The idea of having more purpose at startups sounds nice but really doesn’t add up to me. If you’re talking about the first employee at the company, even the fi

The idea of having more purpose at startups sounds nice but really doesn’t add up to me. If you’re talking about the first employee at the company, even the first ~5 engineers, then yeah I buy it. The work is very different and there’s a lot of purpose while you are still pre product/market fit. But the problem is, if the startup is succeeding the work becomes similar to bigger tech companies pretty quickly - the PMs and designers are dictating exactly what to build, and as an engineer you show up and build that. If you were to leave, someone else could probably take over for you pretty easily. Even by like 5 or 10 engineers, the average engineer at a startup is already becoming a cog in the machine. But the startup is still a long way from being able to compete with FAANG on comp. Is it really worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to be a slightly different type of cog?