Arguably the existence of several different types of stock options has broken the startup option system, incentivizing founders to play financial games with dilution and debt, and separating their incentive structure from that of their workers. Instead they now get paid with the VCs, which is bad for the workers.
Nothing is worth working like a dog though. That’s always a bad trade.
I took a lower salary to work at a startup I "believed" in. We were eventually acquired and my options were in the low six-figures when exercised. I worked there for 6 years. If I average the options profit and add it to my base salary, I'd have still been underpaid in the local area for my skills and experience level. And that's to say nothing of what the event did to my taxes that year.
> Nothing is worth working like a dog though. That’s always a bad trade.
I never worked like a dog for the place in my story, at least. It had a very sane work/life balance.
For sure not every single startup overworks it’s employees, and not every overworked employee works at a startup. But there is a very common (but not universal!) trend for startup employees to be encouraged to overwork themselves so that their options will be worth more in the long run.
Your mileage may vary, as yours did.
That must be one of those cases where "median" and "average" are very different.
People frequently, and intentionally when it comes to politics, use the word average to muddy the information and evoke whatever emotion they want rather than specify the type of average.
In non normally distributed populations, the average is misleading because of skew at either end of the curve.
How do you get rich as an employee then? Because I've never heard of any salaried line engineer getting rich except through winning the startup lottery. I sure have friends who have done exceptionally well by working for the right startup with the right acquisition however.
Even Google engineers don't feel rich when they have to stretch to afford the down payment on a house in Mountain View.
In exceptional circumstances, yes. In most circumstances equity in a startup ends up being worthless, even in the event of exit. Starting your own startup, or joining a startup as a very early employee can make you rich; anything else and you might as well be buying lottery tickets.
That's not to denigrate startups in any way. Working in a startup is amazing. It's just not how you get rich as an employee unless you are staggeringly lucky.