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Comment by dinkumthinkum | Hacker News Reader

Seems like mostly a bunch of whining about how because you are a startup it is ridiculous to think you'd pay people decent salaries. This could have been condensed to "I'm a startup, therefore I pay pennies on the dollar; don't expect anything else." Full stop. ... All right, there was a tiny bit about people should expect to work on a variety of things rather than just Javascript or whatever, fine, but common sense to me.

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I believe there is this stigma that says "equity conversation" == "I will pay you crap". Personally, I don't believe this to be true. If you are switching to my startup, it is so you can be in a better situation and I have to acknowledge that. How we pull/push the equity vs cash lever should make both parties happy.

I know you're taking a fair amount of criticism about this post, with some saying that your attitude toward employee compensation reflects poorly on you and/or you company. However, as someone who doesn't know you, I'm pretty damn impressed with your ability to respond in a very cool, calm, and rational manner to very pointed criticism. If I lived on your side of the country, I'd certainly look into your company since that kind of attitude in a founder tends to permeate a company. I would take (and have taken) a 20%+ pay cut to work with calm, rational bosses and co-workers.

And it is comments like yours that make posts like these worth it. Thank you for the kind comment.

I felt like that at first but I think the issue is that the potential employee wanted his normal salary in addition to equity. He would not undertake any risk for that equity and that can definitely lead to problems in company camaraderie.

Having said that, I think that the post has a slightly angry tone which I do not like. People can ask whatever they want in exchange for their work. If they are not worth it, don't hire them. If they are, get them on board. No need to write a blog post about it though.

The risk is in abandoning your good job at a stable firm working for a known, reasonable entity for a pot shot that could be just about anything and statistically will most likely fail, taking you down with it since you're being paid $60,000 below market according to the owner's own admission.

It's amazing that people don't think that is worth considering.

Yes but according to the article, he wanted his normal salary and the equity. So the only part of your comment that applies is leaving a stable job for an unstable one.

This is a risk but not a big risk at all if the engineer was "one of the best engineers in his area" because he would be able to find another job easily.

I think it would depend on what kind of trade off he was offering James. Offering 120k and equity instead of 135k is a different thing to offering 80k and equity instead of 135k.

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