I am not complaining. I work for one reason only - to exchange my labor for money to support ny addiction to food and shelter.
And let’s not pretend that startups are trying to compete with BigTech. They are just trying to survive long enough to get acquired. Out of all of the companies that YC has founded, how many have gone public?
If you are working for a company that has accepted VC money, your “values” don’t amount to much at all. The only values that matter are those of your investor and all they care about is an exit - statistically by getting acquired.
The opposite choice is accepting Monopoly money - “equity”.
True my unvested RSUs are half what they were at their highs. But at least I can sell them and trade them for real money once they vest every six months.
Don’t get me wrong, I spent my entire career from 1996-2020 working for mostly unknown companies working as an “enterprise developer”.
The only reason I fell into my current BigTech job is because I both know how to talk to customers and I can create pretty diagrams, PowerPoint slides and a shit ton of yaml and HCL and can develop (cloud consulting department)