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I'm glad this works for you, but I don't think your case study is sufficient evidence to prove the author's proposed hypothesis as outright wrong. I see another user mentioned this and was flagged for some reason.

> We pay competitive salaries and offer generous option grants, but it's not the reason why people join. I know this, because we typically work out the compensation once people have already decided to join (contingent on a fair offer, of course)

It does sound like money is a big factor.

Did any of your employees take your offer with a significant pay cut from their previous job?

It isn't the deciding factor.

We've had employees choose us over other offers with higher salaries.

An unfair offer can make people avoid your company, but a higher salary is rarely the reason why people say yes.

Fwiw, my personal experience as a developer also matches this. Before starting Robusta, I turned down a very high offer from Microsoft to go to a development job at a startup because I preferred a high impact job over better compensation.

> We've had employees choose us over other offers with higher salaries

I guess the question here is, how much higher?

If I was offered a good package with sizeable equity and/or options, in a startup with a good outlook and decent valuation, I could forsake a slightly better cash offering.

But if I was to be paid say 25% more in cash, I doubt I would have gone for the startup gig.

Mostly because I have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. I would love not to have to think about money, but realistically, I can’t afford to say “no” to cash.

That's an interesting question — this kind of hiring probably ends up biasing the hiring process towards a certain kind of people.

Not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying that this type of situation (giving up higher wages for opportunity or mission) definitely selects for certain types of people in certain situations.

Time will tell, but I'm not convinced! One third of our employees are parents.

Money isn't everything and there are more ways to be family friendly than offering the highest salary. For example, we offer 1 month of paid parental leave (at 75% salary) for all genders.

We're possibly the smallest startup in the world to offer something like this. But I think it's morally correct, not damaging from a business perspective (employees aren't focused on work anyway with a new child), and it certainly helps us compete with companies that are much bigger and even give higher compensation.

*Depending on your country and your gender, you might get better benefits for a longer period of time. This is the minimum you'll get (at our expense)

> Time will tell, but I'm not convinced! One third of our employees are parents.

What’s the distribution, though.

When I started as an engineer in a small startup over a decade ago, the ratio was similar, but mostly the higher ups were parents. The vast majority of engineering, sales and marketing were either unmarried or childless.

> Money isn't everything and there are more ways to be family friendly than offering the highest salary. For example, we offer 1 month of paid parental leave (at 75% salary) for all genders.

Many companies offering high salaries also have parental leave, so this may not be a factor either.

The engineers have kids.

That's how I hire and run software development projects. I hire with this management style in mind. Hiring people who can't work this way raises the risk that person will not work out for other reasons. There are big companies throughout tech that over-control their developers and other key workers. I don't know how they arrived at the theory that they can get more work, more reliably, out of coders by "managing" them with over-formalized project management styles.

There is some aspects of process, like creating adequate test code and root cause analysis, that needs to be formalized. But apart from the it makes no sense for coders in a first tier tech company to be managed by bureaucratic methods like SAFe. I recently recruited a very high achieving engineer out of an organization that I would not have thought would be so bureaucratic.

> You're an adult, we don't want to decide for you how you work best.

I wish more people thought this way.

There was a poll about this recently on HN and salary did actually score much higher than culture.

I think the reality is it’s complicated and many things need to be above a threshold, and reasonably better than their current role.

From my perspective, in a perfect world, culture would be more important than salary... but it is much easier to lie about the culture at the interview, and also much easier to change the culture later. The information about salary is more reliable.

This matches my experience. Last time I changed jobs, the questions I asked were all thinly veiled scenarios to draw out whether as a developer I’d have the agency to do things without micromanagement. My now team lead saw through this pretty quickly and said he doesn’t believe in involving anyone in a decision who can’t add value to the discussion. That answer pretty much convinced me to join.

This is where being open to remote helps, i work for a cool SF company which is a startup, i get paid probably slightly lower than their engineers in SF. I'm fine with that only because i live in a low col area, if i lived in SF, i would feel an anxiety that i would never be able to afford to live there on startup salaries, which is both true and kinda sad.

Wow, that’s exactly what I want and haven’t been able to quite put into words. And you’re the only person in a leadership position that I’ve seen who gets it. Maybe I should work for you!

Maybe you don't.

Not if your next company has customers in more than one timezone and one of them is polar opposite of yours and by "manage your own hours" the implicit expectation from you was that "manage customers as well whether it's your sleeping hours or waking hours".

That's exactly how my company played its cards by allowing "flexibility" and then later confidently telling "well, it's your responsibility" while hiring in other timezones has been "on the cards" since 2+ years now.

Some CEOs tell devs at the time of hiring - "we are a family", "we don't differentiate between day and night", "we are hustlers".

Anyway, besides the bleak possibility I painted I hope OP's company does it better.

OP here and that's not the intention.

I very much hope that we will manage to stay the same as we scale and grow.

Send a CV to natan@robusta.dev

Ahah, bonus upvote for being straight to the point :)

How close are you to IPO?

We're pretty far away. Why?

A big reason for joining startups, even with a lower offer, is the IPO upside. I was wondering if that was relevant to your case.

There's a trade-off.

The closer you get to an IPO the less options you get (in terms of equity percentages). On the other hand, there is far more certainty that those options are worth something.

At an early stage startup you can get very substantial equity, but in exchange for higher risk.