The start-ups could do the very hard work to make sure that employees can trust the stock options.

I've seen all sorts of games. One of the most common, which is surely a violation of fiduciary duty but no one cares to do anything about it, is when the VCs with 3 of 5 seats on the corporate board negotiate a sell-out that matches, down to the dollar, the amount of money needed to make the VCs represented by those 3 seats 100% whole, and not one dollar more.

In order for options to pay out, there are bunch of hurdles that all need to be cleared in a row, with no mess-ups in between, and many of them are not in your control at all.

OP and article's point is that startups are sort of like a crapshoot. You can have the best product, the best team, do everything you read on HN and elsewhere and still fail. That's the type of environment-high risk but not necessarily high reward. It's not like speculating on financial markets because startup costs a chunk of your life. I've toiled for years trying to be a startup and what I realized is, people are so focused on startup they forget that it's just a business at the end of the day with checks and balances to answer to. Early stage VC funding is fuelling this aggressive style which only works in the favor of VC's not necessarily the founders and their employees.

You are just a naked call option for these VCs-unlimited upward potential, limited capital loss. It make sense for VC's to spray and pray to see what sticks.

I don't want my life to be a fucking call option for somebody to fulfill their ephemeral desires for more wealth with diminishing returns and benefit to society.

I read that as "most startups should fail before trying to hire skilled employees".

If you don't have the cash on hand to pay competitive wages, you should not be hiring the employees.

I would never again work at a startup for the unilaterally renegotiable lottery tickets they are somehow allowed to call "options", instead of salary. If they really, really needed to compensate me with something other than cash, maybe I'd do it for actual stock and retained copyrights in my code. Maybe I'd do it for bonds with a coupon rate 10% above t-bills. But they would definitely also have to do something to polish my resume in case the company fails early. Overblown job title. Gratuitous supervisory authority over someone not needing supervision. Authority to do a side project using a rising-star tech stack.

If you can't give me cash, you have to give me something of equivalent value. If, in the long run and in aggregate, people who have ever been startup employees are earning less than those who were always employees of established companies, the startups are simply not compensating appropriately. And in that case, "don't work for startups" is the correct advice.

I could understand the hostility if you approach the subject with unsubstantiated statements like "almost never economically rational".

It would be easier to support the claim that most startup employees earn less over their career than those who only ever work for BigCorp.. Though I've never personally seen data suggesting that's necessarily true. You have to consider length of career, job and city mobility, career mobility, etc.

"Economically rational" does not mean BigCorp > Startup career pay.. it means it's not rational to accept startup career pay. That's a much harder statement to defend (honestly, I don't think it's the case).

Working for a startup is worth it when you are looking for experience or something you couldn't do at a big company. Everybody should work for an early startup at least once just to see what it's like.

Startup compensation, however, is a roulette table you have to work to sit at.