I told them that offer had poisoned any further conversation.

In all seriousness, I'm not sure why so many people assume that the salaries posted on AngelList should be taken at face value. With minimal due diligence, it's clear that a lot of the startups are unlikely to have enough funding or traction (in the form of revenue) to support the salaries that they purport to be offering. As you pointed out, they're just trying to get warm bodies through the door and hoping a few of them will drink the kool-aid.

I ultimately declined their final offer which they seemed pretty surprised by. It's hard not to take personally after working there and proving my value for two months. Instead of a bum offer from a company I just met, which is no big deal, it really felt like people I thought were my friends were trying to take advantage of the situation. I probably will never do another contract-to-hire. I'm not interested in companies with a try-before-they-buy feeling about candidates, because I think it belies an unwillingness to value and respect the work of talented hard-working technical people.

I made some money and got valuable life experience from it, but I'm still sad about how it went down. There's enough credible salary information out there that companies are really doing everyone a disservice by pulling an extreme lowball on a candidate they want.

Serious question, who in their right mind would take a paltry 1.5% equity and <= 130k/yr for these salary numbers at the level of talent these startups are seeking?

One option is to develop sources of talent which Google's hiring process doesn't reach. They are helped in this by the fact that Google's hiring process is, as has been widely reported, a disaster.

Another option is telling folks that working at a startup with not be like working at BigCo. This is sometimes explained using some or all of: you'll be part of the family, work on things that directly impact users, learn quickly about a wide variety of topics rather than getting to be the world's leading expert in configuring BigCo's proprietary form generator and then repeating that every two weeks for the rest of your career, get to live an extended adolescence during your tenure there (foosballs and drinking and laundry taken care of for you!), etc.

At this point, if I really needed money, I'd try to go back to Google, but if $120k was sufficient -- and it's more than sufficient for most people -- I'd prefer to work at a startup. Even if the equity is worth nothing, it can be a wonderful experience.

Of course, this involved taking on a small risk that the company would not end up IPOing. But everyone in the industry knew it was on its way up, and the company was already mid-sized when he joined.

Google and Facebook (and some other companies) have upped the ante in compensation by offering lots of (liquid) stock.

If you can't read poker hands like that, you are pretty screwed no matter what.

The people who would make it through are going to demand founder-level equity to compensate for the risk associated with the lack of money being offered.

Considering how little Google and Facebook care about false negatives, even seemingly priding themselves on having candidates interview for the same job two, three, or four times over years, I doubt that demographic is really that small.

I basically told a #LargeCorp to fuck off, politely, when they told me they wanted to do a tech screen during business hours [which would mean taking PTO off for it].

I've never had that issue with startups and/or small companies. They've been willing to cooperate and start things off at 4pm.

I highly suspect I'm not the only person that isn't willing to take time off "for the chance to work at #LargeCorp".

Well, I think your tech screening process could use some work then.

There is something wrong if you can't finish a tech screen in an hour imo.

At smaller companies they'll probably have less bureaucracy, so they can make hiring decisions quicker with less paperwork. Also team members will care a great deal more, since they'll be personally working with the candidate.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-microsof...

I suspect so many salary numbers I hear on the street are bullshit, either designed to get me lower my price or raise my price against my best interest.

I believe lots of times, interviewers are not judging the candidates right...so getting in becomes tough.

But even adjusting for the cost of living, I'm glad I see figures like this because it shows how ridiculous some offers are. I got an invitation to apply in Los Angeles last week for webdev, with the bottom set at $40k and the max set at $70k

I would love to see some sort of cost-of-living analysis that didn't just look at average costs of housing and food but also incorporated some mental measure of "being well-off" that used the area's Gini coefficient [0]. I say this because I have lived frugally in Santa Monica, CA and I have lived frugally in Atlanta, GA at approximately the same standard of living but being surrounded by conspicuous outliers definitely made me feel much poorer in Santa Monica. See [1] for academic discussion.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient [1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503742

This analysis is not hard to do for a specific job. If you're looking at a job at a 10-person startup in LA, go to AngelList and look up job postings at 5-10 other LA startups that are a similar size. You'll get a great sense of what a typical offer looks like, and then you can compare that to your own offer.

EDIT:

I lost two really good potential hires once they passed the tech interview and then we decided we couldn't pay them...which is fine initially, but if we can't shed that mindset when our next round closes, I will be sad (and likely available).

If only there was some kind of proxy for salaries, some sort of thing we could offer in lieu of payment to potential employees, some kind of asset whose ownership we could offer with the expectation it'd be worth more later. Man, what a thing that could be.

