I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. When I was being made an offer at my present company, I very specifically told them not to use a higher salary to incen

I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. When I was being made an offer at my present company, I very specifically told them not to use a higher salary to incense me: I wanted to make a decision based on factors that compound over time. These factors are quality of peers, challenge of work, autonomy: all of these translating to "will I do work that I find fulfilling, will I learn something at this job that will make me more useful myself to future employers, my profession of Computer Science/Software Engineering and society as a whole". I don't mean "will I learn a shiny new technology X", but rather will I learn new concepts (from work itself, from interacting with people smarter than me and with different skill sets) that change the way I approach existing problems and allow to me approach new ones. Unfortunately, many start-ups are (justifiably) high on the former (no legacy constraints, chances to use better tools) but low on the latter. Other factors are often also a combination of these: working hours is a function of autonomy and ability to work from home (or come in and leave at times when there's no traffic) can mitigate a bad commute. Under no circumstances, however, do I say engineers should be underpaid: the salary shouldn't impose a burden, it should allow you to (when living within your means) save towards retirement (without counting on winning the IPO sweepstakes), towards your family, towards (if you're inclined that way) a mortgage (1). However, pretty much every offer I've had matched those criteria very well. Decisions had to be made by other parameters. Shares are a very complex topic: while it's important that employees be a share holder (tying your own financial success to the company's), the number of options, the strike price and even the stated equity percentage are often meaningless when stated _without a context_. There's different kinds of liquidity, there's reverse splits, follow on funding rounds, different types of stock, different vesting agreements. Just because someone told you "you have 0.25% of the company stock", it doesn't imply that you'll be a millionaire if they sell at a $400 mm valuation. Work is where you're spending the majority of your waking hours. While an eager recruiter may tell you "what's the worry, just spend two years here and then we'll have an exit and you'll be rich!", it's a tremendous decision (especially if you're enthusiastic and passionate about your field of work, as most on HN are) that can't be boiled down to any single number. (1) One exception here is for fresh graduates. Public, prestigious technology companies do occasionally [edit: added occasionally, per a comment] underpay them (much more so, in practice, than funded startups: there are established procedures and formulas for determining salaries) and the pay off (in terms of skills learned, confidence gained, exposure to smart and experienced colleagues) is often worth it if you pick the right team and the right project.