A good company will reward key people with equity.
Either you were not a key person or you badly picked the company you worked for.
> Either you were not a key person or you badly picked the company you worked for.
This is a really uninformed and insulting reply. You speculate without having any knowledge or details about the situation.
First of all, I didn't join the company with the intention of staying 8 years or rising to management; I joined because they offered a big pay raise from my previous job. So no, I didn't badly pick the company I worked for.
Second, I personally wasn't looking for equity, I was looking for power, the ability to make independent decisions.
Third, a more general point: BigCo engineers get equity in the company, but they're still just cogs in the machine.
This is merely a logical conclusion of the previous statement that I made.
Feeling insulted by logic really takes the cake for a computer scientist.
This is key. I worked for a small company for 8 years, and in the end I realized that the owners still wanted me to be just a cog, and I would never be anything except a cog in their (small) machine. That's when I quit and started my own company.
The gap between employees and owners is massive and almost always insuperable.