Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

I mean no offense when I say this, but you're a great example of a "smart but clueless" employee dishonest startup founders prey on. At $500/week, you are making $26,000/year. Assuming you're a good developer (and now manager), you could probably pull in $120,000 working for Google or Facebook, which means you're losing $94,000/year (!) in opportunity cost (not even counting health benefits or other minor perks). You said nothing about equity, but assuming you will own 1% of the company after four years, and assuming the company exits for $50mil, your equity will be worth $500k, while you could have earned $376k working a stable job (again not counting health insurance, plus Facebook gives equity too). Considering that a potential exit opportunity is associated with large risk, the expected value of working for such a startup is miniscule, compared to opportunity cost.

You are not acting to your own advantage financially or emotionally. One option you have is to renegotiate your salary with the founder, and considering how hard it is to find great people, and how little he pays you, I have a strong feeling he'll budge. But if you have options (and it's your market now), do you really want to work for someone who has no ethical standards?

BTW, we're hiring: www.rethinkdb.com/jobs.

EDIT: just read your comment that you do not have any equity. Run, don't walk.

I thing renegotiation is out of the question. I feel even if I renegotiated and it ended up being the perfect compensation/benefits position the day-to-day work environment would become hostile -- and that is something I do not want to happen.

I honestly don't know what I was thinking. -- Well actually I do: Back in 2008, a year and a half into college, I won a local business plan competition and dropped out. (The competition gave office space and some startup capital.) The college I was in was a small community college and the classes weren't that great for the IT field. Going into college I thought everyone would have the same passion I did. Into the first semester I was helping teach my major related courses.

Unfortunately, not having any sense about business and being somewhat misguided by my other founders, the business flopped. I started a second business which did slightly better, and again won the business plan competition again. However our overhead was too high compared to the cashflow coming in. We started working with the company mentioned in this post and I was basically made an initial offer to work exclusively for them. (Mistake.)

Going back to my reasoning: I felt that if this company did go somewhere, that there would no longer be a need or a way to get roadblocked by not having a degree. I am a strong believer in work and passion than a piece of paper. I know I would have never hired any of my classmates from that college.

Although the justification is/was not sound at all. Getting out know is the only way for me to continue to seize my potential. I know continuing down this path will only lead to my own destruction.

You sound like a smart guy. Your failure thus far is an amazing and truly educational amount of experience that will benefit you short- and long-term. You really have a great deal more experience than many, and clearly you have drive and passion.

You're valuable and hardworking, so get the hell out of that shithole.

With your experience, you should be able to make some incredible contributions to any other startup that has a good product/service and actually cares about their employees.

$26,000 a year is ridiculously low... absurdly low. Hard-to-fathom low. If you feel like renegotiating would create hostility then that is far and away the biggest alarm that you need to get out of there.

As coffeemug said, "run, don't walk."

Going into college I thought everyone would have the same passion I did. Into the first semester I was helping teach my major related courses

Don't you hate when you come to that realization, it is even worse when you get out in the real world and find that these people make up a good portion of your technical peers. IT is one of the reasons so many IT projects fail. Crappy people make crappy products when it comes to software.

Don't fall into the education trap. I know that it chews on you and can give you an inferiority complex but unless that degree has MIT or Stanford it's crap. I fell into that trap and spent 40k to get no further than I already was. But I started thinking in my mind, I will get passed up for other people. This was after my first CTO position. Imagine that, I had made CTO, went on to sell the company, was wildly successful and yet the education trap was chewing on my mind. I realize now that the only person that ever cared was myself. We are in an industry where actions speak volumes and anyone you would want to surround yourself with as a peer, knows that a degree does not a good developer make.

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