[yojo]

Not necessarily true. I was a mid level product engineer at a recently IPOd company (joined 2 years pre IPO). My base salary was $200k, and the stock and bonus more than doubled that.

There was a little bit of “pick the rocket ship” gamble - I had an Uber offer that probably would have been ended more like $250k/year, but it’s not unreasonable to get half a mill joining a late stage pre-IPO startup, and base salary is high enough you do it with little risk.

Hell, I know some mid-level post-IPO folks at Square making $700k due to it 10xing in share price.