Anecdotally, that's not my experience. I see a lot of people working at startups who got tired of doing things at big companies that just weren't that interesting to them. Those folks have often made enough money that they can afford to work at a startup for a few years because the work itself is more fun, the company has a mission they like, or they appreciate having a bigger day-to-day impact.

As a startup founder in San Francisco, I will say that it is increasingly hard to compete for early- to mid-career engineers. So maybe it's true that the pool of people with less than, say, 5 years of dev experience who choose to work at a startup is "lower quality" than those who choose to work at a FAANG, at least using the measures that big companies tend to use in filtering/evaluating.

But engineers with less than 5 years of work experience are often not the most valuable engineers. :-)

> I see a lot of people working at startups who got tired of doing things at big companies that just weren't that interesting to them. Those folks have often made enough money that they can afford to work at a startup for a few years because the work itself is more fun, the company has a mission they like, or they appreciate having a bigger day-to-day impact.

The kind of people you describe are basically retired, and working primarily for recreation. While they do exist, they're very rare, and one thing is certain about them: they will _not_ put up with crazy work hours, intense crunches, etc.

They are not the type of driven people you need at a startup. They're essentially doing this for fun. If there are too many long days or unpleasant tasks - they're out.

Unfortunately, startups need these long days and grueling tasks done, and fast. Far more than the big companies do.

So no, these magical people aren't the solution to the fundamental issue, which is: smart employees realized that engineer equity at startups is low value, and can't compare to what big profitable companies pay.

The only solution is to increase the equity upside, not rely on the recreationally retired to run your startups.

I agree about offering early employees as much equity upside as you can (and, just as importantly, a great work environment and team culture).

But I disagree that the kind of people I described are rare, or that they are "basically retired."

That's just not my experience. Many of the most valuable, hard-working engineers I know at startups have a few years of big company experience in their recent past, and are choosing to do the startup thing all in. Sure, because it's "fun" -- but fun doesn't mean fun every day, and it certainly isn't a synonym for easy. Nobody who has done one thinks startups are easy. :-)

Some of us like going to work to do hard things.

> Many of the most valuable, hard-working engineers I know at startups have a few years of big company experience in their recent past, and are choosing to do the startup thing all in.

I completely agree with this, except for the "all in" part. If you re-read my GP reply, that's what I was disagreeing with.

Not that they're not valuable - on the contrary. An engineer who did well at Google for 5-6 years is going to be incredibly valuable, and most startups would be lucky to get even just one or two of these in the team.

However, they have a different mindset, and I say that from experience. They don't need this job, and they don't see it as financially or otherwise important. In short, nothing is keeping them there. They're not committed to the success of the startup. Making 250K is nice, but not after you made 500K or more for several years, and can easily get the same pay if you wanted it, or find another 250K startup job in a heartbeat.

There's a reason bigger companies spend huge amounts of money to pay essential employees very well. It doesn't guarantee that they stay, but not paying them well certainly doesn't help.

So when the going gets rough, these people leave. It makes total sense, they have no reason - financial or otherwise - to commit to the success of the startup as a business. They're there for a good experience.

Three thoughts just based on my own personal experience working at startups for ~20 years:

Many, many people are committed to jobs for reasons other than money, across all walks of life. This is often true for engineers, too.

Few experienced engineers in SF (who are also US citizens or have green cards) are locked into any job. If you're making $750k/year at Google, the Apple or LinkedIn or Salesforce or Facebook will pay you $750k/year and make up the value of the RSUs that you're leaving on the table. The exception to this is if you're at a growth-stage company and have a lot of vested stock with a current valuation much higher than the strike price but no liquidity. Leaving that situation means paying a big purchase+tax bill now, without any guarantee of when you will have an asset you can sell. That's a tough decision.

It's a good thing to have employees who aren't locked into the job by a sense of financial need. I'm not saying that it's not also great to have young or otherwise early-career employees who, just situationally, aren't as financially lucky. But lots of terrible dynamics come from power imbalances between companies and employees. You only need to spend a little bit of time at a company that employs a lot of people with restrictive work visas to see this play out in soul-crushing ways.

> Many, many people are committed to jobs for reasons other than money, across all walks of life. This is often true for engineers, too.

Of course. But there's a reason why SV begun this expensive tradition of giving engineers substantial equity: the realization that startups and other ambitious companies must align employee incentives with company success.

It's possible that the employee will develop some irrational dedication to his job that is not based on any rational incentive structure, but that's not something you want to count on, especially with the type of intelligent, rational employees you hope to hire.

Incidentally, I've seen this position of "employees should just be dedicated regardless of equity" elsewhere in this thread. It feels like a step back to me. SV took a big step forward giving employees meaningful equity some 50 years ago. Now we're trying to roll this back in the name of... what? VC greed?

Again, I definitely agree about early stage employees having substantial equity.

But I would also not call dedication to a job for reasons that go beyond compensation "irrational."

There are costs to "dedication to a job". These costs must be balanced with benefits, or choosing them is irrational.

Notice you're talking about "dedication", which is different than "I'm working on rewarding problems in a fun team". That's the opposite of dedication. Dedication is what keeps you committed to a team when it's no longer fun, working on problems that are no longer rewarding.

I've seen plenty of people give their heart and soul to startups, that ended up exiting in ways that made the founders and VCs rich, while these people walked away with nothing, often not even a job (since their old job was effectively gone in the exit). Is it rational to choose such fate?

> I see a lot of people working at startups who got tired of doing things at big companies that just weren't that interesting to them. Those folks have often made enough money that they can afford to work at a startup for a few years because the work itself is more fun, the company has a mission they like, or they appreciate having a bigger day-to-day impact.

Those folks went through FAANG first (not startup first) though :). I don't know if they decided to move to startups for the experience/thrill/fun or they're just there so they can go back to FAANG and get the full 4-years RSU + sign-on.

Plenty of us don't want to work for them regardless of pay.

I'm not sure "plenty". More like "few".

My experience of working in startups is that they're populated almost entirely by people who openly mock the idea of 'selling out' by working for a big firm. Maybe that's just the places I've worked (that tend to either be in creative sectors or 'worthy' industries like education).

I'd be curious to see a poll on this though.

I don't know about that. I refuse to live in the Bay area and have no desire to live and work for one of the "big players".

Seems like a sad and shitty way to think about other people.