You could also ask the question for "why do founders even bother with startups", and you'll get the exact same answer. It seems selfish that they then expect their employees to work for them, not for money, but rather for love and exposure.

Startups can be for a variety of reasons, not everyone who starts a business wants to make billions. Sometimes they just want to have a nice life doing something they enjoy, find value in, or can just make money at.

Then again, I'm on HN. Show me the Benjamins. ;)

Yes, I work for a sense of value and worth to society, and I would accept being paid less if it meant a greater sense of worth. Think about it this way: I have about 40 productive hours per week (young kids, otherwise it'd be more). I could spend 30 hours at a worthless, pointless job that pays well, making enough money for my family, and then 10 hours volunteering on something I care about that makes a difference; or I could spend 40 hours at a job that pays only 3/4 of the former but also achieves my goal of producing valuable things for society. I get paid the same per productive hour, and the latter is much healthier for my psyche.

I currently make around the 20th percentile for my level of experience. I do look for higher paying jobs, but they're all at stupid boring companies doing fintech, adtech, or trying ineffectually to position themselves as middlemen in whatever the latest tech trends are. I don't love my job, but at least I'm making real things that actually help the world.

You are trying to derive emotional value from your job. I did that for a long time.

I don't anymore. I learned it actually made me worse at the job, and didn't allow me to contribute to the things I DEEPLY care about, because I'm actually just pushing work.

It is not an easy lesson. But I'll take the money, and derive my value to society elsewhere. Alot easier that way.

Ask the people who worked at Bell Labs in its heyday, or at NASA during the Apollo program, or who make a modest living earning a salary for a charity or organization they care about -- ask them whether it's a mistake to try to derive emotional value from their jobs. The problem isn't that humans become invested in their work, the problem is that almost all jobs are stupid meaningless bullshit. It might seem like a monumental task trying to reinvent the economy so that most jobs aren't just fucking awful mind-prisons, but it's actually easier than changing human nature. Humans want to care about their work, it's just that the parasitic, psycopathic caste of C-suite "Business Leadership" nepo-babies who currently run the entire economy don't give a shit about what humans want. People in the 1950s were largely proud of their jobs, and not because they were morons, but because their jobs actually mattered, they contributed real things to the company and the world, and they were paid well -- within a factor of 10x what the CEO was paid. None of that is true anymore, and it's not human nature's fault. It's the fault of a small percentage of very specific psycopaths.

It's always about the money. And when someone says it's not about the money, it's absolutely about the money. Once people understand that, the world becomes much easier to navigate.