[the_common_man]

I wonder how engineers at Google feel about all this. I guess they feel they should be joining these startups instead of slogging at Google. They can just easily retire/do their own thing if they are part of these acquihires.

[largote]

Working at a startup "for the money" is like playing the lottery, you may hit it big, but a lot of startups just crash and burn.

In the meantime you're making a lot less than someone working at a large company. You could take the $50K/yr pay difference and buy lottery tickets with that.

[the_common_man]

You are right but it's not like the startup is not paying you anything. So it's not exactly the same odds of a lottery. Most startups pay from 100-125k and Google is not that far off from that range.

[largote]

The gap in base-pay+bonus is usually like 20-30%, plus there's the fact that you're getting stock you can actually sell on top of that.