Re:An Offer
by mronge on Sunday December 09, 2007 @06:58PM
(#87530)
From my own experience I've found the percentage your looking at, 0.166, to be about the industry average for a software engineer joining around the 10th person.
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Re:An Offer
by nostrademons on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:08AM
(#87819)
That's been about my experience too. It's almost exactly what I got (stock-wise; my salary was about half that) when I joined a startup at age 19 as the 13th employee.
In the sense that many people on this forum are the uber-productive hackers described by PG in essay form, the industry average is low.
Not if it's what the market bears.
Sure -- I am saying that the industry average is low for an uber-hacker, because he or she is worth more... this gets us to the Grahamian theory of business, where the only way to get paid what you are worth is to start a company.
I am saying that the industry average is low for an uber-hacker...
I don't have any direct knowledge of palish's qualifications, and I certainly mean him no disrespect -- but his self-description (19 years old, programming for 7 years, high school drop-out) doesn't exactly scream "uber-hacker" to me.
I'm not. But I do my best and learn more every day.
Right, and (speaking as a 26 year old with a doctorate in CS) what you've done is quite impressive for a 19 year old. But you have to compare this job offer to the other jobs available to you -- not compare it to the jobs available to other YCers (which is, in effect, what you're doing by asking what other YCers would do in this situation).
Sure. I guess all I am saying is that members of this forum and YC applicants are much more likely to be uber-hackers than your average corporate developer. It's not an overly meaningful statement, but I'm pretty sure it is true because of strong outliers like yourself.
If I had to pick 10 applicants for a software company and I knew nothing about them except whether or not they had accounts here, I would take 9 news.yc'ers and one other, just in case.
Hiring someone based solely on the fact that they read this site seems like a pretty awful idea to me. Of course, if you knew nothing about them except whether or not they had an account here, the results would likely be fairly random.