According to Glassdoor, average programmer salary at GitHub is $150k. That's hardly peanuts. Bay Area overflows with job opportunities. If those talented peop

According to Glassdoor, average programmer salary at GitHub is $150k. That's hardly peanuts. Bay Area overflows with job opportunities. If those talented people would rather get a risk-free work at Google/Facebook/Microsoft for $250k, why didn't they? Majority of software startups require just as much work, pay even less in base salary and their equity is worth $0 in the end, because the founders didn't create a valuable company. You say employees got screwed because they worked hard and didn't make tens of millions. I say they got supremely lucky. A 0.1% of 7.5 billion is $7.5 million, which is more than you can hope to make from cushy G/F/M jobs and certainly more than you can hope to make from an average Bay Area startup.