Comment by aristofun
I do wonder too.
I’ve checked few startup offers with calculator. Math just doesn’t add up.
Unless you’re a founder with >10% stake - you virtually _never_ end up financially better than in hi paying position in a big company (think low faang range +).
Even in the best case scenario.
Surprisingly in some cases i know you’re much better off being among few 100-200 forst employees rather than a founding engineer in a promising startup.
“Founding engineer” is a weird concept - you get stressed and used almost like a founder, but paid ~ like first employees.
Unless it’s a new microsoft or google. But such companies don’t just publish founding ingeneer jobs.
But based on the comments here there will never be a shortage of naive people who buy into all that startup romantics and silly slogans like “money is not everything” (sure, but we speak about jobs here, not about our dreams, don’t we?)
Yeah if you're literally the person building the product you should at least get cofounder credit. It's silly that one person pitches a company and touts all the cool things about the product, but the product doesn't exist, it's all to entice some intelligent but naïve bright eyed engineering grad that they're getting a good deal.
I worked as a founding engineer and the CEO kept saying that I'm basically set for life because he was certain the company would become a ~$10 Billion unicorn. Of course then I thought "Why would he say this if he weren't very certain it would happen", but that bravado optimism I realized was just par for course among founders, and only 1% make it. Your chance of becoming wealthy in 10 years in aggregate are much higher just working for a normal tech company and investing your disposable income.