|
|
|
|
|
|
by burnallofit
2823 days ago
|
|
|
This doesn't make sense. "Engineering force pretty much has no negotiation power in this." Of course we do. We don't have to accept an offer unless it meets our terms. "Engineering is a liability. Sales is an asset." This is ridiculous. In an early stage startup, most likely there is no product. Sales has nothing to sell if not for engineering's efforts. "VC's won't allow it." If a startup can't hire, then VCs have exactly nothing. This isn't to say that cash isn't a good thing. I personally agree that options need to be balanced with cash, especially when a startup is well funded, and options are fractions of a penny, but that decision is individual. |
|
|
For example, at my current startup I work with a couple 10X engineers (seriously, they are brilliant and able to solve problems in an incredibly elegant way) who are paid 30% less of what I make in cash, and about 25X less equity, despite having joined just a few months after me in a similar role and with more years of experience than me (I know because as part of my due diligence I took a peek at the cap table). The difference is that I negotiated heavily before joining, and every ~12 months I express my discontent to my boss about my current compensation, and he tries to bring it up with new equity grant and/or salary raises and/or performance bonuses. In exchange for that, I try to do my very best on the job.
To those people, the pay simply doesn't matter, it’s the specific opportunity given by the startup what they are after (domain/tooling/authorship/etc.). They will never complain about the compensation, or even ask to get more equity, since, as software engineers, the "base" pay allows them to have a reasonable quality of life. If the company sells for $10B and they make $0, they'll be just as happy, they got to work on a for-profit project that became super successful! yay!
Empirically, I've seen way more people like them in the software engineering field than in other highly-skilled fields (e.g. law, medicine, accounting), and I'm sure those fields are just as rewarding as software engineering, for the person passionate about those aspects of human knowledge and creativity.
I've never raised these observations in a live setting, I am too scared I'd be taken for a cynic who doesn't love his craft and it's only after money, while in reality it couldn't be farther from the truth, I very much enjoy software engineering and spend a considerable portion of my free time reading up and improving my skills. It's just that for me both the compensation and the opportunity need to be good, I won't be happy with just one of the two (so I wouldn't take a very high paying job for a long period of time, if such job would mean stagnating my technical growth as an engineer).
Why do you think that is?