Paul, I feel that you personally have a vested interest in convincing young engineers to take low salaries for "more enjoyable work". Why? It makes kids far more willing to lose 2-4 years salary at an under-funded startup and overwork themselves based on the strength of your own personality cult.
Reading anything I've written about startups would correct your impression that I view it as enjoyable work.
"There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain. For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it."
Having read and quoted that essay, I'd like to think the stress and pain is somewhat counteracted by the pride and pleasure of choosing your own destiny.
It also seems that being a founder or running a business is the only way to get paid your true worth by the marketplace.
You avoided the actual issue. This isn't about founders. This is about engineers. Engineers aren't the ones getting the million dollar payout (if the startup lottery is in even in their favor). This is about engineers looking for work. The people founders need to pay a salary to. There haven't been million dollar payouts for engineers in a long time. The complaint is that founders continue to peddle the fantasy that engineers should remain underpaid because they might win big at some later date, in an effort to keep salaries low. That's a shame.
