A lot of the jobs I see offer surprisingly low pay and I'm not even factoring in cost of living. I've seen salaries out in SV that I wouldn't even consider in Atlanta and I don't come close to spending near half of my paychecks on rent.
Pay depends on the stage a startup is in if you want to work at a startup. Very early stage startups can pay very little, but you don't work at a startup like that for money. Google, Facebook, and even companies like New Relic, Zen Payroll, thousands of other companies easily pay 6 figure salaries to engineers. Starting out pay for new engineers is close to 6 figures. I don't know maybe that's low for you, but it is enough for me.
Then why the hell do you? To make someone else rich? To help VCs get a few extra dollars? Slave away with 60 hours weeks for years only to see an exit that nets you less than what you could have made working for any of the big companies? So that you can experience wanting to move on after a few years but worrying about losing stock options? SO you can sit around wondering when the company is going to IPO and you can actually make some cash? (meanwhile the CEO cashed out years ago, and doesn't want to IPO ever)
Ideally you touch every part of the stack, learn some new stuff, play fast and loose with everything, cash out leaving your '10x developer' code for someone else to maintain, and tell people you have experience with a million trending technologies while omitting the superficiality of said experiences. It's all about the lifestyle.
Nah man, you work at startups because home delivery parrot rental service is gonna like disrupt the industry man. That's where all the cutting edge interesting problems to solve are.
Early stage startups don't have much VC funding if any. If there was VC funding then you can expect normal pay rates. As to why? I work at small startups because I love the challenge, I love working as part of a small team, I love being close to the customer and making a difference. I rather work there than phone it in at a big company for a bigger paycheck. My work is a big part of my life, I want to do things I care about.
The equity has never made up the loss of salary. As an employee your company has to become really, really big for it to be life changing and that's incredibly unlikely to happen for all but one or two startups every few years and there are many thousands of startups. As an employee working at a small startup can't be about the money, if it is then you are wasting your time.
You do it for the experience. 1 year of working in a startup will have you learning more than 2-3 at a larger company.
If you're good, you can advance much more rapidly through startups and then parlay that experience into either a lucrative BigCo job or consulting gigs.
