Hacker News Reader

Working at a startup "for the money" is like playing the lottery, you may hit it big, but a lot of startups just crash and burn.

In the meantime you're making a lot less than someone working at a large company. You could take the $50K/yr pay difference and buy lottery tickets with that.

View on HN

You are right but it's not like the startup is not paying you anything. So it's not exactly the same odds of a lottery. Most startups pay from 100-125k and Google is not that far off from that range.

The gap in base-pay+bonus is usually like 20-30%, plus there's the fact that you're getting stock you can actually sell on top of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com