AureliaDalek

Think of them like lottery tickets. Yes, they could be worth millions of dollars, but the chance of that happening is very, very slim.

The tradeoff for the bad hours/pay is that you'll get more autonomy in your work and the ability to really influence the product. To me, this is why you should work for a startup. Certainly not for the stock options.

These people seem crazy to me, since 40k is a pretty manageable amount to pay off in 10 years. Even with interest, it's not more than 6-8k per year, max. I was expecting this article to have examples of people who were 200k+ in debt. I'm more sympathetic to those people, under the argument that they were too naive and should never have been given the loans in the first place. But 40k? That's reasonable, if you ask me. High, yes. But perfectly possible to pay back.