I'm not sure what part of my comment you are responding to.

This part:

> on the backs of their employees

Is my comment somehow unclear? I don't think I said or even implied that anyone forced anyone to work anywhere.

Perhaps you should just say specifically what you implied, then?

If it's that unclear then I'll rephrase it: If you make a gamble that requires someone's help to pull off, and the gamble is successful, you should share a reasonable amount of your success with the people whom made your success possible. I don't think these founders are sharing a reasonable amount with their employees, and I also think it's sad that this is not only accepted, it appears to be encouraged.

Also employee owned cooperatives are cool, and I wish there were more of them.

> I don't think these founders are sharing a reasonable amount with their employees

Based on what?

Based on the percentages presented in the article that this post is based upon.

What should the percentage have been?

The point I'm making is that my opinion is that the founders here were unfair and that American laborers should expect fairness, not that they paid them some specific amount less than they should have- though I suspect you know this. If you'd like to have a genuine discussion with me then feel free, but whatever you currently appear to be after I have no more interest in pursuing.

GitHub employees agreed to work for pay, both in competitive guaranteed wages (salary, health insurance and other benefits) and also with stock, which is not guaranteed. Sounds fair to me.

You don't think it's fair -- fine, but what would be fair?

Who is suggesting otherwise?

The fact is that the multi-billion payday would not be possible, had they not convinced so many talented people to work for equity-peanuts. Kudos to them!

According to Glassdoor, average programmer salary at GitHub is $150k. That's hardly peanuts.

Bay Area overflows with job opportunities.

If those talented people would rather get a risk-free work at Google/Facebook/Microsoft for $250k, why didn't they?

Majority of software startups require just as much work, pay even less in base salary and their equity is worth $0 in the end, because the founders didn't create a valuable company.

You say employees got screwed because they worked hard and didn't make tens of millions.

I say they got supremely lucky.

A 0.1% of 7.5 billion is $7.5 million, which is more than you can hope to make from cushy G/F/M jobs and certainly more than you can hope to make from an average Bay Area startup.