After Skype and Zynga, equity compensation is worthless. The Facebook IPO is creating more than 1000 millionaires. Early people didn't do so badly with Linked

After Skype and Zynga, equity compensation is worthless. The Facebook IPO is creating more than 1000 millionaires. Early people didn't do so badly with LinkedIn, Zynga, or even Groupon either. There were a grand total of four (4) people affected by the Zynga equity contract renegotiation you reference. startups should be paying Obviously startups don't have money, they have equity and a dream. This is the point of a startup. If all one cares about is median-case money rather than impact or max-case money, startups are indeed irrational and one should work at Oracle or something. That said, it is the presence of startups recruiting great engineers that don't care as much about money that is causing bigcos like Google to offer higher salaries. It is the only way they can compensate for the bureaucracy. An average (median) engineer should be making $200,000 Unfortunately, this is similar to saying that teachers, cops, firefighters, housemakers should be extremely well paid. Everyone thinks their own talent is surpassingly rare and their job is crucial to society. But the truth is that engineering salaries have been driven up by a startup bubble in much the same way finance salaries have been driven up. When the bubble pops and many of the startups without much revenue fail, salaries are likely to fall back down to earth. Additionally, savvy employers will find other ways to get more people into programming. As people who would have trained to become chemical, electrical, or mechanical engineers start retraining to learn programming (e.g. via sites like Codeacademy), in response to market signals, salaries will invariably go down.