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Comment by carc | Hacker News Reader

You can't have it both ways people - when a company strikes it rich people complain that the regular employees didn't get a big enough piece o the pie. When companies do poorly, people complain that the employees totally got screwed because their equity is worth nothing now.

You either can get paid in pure salary and have a lower ceiling (because you're paying for less risk) and then be left out when the company does well. Or you can get some stock with a higher ceiling/lower floor and be screwed if the company goes down the drain. Either way you're not forced to take equity... developers are in demand.

This is before even considering about trying to align interests of the employee with the company..

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That's not an example of trying to have it both ways. There's no law that says you can't have both a solid base salary and a good equity grant, so you increase the upside but get screwed less on the downside.

I don't see people on HN often arguing that companies shouldn't be allowed to offer equity, more that people shouldn't blindly accept equity grants they don't understand - that are smaller and more limited in upside than they think - in exchange for greatly below-market salaries.

People complain because the way things work now you take less than market value and when the company has a successful exit years later you end up with... maybe enough to make up for the lesser salary you took. So why not just go work for an established company and make your money without any of the risk.

Or you can take less salary, buy your shares when you leave because strike price is 1/3rd of fair market value and they are going to have an IPO 'any minute now' Then you can wait 5 years until they are bought by Time, Inc. Then you can get a polite letter explaining that you get nothing because only the senior stock shares were in the money.

I'm glad there will be more scrutiny. Currently seems like 'heads I win, tails you lose'.

Perhaps one can't have their cake and eat it too, but it's not uncommon for companies to argue for a much, much higher value on the equity parceled out to employees than that a VC working with better information would.

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