I'm waking up personally to the unethical side of Software development as well. You can either do little and get paid pocket change or you can provide a ton of value for pocket change next to some promises lulling you in, where the value of your work exponentially increases, but you will see nothing of it and whatever you do: you are still a replaceable cell in excel to them and there will be ways where you get dragged over the table. If the money isn't directly in your bank account, it might as well not exist or was a lie.
Sooner or later you are the horse behind the barn anyway.
As an engineer if you are gonna be a rank and file employee you need to do it for your own reasons. I think the main good reasons to do it are:
1. It's relatively chill and you value the stability. You deliver competence from 9-5 then go home to your family or some other thing that's more important to you than work.
2. You really enjoy the pure engineering side and find meaning in the technical artifact you're creating. Probably it's open source and has some value/community outside of your employer.
3. You're gaining valuable experience that you can later leverage into something else. Probably you're in the first 5 years of your career.
If the main thing driving you is growing a business, and you don't directly own (not options or RSUs or whatever, actual real equity) a significant slice of it, you are very likely misdirecting your energy.
(I guess there are also cases where the mission of your organisation is not profit and you care about that. I don't know any engineers in this position but I might be quite happy working in the public sector).
Okay, but how much do you think you deserve as an employee who has invested none of your money in the company and decided to join on a 6-figure salary only after the company is already through YC, is funded by top investors and looks attractive?
If you’re instantly replaceable by any dime-a-dozen engineer than can install packages on npm and use react components and add a thumbs up to slack messages…to not get accidentally rich because you just took a high paid tech job a year ago…seems fair?
I just fail to see why everyone in the comments here believes they deserve to be compensated at the level of the top 0.01% of all people without starting their own business.
Start your own company if you think it’s so easy to be a founder instead of an employee. Nobody is stopping you.
I also think it’s some crazy cognitive dissonance to assume you’d be able to walk right into a FAANG sr. eng gig instead. As if most startup employees haven’t tried before joining [insert startup].
If it’s so easy to do that instead (and if you think that’s how startups work), why the hell would you join as an early employee instead of starting your own company?
If I join a lottery syndicate and it wins 100m but I only put in 1% of the syndicate amount say $100 do I not deserve $1m because I'm just a "whatever I am just"???
> I just fail to see why everyone in the comments here believes they deserve to be compensated at the level of the top 0.01% of all people without starting their own business.
No one is saying this.
There is no question that the Windsurf and Scale AI ploys effectively left employees with ownership in the company high and dry.
> but how much do you think you deserve as an employee
You deserve what you are promised. If a founder says you will get rich if the company goes to the moon, and they instead do some strange maneuver so only they cash out, the founder is a scumbag.
You are acting like early startup employees risk nothing working for a startup, and invest nothing of their own. Again, that is a weird assumption.
Being a founder is a job as much as being an engineer is and being an investor is - especially if you get investors early and don’t take debt to capitalize the company (which you shouldn’t if you like your life.) If you did take debt as a founder, don’t brag about your bad decisions as if they make you special.
You do sometimes get the 0.31% of a relatively big number under a promise you tag along for two years and some more pocket change on top. Still better than just pocket change zo
I still feel the need to bring clarity by pointing out the obvious in the most direct unfiltered manner, as you can see other commenters in this thread trying to frame it differently with an absurd of confidence while doing so.