What kind of work do you do? I work for a non-enterprise Java shop (NLP) up in Dallas. We have trouble finding people worth interviewing, but since I started 2.5 years ago have only had one offer extended and rejected.

EDIT: On the flip side, I have had major trouble trying to get places in Dallas, Austin, and Houston to even talk to me when I have been looking. It took me two years to get what I have now, and my testing of the market recently has been met with silence.

Voodoo and witchcraft. That's the state of the art in software interviewing.

There's a lot involved in hiring--not just technical aptitude, not just "does this person work with your engineering team?", not just "do we runway for this person?". There's also "does this person work with everyone in the company?", "do we value this person enough to give up equity to manage the salary differential?", "do we really need this person's skillset right now, or can we get by?" and many others.

If I had my druthers, we'd hemorrhage out equity and cash to hire the best--the very best--and retain them by working on inspiring projects and helping them grow and help others grow into the best engineers the world has seen since Bell Labs in the mid 70s. Life is too fucking short not to focus on building awesome things with awesome people.

Alas, that's kind of what Apple tried in the late 80s, early 90s, and it basically cost them the company until they were finally able to pay NeXT to acquire them.

There are sad, annoying practicalities in running a business, and sometimes that changes hiring practices from the ideal. :(

EDIT:

The real issue is that the Internet has made it trivial to look at greener grass everywhere, and see how raw a deal one might be getting. Not good for morale, even at decent firms (such as mine).

Worse, it means that hiring from local good schools is a pain in the ass because the graduates are all tuned to Google or Facebook or {{latestFundedSVStartup.compPackage}}. Unless you make it clear to them in an interview that no, they aren't actually worth 80k unless they can hit the ground running, they'll just say "lol, whatevs, I'll go elsewehre". Whether or not they get hired there is not important...I probably won't see them again (even with prodding from emails).

We'll never see the true fallout of that side of the bubble, I think, but I suspect it's pretty rough.

EDIT2:

Just to clear up any misunderstandings: I'm the first engineering hire here, so while I handle a lot of team stuff and whatnot, final hiring authority does not rest with me. I'm not the one deciding whether we can afford a new hire--I just try to find good ones and get them interested.

EDIT3:

Removed "and genuinely do not deserve their asking price" from bit about students. Deserve was wrong word to use--better phrasing would've been "their asking price is based on a market which is not ours".

The problem being, of course, that the standard reference market is SV as popularized by HN and other channels, not whatever their local market is.

Deserve has fairly little to do with it. It's a market. There is a market clearing price. You appear to not want to pay it. That's fine. People do not want to work for you. That's also fine. You being surprised that people are not prioritizing your offers given that you do not pay market wages, that, that makes me scratch my head a little bit.

I am a bit curious about the long-term effects of the market's actions here, evaluated from a "Did we really, truly, optimally allocate resources?".

If you are a tech startup, and can't hire or retain decent talent, that's a pretty important thing for the person deciding these compensation maximums to consider in the context of any growth plans, no? Sounds like I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm curious how you are going about tackling this challenge internally.

If both the company and employee are happy with (and agree to) the employment terms, then it's as optimal as it needs to be.

Saying it should be a different type of optimal introduces Hume's guillotine.

No offense, but as someone who basically pulled aside and told I was asking for too much money before...I suspect you are dismissing it out of hand when the reality is a significant fraction of them can.

Admittedly, I'm not a new grad from a college but I've consistently seen the employer/interview side of the table think they can hire me for less than what I make currently and/or stand a reasonable chance of making in the near future. I'm like "Umm. No?".

That's one of the perks of a big company over a startup for a young graduate - the company can afford the investment in their own potential talent, and can afford to take a loss on the few people who they were wrong about being worth the training.

To me a "hit the ground running" salary is about double that, because that's what I got when I started my current job "hitting the ground running." I don't have a CS degree and have absolutely no formal training in algorithms or data structures, either, but I manage to do quite well in my research oriented role.

Edit: I also am not working for any of the well known major tech companies.

This is not how stocks work. Exceptions aside, every previous round gets diluted by the next round where the 10% eventually becomes 1%. Also, not every employee will stay on for 4 years to vest their stock options completely.

You do have the risk to burn through your allocated employee stock option pool if you're too generous (this is the point after which the investors and founders start to dilute their shares).

I'm missing something.

For example in the UK BT's latest 5 year share save returned over £70k tax free - and that is open to every one.

Web Designer < Web Developer < Software Developer < Software Engineer

There is some overlap between Software Dev & Eng with PM's and Senior Web Dev.

http://www.roberthalf.com/technology/it-salary-center?lobId=...