Totally agree on CEO compensation and not valuing the employee - often even the founders get screwed in those deals. This is the problem. The "dream of equity

Totally agree on CEO compensation and not valuing the employee - often even the founders get screwed in those deals. This is the problem. The "dream of equity" doesn't pay out so many times that people shouldn't assume it's part of compensation. I recall losing some relatively good engineers at various startups due to very small, in the end, not bank-breaking levels of compensation, we just couldn't compete with larger companies, when I really would have loved to hire them and maybe just hire less people. Meanwhile, people who work at companies like Cisco in the area are able to command about 30-40% more in salary sometimes and have better hours. If you find the right big company, your work can be quite as good as a small one, and you may have better hardware/software resources. For me, I think the answer is mid-size to large startups right now, but small ones can be good. Can be. But they can go either way really quick. I recall a similar thread somewhere about sales compensation, which gets super crazy at times, but sometimes getting an engineer who is going to work tons of hours $100k (who is going to make the product you sell or raise money for) at some companies can be really hard. It's not right. They lose big to save a dime in the most important areas and blow it elsewhere.