He was responding to me and that’s a very reasonable response. When I was in the market for your standard enterprise CRUD Enterprise dev jobs, I would have taken a cash compensation of $150K - $160K and zeroed out the equity.

What I wouldn’t do is jump through any hoops like a take home test when jobs in that pay range are (were? I don’t know what the current market is like) a dime a dozen and I could just do one phone screen and a soft skills interview for half a day and get a job making that much.