I’ve considered some startups, but it seems like it’s often difficult to enforce boundaries on work… I benefit a lot from being able to go offline completely on evenings and weekends. That was always possible in my last job except during the occasional oncall and maybe one or two major launches per year. Also, the pay offered is usually half of what I made in my last job, or less. If the current market situation persists for another six months I’ll probably relax my standards. Or if I get contacted by a startup that’s especially impressive or interesting, or someone I trust tells me it’s a great place to work.
Pay isn’t the most important factor, but I don’t want to get locked in at low comp and have to change again in six months. Also, I have a hard time getting objective information about the work culture at startups. With Google or whatever I can always find contacts who work there and ask them how they feel about their job; with startups every person I talk to is trying to convince me to join and is incentivized to downplay the problems.