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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Good advice buried in the article: work for the experience, not for the money. I hear it time and again, someone talking about the equity they got and how "if it takes off..." much money they could make. Then I get to be the wet blanket that explains slim odds, how much 0.5% really is, and dilution.

I do have one quibble with the author, and that's about how options make employees "owners". Eh, not quite. First, they have the option to be part owners. Second, the options you get as a grunt on the front lines are often not the same as the ones founders and VCs get. IOW, you'll get to go to the back of the line when payout time comes.

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To its credit though when it works, even with modest options, it can work well. I joined Sun Micro the monday after they went public and those options, while small compared to other employees that were already employed, effectively quadrupled the economic value I got out of my first four years at the company.

That's true enough, but even back then your case was not the norm, and while I have no hard data to back this up, I heavily suspect the situation is even worse now as contemporary companies seem much more willing to publicly fuck over option holders, ala Zynga or Skype.

Hold on ... the advice is to decide whether you want to earn or learn. After a certain age, lets say 32 to pick a random number, the marginal benefit of learning is less than earning.

It probably depends on what you're learning. Not all knowledge/experience has equal personal or marketplace value. I'm past your random number, and as you expect, there's opportunities with good education value I've turned down. There's still some I'd take a pay cut for.

Also, it's not really certain that you'll learn more at a startup than at an established company:

- Most startups fail, so all you might end up learning is one particular way how not to run a startup, not how to run a successful startup.

- Many startups are run by younger people who themselves may not have had very much experience shipping products or running a company.

- Startups are under pressure to deliver quickly before the money runs out, so you might not spend as much time considering alternative approaches to problems, which is one of the ways to get deep understanding of a problem domain. The desire to move quickly might also pull them in the direction of quick and dirty solutions instead of solid engineering.

On the plus side, you might end up with more responsibility for the product than you would get in a larger company, and there are many things you could learn from that experience.

I disagree with your first point. Everything you learn is not dependant on the outcome. There is much you can learn in a startup that may not be negated by the company failing: how to wear multiple hats, individual tactics that alone weren't enough to save the company, etc. etc.

Learning failures is just as important as learning successes.

/lesson I learned in 5th grade science fair

Only if those lessons are applicable. Startups fail for lots of reasons, only some of which are generalizable.

Excellent point. I'm 30, with 12 years of experience. I still learn something new everyday, but I make sure to earn as much as possible doing it.

First, thanks for sharing the article! I agree that nominally the employees lives won't drastically change unless you are in an extraordinary situation. I do, however, believe that a culture of ownership is super important. Ownership, no matter how small, has a psychological impact on an employee and a generally strong impact on the culture.

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