[jon-wood]

Firstly, earning more money isn’t a trap. You’d be making more than 3x the average UK salary, you can spare the higher tax rate, and it’s not like you won’t see any of the extra money.

With that out of the way, the core thing to consider here is valuation. 0.2% might be small, or it might be life changing money in the case of a sale, in my case at a similar amount of equity it resulted in a deposit to buy a house rather than buying one outright. What does 0.2% translate to at different sale prices, and does it feel like reasonable compensation for the effort you’ve put in? In terms of salary you’re pretty much at the top end of the scale for small startups with entering the C-suite already. You could maybe get another 10k or so, but if you do that forget about extra equity as well.

Secondly, it’s worth considering if you want the extra stress of being a manager. It’s a different skill set, and a different kind of work. Some people love it, others don’t. Personally I spent five years or so gradually working my up the management tiers, by the end the money was great (in the order of £150k a year including bonuses), but I hated every minute of every day. Eventually I decided I’d had enough and took a huge pay cut to go back to writing code all day for a startup, and I’m a whole load happier for having done so.

[fy20]

Definately consider if you want to become part of management. Other than a more glamorous title I don't think it's really worth it (in Europe). For most companies pay is not much more than engineers, and in some cases can be lower than a specialist. If you want to earn more, contracting (when the market picks up) is much more lucrative.

I transitioned from senior engineer to engineering manager a couple of years ago. Maybe it's just this company, but I feel I enjoyed being an engineer more. Definately less meetings and less stress. Plus when you go to the next job hunt, there are more engineer jobs available.

On the other hand, if you feel that your engineering skills are a bit lacking (no offense intended), but your have strong soft skills, then it would make sense to go this route. The best head of engineering I worked for was a mediocre developer, but his soft skills were amazing.

[ManchesterDev]

I agree with both the comments. At the moment there are no progression paths which don’t involve moving up into doing more management, but I’ll still be spending 75-80% of time writing code. If the company was larger there may have been other options internally to focus on technical roles.

[jon-wood]

Be very cautious about “you’ll still be writing code” promises. A team of three is a significant time investment, and I’m highly dubious that leading a team can be done in 1 day a week, at least if you want to do it well.

At the very least you’re going to have to learn how to write code while being regularly interrupted, and in my experience that means you’ll have to let go of doing anything interesting because you’ll end up blocking work due to unexpected things coming up.