[tikhonj]

When you can't compete on salary, you can compete on other axes. Not just financially (equity/etc), but also:

- flexible schedules

- autonomy + impact

- interesting work

- culture (respect, appreciation... etc)

It's not hard for me to imagine an environment where I'd love to work despite giving up a lot of salary. Hell, I'm not unique—just look at how many incredibly skilled people choose research careers over far more lucrative industry jobs.

And yet, I don't see many startups that seem serious about this. If you want to compete for great engineers, choose some of the things I outlined, actually commit to maintaining them and figure out how to demonstrate this (show, not just tell).

[ed25519FUUU]

I still wonder why startups don’t offer more flexible work. If anything, my time in a startup was significantly less flexible than at a bigco, where I had a much bigger team to cover my shifts.

It could be something as simple as a 4 day workweek. Or even 4x 10 hour days. Instead startups are a place where people are expected to put in 60 hour weeks!

[luckylion]

Likely because people believe they'd happily give up salary for more flexible work, but really wouldn't, and so you'd not get any employees if you didn't pay high salaries and offered more flexible hours and some culture benefits.

[dllthomas]

I think Tikhon's point about figuring out how to show that you're offering the benefit is key.

If my salary is $200k, it's clear what that means, and I can be pretty confident that there won't be weird social games to get me to actually accept less this pay period. (There's an argument that income tax is an example of this, but that doesn't vary in unpredictable ways between positions.)

[ric2b]

Don't forget equity. That's probably where startups have the biggest advantage over large corps.