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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Probably not.

If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.

I keep seeing this sentiment, but I think it's important to distinguish between "don't give your people worthless equity instead of a good salary" and "I'm just here for the money." Starting to see a lot of the latter around here and it's disheartening. Sure, broken dreams and failed visions and all of that happens, but it's part of the process when you try to do "big" things. Widespread cynicism will kill high-tech.

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There is nothing wrong with being at work just for the money, and it most definitely does not mean you are cynical. Funding a family or a hobby is a rewarding and valuable life to live. Being in it for the money can be a really powerful way to push through a lot of hard and boring work that nobody capable of doing could possibly be passionate about.

I think that is globally true, largely because for the vast majority of people that is the best that they can hope for given their station.

I however am restricting my evaluation to the domain [high-tech] : [startup], which after all is the core demographic for HN and YC more broadly.

In that context I don't think it's an optimal outlook - and in fact I think it is detrimental to the zeitgeist and pushes further away from the PARC roots of paradigm setting technology development.

I grant that in the current environment it's "idealistic" but I think at the core, the real innovators still have the vision of changing the future through technology - at least I do, and I know I'm not alone in that.

> "I'm just here for the money"...it's disheartening

Yaa, how awful...because my landlord accepts a share of my company CEO's "vision", as does my grocer

> Widespread cynicism will kill high-tech

What a laugh that the heirs, the LP's, the VC's and seeds and angels aren't the cynics, your unhappiness is the twenty-something wage slaves slaving away at all hours building products are now disheartening, because they're buying the BS less and want to keep more of the wealth they're creating.

The heirs and LP's are not "here" for the money. They're in their yachts at Key West, and they have their bets spread.

Woe is us, how disheartening that the people creating the wealth want to keep more of the wealth they create, as opposed to believing the fairy tales the idle class and their myrmidions are telling them.

You're fighting a strawman my friend. I explicitly stated that I was not talking about inequitable distribution of capital in a podunk startup. Indeed, in the context of this, the executives that Mayer would be seeking to incentivize with cash are already in the upper stratosphere of ownership - so given that as a background my slant should have been clear.

Those people, including Mayer herself, are in it for the money and the power/glamour/fame. Look at Mayer -- a Google bigshot who has power over thousands of people at Google, who left because she felt overshadowed by the CEO. She went to Yahoo not because she wanted to do more/bigger/better things -- she could do anything she wanted at Google! -- but because she wanted to be CEO of something.

I like that you are saying people in their 20s making 6 figures are wage slaves. That is a worldview I never really even considered, so you have opened my mind to new possibilities.

making 6 figures can provide a comfortable life but yes definitely a wage slave. I have worked for a few of the super rich and they could easily blow a few million just trying to watch their sporting team while on their yacht. Although this is in the past when they would have a private jet on standby to fly in a copy of the game. Now sat comms are good enough they blow similar amounts without any thought on other things.

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