Ask HN: Should I join startup for less-than-expected equity?

First off, it's probably not lack of respect. If you really think that and you can't get it out of your head, then don't join the company. To me, that seems like a market salary. For better or worse, experience doesn't count for that much in the market for software engineers.

You could probably trade some salary for equity. It's all about your personal situation and how much cash you need. For me, 130k would be a bit overkill and at this point I'd try to trade 30k for an extra half point or so (I'm betting they'd cap the equity at .5% total or something though).

That said, if they're hiring a 20th employee at 130k and you're confident that there's enough money in the bank + revenue that doing so makes sense (that's something to check), then the risk factor is a lot lower than a 4 person startup burning through seed capital who will offer you the 1-2% you're after. There are a lot of those in SF that you can join. You probably won't have a nice office or free meals but you'll make a bigger dent at a smaller scale and therefore get a bigger piece of a smaller pie.

In short, from the info you gave, I don't think they're necessarily low-balling you. But if you do, don't join. If you're good, there are at least 50 other companies in the bay who will give you an offer like that tomorrow.

Your grievances about your current company:

> This current company has a highly dysfunctional development culture, no automated testing, poor choice of deployment vehicle, a VP high on the DK spectrum.

That sounds EXACTLY like Silicon Valley Generic BigCo to me.

I was employee #10 at Palantir and received and accepted an offer in this ballpark. I'm pretty happy with it at this point. Frankly it was absolutely life changing, both from a learning perspective and a compensation perspective. Of course that's an outlier — but this is why you should treat what company you join the way investors think about investments. Only they get to diversify and your choice is even more important — you only get one shot at any given point.

rgbrgb's point is also well taken. You should be able to swap equity for salary, since for a pre Series A company that's a chunk of coin.

It's probably inexperience. I'd try and talk them up a bit.

But other commenters are right: pay attention to the salary, the benefits and the position itself. The equity is a lottery ticket. I do believe they should correct the amount to make you feel valued, but that's the only reason.

On the way-later side of 30!

The current company is legacy-land as far as development tools goes (though they're reliable and in the right hands do very well). The prospective startup would involve new tools I need to "keep up-to-date".

I did a short (paid) project for them involving some popular scripting significantly-hipper-than-Perl language and delivered it in serviceable, idiomatic form that I know they were very happy with, using all the right libraries. I picked it up the tool/language quickly enough. I feel I need that experience and exposure to maintain my longevity in the SW market. Sticking with the current company is 2 more years I become more of a dinosaur.