I think a lot of candidates (speaking for myself here) just don’t care too much to negotiate equity at privately held companies. Given the highly unlikely probability that a company I work for will have a successful exit at all, let alone while I am either employed or hold exercised stock options, it’s all Monopoly money to me. Benefits, salary, and bonuses is the only compensation I negotiate and judge a company on. All the other stuff is just lottery tickets.

Meaning, startup or no, I’m expecting to be paid what I ask. levels.fyi shows that my pay+bonus at my startup for my role matches FAANG compensation so I’m happy with it.

Yeah, I mean, this is my take, too.

I have worked for places that offered equity a few times. It did turn into something once (Google bought my employer). But the actual equity conversion was minor in quantity compared to the rest of my Google TC.

There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company. I don't think this is healthy. The incentives are not there for engineers in startups to really put themselves out there.

> There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company.

Took me 10 years of grinding to finally realize this. Now at this stage the only question is how do I do it?

You can just save your way out too. I started on the path to FIRE (check out /r/financialindependence on Reddit) about 10 years into my career, and it was a huge quality of life improver

Now I'm always sitting on an enormous pile of savings and I have short- and long-term plans to move my career and life forward. It spares me a lot of stress.

This is likely a more "reasonable" path unless you "go into business for yourself" as a plumber or a consultant, neither of which actually makes a salable business.

Especially since you only need to keep your expenses 10% lower (or so) than your after-tax income to hit a reasonable target.

Yeah, I looked into it on my own early in my career, and I thought "Damn, I'd have to save two million dollars to live in retirement off 50k a year for forty years"

Turns out the numbers are a lot more favorable, though. You can count on some level of compounding investment growth even after inflation, you can slash your living expenses after you retire, etc. Suddenly early retirement is a possibility even at a pretty modest income level, without compromising your quality of life too much in the mean time

Are you counting the equity at a large public company to be lottery tickets? Because it's absolutely not. Every quarter a bunch of real money appears in an account with my name on it, that's not a lottery ticket.

No, I specifically mentioned privately held companies.

No they are talking about private companies.

You do you, but even if you don’t expect to make it big its not a good idea to leave money on the table.