[sshumaker]

I think the article's overall structure is actually pretty poor. One lens to think about a startup job is risk vs. upside - both risk and potential upside decrease as the startup progresses. Ultimately, a large publicly traded company has the least risk and least upside. It's a very broad brush to simply say 'unicorns are a bad time to join' - people who joined a few years before the Google or Facebook IPO still did very well with minimal risk.

Another approach is to consider what non-monetary goals you have - e.g. growth. For a junior engineer, going to a top-tier public company or unicorn is often a pretty good idea since you can learn a lot about best practices and can be mentored by more senior talent. Going to a startup mid-career is often useful since you get a broader perspective outside of engineering (on business, marketing, etc). etc.