If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles, and you're willing to work 996, be just a little bit smarter and found your own startup and take all the upside.
I think your framing is backwards.
Getting hired as a random employee, going in expecting 9-9-6, with the sort of comp these companies manage to pay, means there is a smartness ceiling, not floor.
does that work? how do you convince investors to give you money if you don't have a network/didn't go to stanford?
This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.
Without pedigree, you get a pitch if you have something real and are lucky
With pedigree, you can pitch science fiction and get funded.
It is extremely rare that I've seen such grotesque errors and this not have founding members from the MIT/Standford-esque crowd. A notable example is Rabbit R1, who clearly pitched science fiction, but then again Jesse Lyu has connections to Y-Combinator. On a side note, I lost a lot of respect for several researchers when I saw them promoting or talking about how impressive the R1 was after the announcement. I don't expect the public to be able to tell what's Sci-Fi (though there were clear signs of demo faking), but researchers (being one myself) should have clearly known such claims required orders of magnitude more advanced tech than what was currently available.
s/smart/stupid/g
Imagine if ownership of a company was divided according to the amount and skill level of work.
- Builders produce food, mine resources, build houses/machines, do research, provide essential services, etc.
- Redistributors take a cut from builders, by providing a non-essential service like salesmen or assistants who call themselves managers, by getting themselves into a position of power where they have many builders work "under" them or simply by holding and "renting" limited resources like housing
I feel like this division is at the core of inequality (money per unit of work only as long as you work vs money for no work in perpetuity). Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.
Of course it is. You are limited to 168 hours in a week that you can do work.
But there is no limit to the hours that other people can work for you.
Because this can't be that hard to understand even for the average person.
A lot of people who care are unable to do anything about it because representative democracy is too indirect.
And yes, I think a lot of people don't fundamentally understand this, otherwise things like co-ops would be more common.
Sorry to break this to you but if you think Sales is non-essential, you don't know anything about startups.
Of course you need to sell your product but as a builder you can do it yourself. It's not your specialty so you likely will be worse at it than a dedicated person and will have less time for actual building.
The key is that builders can exist without salesmen. But salesmen without builders have nothing to sell.
I am against some specializations getting paid per unit of work regardless of the market value of their product while other specializations get paid a cut of the market value.
I am against positions of power which allow people who don't produce anything to decide how much other people who do actually produce something get paid.
Etc.
I am fundamentally against inequality.
One who can both build and sell is indeed a rare specimen (unicorn?). I know many builders and less than 10% of them can sell.
You might be missing a whole paradigm that was written about in the 19th century and implemented in the 20th century, to deleterious effects.
And all of the risk.
Encouraging anyone to start their own company is deeply irresponsible. Most startups fail. If you're needing encouragement to do it - if you're not already fully deluded that you're the special snowflake unique genius who will succeed where all others have failed - you shouldn't be doing it.
Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.
An employee has the opposite arrangement, they find a job to receive money. A CEO finds money to have a job.
That's not just false but very often false.
Never said they weren't. But they're taking _less_ risk because they are at least taking a salary the whole time.
So, where's the risk? You still just were working anyway, pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years. And now you have "Founder" or "Founding Engineer" or "CEO" or "CTO" on your resume. So you didn't have a good exit. So what?
We have a difference of understanding of what "startup" and "failure" mean. I'm not just saying "most startups don't have an exit event" - I'm saying "most startups make negligible money (either through revenue or investment), so the founders are taking a loss the whole time they're working".
If that's not correct, then a) I need to update my mental model of the whole situation, and b) thank you for bringing it to my attention!
If they can't get funding off the MVP then yes they're 20k in the hole, but at least they were working in the meantime.
so how is it different being a salaried employee at one of these companies? You say they're likely to fail; shouldn't you get the bigger lottery ticket then?
For a CEO founder, 996 is necessary to even have a shot at building and fundraising, and even then you're likely to quickly fail. Instead an IC banks on joining a founder who has funding and can get more while you build and collect a reasonable salary, and save for rainy day.
From what?
It's a big if. Few can get funding especially without connections. In that case, the odds are heavily against you.
I'm not sure what is being argued here - if you have connections, can get the money and the opportunity is clear, go for it. However, you should be clear with the above before you put your assets at risk - a job, property, savings or whatever.
It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling. That seems obvious, but what do I know.
Don't get me wrong, I agree. I'm just pointing out that for those who do manage to get funding (however fickle and/or unfair the process may be) all the natural risks of true entrepreneurship are moot.
I speculate that most people here, have come under the receiving end of what "At Will" contact.
E.g. I'm from New Zealand, and at-will contracts are not legal for employees. A company can use contracts (employing a contractor) but contracts are effectively restricted to professional specialists. A company can use temping agencies but the agency takes a big commission on top of wages. A company that has to sack someone can often get hit with financial penalties through the employee rights protection laws.