy outside of work to pour into personal creative projects and personal life.
The role I have is somewhat similar. I've been a contractor for a few years and while it does have it's shortcomings and general lack of respect from leadership, ultimately it has been fine, the work is cool and I can fully unplug at the end of the day.
From what I gather, the startup is doing quite well and expects for that to continue (about 2 years of runway before more funding is needed and actually had impressive term sheets on the table for series A). However, they normally operates on a 6-day fully in-person schedule. The role I could have is a super niche, cross-discipline skillset that apparently is quite rare. I had expressed some hesitation about a 6-day work week and they got back to me telling me they were able to accommodate me for a standard 5-day week.
It would be a 20-33% base pay bump from where I'm at now + equity. My major hesitation is that unseen mental tax. They emphasize an accountability-based culture (totally fair), which I take to loosely mean "deliverables are required by a certain deadline regardless of hours kept". I am worried about trading my current autonomy and creative peace of mind for what could be quite an intense workload. The work itself does seem really interesting and everyone was very nice. I'm not sure if they are bringing on more people with a similar 5 day work week but the fact that this is standardized as part of their expectations and I'd get an exception feels like a point of friction.
They told me performance evals would reflect that 5 day schedule as well which put me somewhat at ease. What would you do? I don't want to talk myself out of an amazing opportunity. My personal life and hobbies have always been important to me and are how I maintain balance. On the other hand, I've said for years I've been looking for a way out of the big tech contracting life and this does seem like a great opportunity to leave.