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This is the most insightful thing I've read about the engineer crunch in a while. The market needs to realize that good engineers have lots of options and that

This is the most insightful thing I've read about the engineer crunch in a while. The market needs to realize that good engineers have lots of options and that 0.1% is just not a meaningful amount. I'd like to see 5-8% for key engineering hires, even as companies approach Series A. Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution? Also, don't forget that 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff is standard, so it's not as if the worth of a meaningful equity offer isn't fully obvious before the shares are "spent" on a key hire (also, before vesting, the risk is totally borne by the employee). I think the ideal situation for engineers would be to earn a solid equity offer and then have a secondary market to use to trade some of it (once it's vested) for fractional ISOs of other promising startups.

dfraser992 13y ago
> Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution? Yes, some of them do. I got forced out of a startup here in London - I was the _only_ full time engineer in the IT dept. (basically was acting CTO) and one part time guy in Russia for some period of time. The company had two sales guys as well, not sure of their compensation but they were making more than me... We all quit within a period of two months due to A) the CEO flat out lying to a customer about the nature of the data they were being sold, in order to secure the sale - the customer later made threats to sue after their patience had been exhausted due to one founder trying for a month to gaslight their board about the technical nature of the data B) lies about the "cash flow problem" which I was told was preventing another person to be hired to help me (the founders were skimming profit before paying everyone, months late) The CEO's wife, who liked to play lawyer, then dragged out paying us for what they owed, trying to arbitrarily reinterpret the language of the contracts, claiming utter nonsense as logic and being over the top abusive in contract negotiations. It was all too much for everyone. Later I found out a $5 mil offer had been made to buy the company from a 3rd party - not much but enough to show the company was certainly going to be viable. So it made perfect economic sense to these sociopaths to drive out everyone who might have some moral claim to profiting from the company's success (i.e. promises were made early about "equity"). The founders deemed I was completely unnecessary at this point due to having built something that could be maintained well enough by cheap labor from India and eLance - to heck with looking into the future and seeing how an experienced engineer might open up new markets, etc. This company lost every bit of technical knowledge they had when I left. But that's sociopaths for you and how business is done anymore. I'm sure SF is full of amateur sociopaths these days.

dfraser992 13y ago

> Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution? Yes, some of them do. I got forced out of a startup here in London - I was the _only_ full time engineer in the IT dept. (basically was acting CTO) and one part time guy in Russia for some period of time. The company had two sales guys as well, not sure of their compensation but they were making more than me... We all quit within a period of two months due to A) the CEO flat out lying to a customer about the nature of the data they were being sold, in order to secure the sale - the customer later made threats to sue after their patience had been exhausted due to one founder trying for a month to gaslight their board about the technical nature of the data B) lies about the "cash flow problem" which I was told was preventing another person to be hired to help me (the founders were skimming profit before paying everyone, months late) The CEO's wife, who liked to play lawyer, then dragged out paying us for what they owed, trying to arbitrarily reinterpret the language of the contracts, claiming utter nonsense as logic and being over the top abusive in contract negotiations. It was all too much for everyone. Later I found out a $5 mil offer had been made to buy the company from a 3rd party - not much but enough to show the company was certainly going to be viable. So it made perfect economic sense to these sociopaths to drive out everyone who might have some moral claim to profiting from the company's success (i.e. promises were made early about "equity"). The founders deemed I was completely unnecessary at this point due to having built something that could be maintained well enough by cheap labor from India and eLance - to heck with looking into the future and seeing how an experienced engineer might open up new markets, etc. This company lost every bit of technical knowledge they had when I left. But that's sociopaths for you and how business is done anymore. I'm sure SF is full of amateur sociopaths these days.