With a salary of 65,000, you aren't making that much below market for a 22 y/o developer. The CS grads I know got offers in the range of 40-85k, so you are square in the middle. It's not like you are making $30k.
People always want to skimp on developers. Would you hire a new college grad to design a $100 million building? No? Then why hire one to build the foundation for a $100 million company? It's certainly not simpler.
As a result of that experience, I'm extremely skeptical of companies with older non-technical founders that hire inexperienced programmers as their first technical employees. It usually means they just want a code monkey to implement their brilliant ideas, and don't understand the engineering and financial challenges inherent in any startup.
They basically have a time-line of launching in March 2012, and we only started in May of this year. One thing that's worrying me is that I haven't yet done a second iteration of the code and they keep wanting more things added..and I feel that we're not focusing on solving one problem but many (too many). Products that are successful start off as being simple and then more gets added over time...
One of the issues is that one of the co-founders is my Dad's former co-worker's Son, and even though I have some say now that I have equity, it won't necessarily be heard because what does a 22 year old know anyway, right? My suggestions might seem too radical to them, and that is to drop a bunch of what we have, and now that we've had some testers, to focus on what the testers liked, and remove what they didn't.
Several of the testing sessions that we had, the people using this new service had mentioned that because of the relatively private nature of this service, that they feel uncomfortable with a linkedin/facebook login button on registration because they feel like the private information available on the service will be shared with other more public networks. My vote is to drop these "features" but the cofounders seem insistant that we keep them and feel that it "adds legitimacy" even though the testing sessions seem to show otherwise. There are other examples of this based on tester feedback, this is just one of them
Yes that is what I said. I'm not sure if you're restating my point as a rebuttal or if you are agreeing with me though.
If you can create a foundational product, you are worth what I say. If you can't, then it appears the founders don't know what they are doing and the equity is worth absolutely nothing because the business has no chance of success.
This is delusional. $500k isn't the going rate for senior software architects even at major companies. It's certainly not the going rate for a junior engineer building a product that may not even have a market.
Edit: Trolling successful!