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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

The salient point in the article is about opportunity cost. When you take a 100K startup job, and could have been making 200K somewhere else, that's a very real loss. Now, those are made up numbers, and you need to plug in real ones to make an accurate assessment, but that's his point.

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In my experience startups typically pay more than other well established organizations, at least for Design/front-end roles. Agencies and Enterprise is typically where the low wages come from.

This doesn't factor in Silicon Valley. SV is an entirely different animal. The cost of living there throws the math way off. I can imagine that those wages are typically very low. $200k in SV is comparable to $70k in most other cities. This is why it's beneficial to work remotely for a SV startup and live somewhere more desirable.

I think we're conflating all startups with SV, which shouldn't be the case. Certainly folks joining SV startups IN SV are being taken for a ride.

> $200k in SV is comparable to $70k in most other cities.

What's the basis for that estimation? Given California's income tax and higher rent, I'd say that the difference in cost of living is $20-30k, not $130k.

Purchasing a home. That should be the standard.

Most people don't want to rent for the entirety of their lives.

One can easily work a few years in the Valley and buy a nice house in much of the country...and likely get an opportunity to work remotely if he/she has worked at the company a few years.

The raw numbers are nothing to sniff at, and you don't get that buying power in much of the country.

Part of the problem is the rampant NIMBYism in that area, which isn't really the fault of people doing startups. Still, though, it really adds to that area being expensive.

right, and that is completely valid to discuss.

I think it does a disservice to the other problems and discussion points to toss everything under "risk".

What else is opportunity cost in this case but risk that an early employee at a startup misses out on a much better financial endpoint at a non-startup with much higher salary and benefits (401k matching, etc)?

But what would you call it besides risk? ie you're gambling (risk) that your opportunity cost will be made whole (and hopefully even exceeded!) via a liquidity event.

I'm not denying that it is risk, I argue that it doesn't allow for the subtleties and nuances (opportunity cost vs responsibility increase vs positive/negative association after exit/failure).

There are a lot of different variables involved and a great many of them boil down to calculated gambles on the part of the employee and employers. Those are worthy of discussion and there are plenty of discussions to be had around those. But simply calling it "risk" and saying you need more of the upside is so simplified its nearly meaningless and impossible to have a conversation about with everyone involved having the same idea about what is being discussed.

There are certainly non-monetary benefits to working at startups, as well as costs. It certainly makes sense to include those as part of the calculation, but money is not a small part of that, either.

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