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Comment by sgustard | Hacker News Reader

I've never taken a job in 20 years because of money and I don't advise anyone to do that. I choose a company for culture, the people I work with, the kinds of projects, and quality of life. Also a desire to ship things and not spend my days in meetings or dealing with bureaucracy, a desire not to work with jerks, and a desire not to work on lines of business that I find morally repugnant. The latter criteria have made most of my FAANG offers quite unappealing. But I love going to work at a startup with my buddies, building cool tools that help people, and spending plenty of time with my family.

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They commenter isn't saying you should pick a job just because of money. But you should also avoid a job that is taking advantage of you, by giving you absolute crap compensation, by "selling" you ISO's as something valuable, when in most cases it isn't because of the constraints.

We all want to work on things that are cool, but we also have bills to pay, and retirement to prepare for.

A "culture" of founders making a ton of money for my work is not a culture I would consider good.

Every startup I’ve joined, I’ve always wished for the founders to make bank on my work. Because that’s the only way I’d do well.

My point is that founders frequently make bank while your stock options go to zero.

I just treat high compensation as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for employment. It works.

If you’ve never done it, maybe you shouldn’t be giving advice on it?

I just took a job at a smaller public tech company that’s paying me almost what I’d make at a FAANG (more than double what startups were offering), and I’m experiencing none of what you’re talking about. Great work life balance, WFH whenever you need to, people are in the office 40 hours or less, people take 5 weeks vacation per year, we don’t have a crazy amount of meetings or bureaucracy, and our business is selling useful software tools to customers who pay us money for them.

Pretty nuts to do that while getting paid nearly half a million per year.

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