If an employee is so valuable that it hurts when they leave, maybe they should have been given more incentives to stay. You can't say that an employee is selfi

If an employee is so valuable that it hurts when they leave, maybe they should have been given more incentives to stay. You can't say that an employee is selfish when they're the ones doing all the hard, laborious technical work and getting almost nothing out of it aside from a below-average startup salary. This might come as a shock to some, but engineers have feelings and ambitions too. In this highly competitive market, it makes sense to give your employees more equity if you want to hold on to them. When you consider supply and demand, the ratio of founders to engineers is now much higher than it ever was. Great engineers are rare. I've left quite a few companies, even a promising startup - Would I have left if I held even 5% equity in that company? Probably not. If you don't give your 'valued' employee decent equity then you are the selfish one and I hope that they do leave (if only out of respect for the profession). I've seen too many self-important founders who think that they deserve twenty times more equity than their best employee (just because they're friends with a rich investor). Taking risks is easy (and kind of fun), doing mind-numbing programming every day for 10 years is not (and working for a single company, in a single problem domain for that long IS mind numbing). Also, let's not pretend that engineers aren't taking risks. 5 years of a young engineer's life is a huge risk especially when you consider that a lot of engineers start to slow down as they get older.