Focusing on the raw dollar amount is a red-herring that always comes up in these conversations. 200k is plenty! is a sleight of hand. If I am building something with 10s of millions of value and you give me 200k and expect me to shut up cause it's plenty, you are deceiving me, full stop.

The "we all get paid the same" is a dishonest by omission. They don't all get paid the same, and while the peanut gallery may think so, I sure as hell don't think the IRS thinks the same way.

I personally don't really care what they pay their engineers, but to pretend to have this egalitarian approach to compensation and then hide the equity numbers is dishonest.

In other threads, the voice of HN tells us to consider equity in a startup as worthless and only ever count on base salary.

Here we instead hear that equity is as important as the air we breathe.

Yes, 200k is not life changing but at least it’s not pretending to be, like many other inflated equity schemes that never vest. It’s just an honest decent salary, better than what you can find in many places of the world.