That advice only works with people with little experience.

True, but...

For us folks on our late 20s, that have 7+ years of experience, compensation matters. If you already been into few good startups, or build from scratch successful products in a larger company, you have very little to learn into joining yet another startup.

That anyone with some watermark of experience has little to learn from a startup is quite the assertion. Even if the few good startups you have joined and the few good products you've built from scratch have taught you a lot of things, I can't imagine making such a bold assertion even then that another startup has little for you to learn. Maybe they are attacking a different market; maybe they are using technology that is based on ideas you've only skimmed over up until this point. Maybe some other learning opportunity?

I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to dismiss the possibility of future learning based on something as arbitrary as years of experience. The idea that all years of experience are not equal is, I hope, a horse beaten to death several times over. It strikes me that basing amount of learning on years is a reasonable negative corollary to that.

Also, if you are good you probably have a lot of choices out there. It is not a startup vs. big corp binary choice. A lot of mid-size companies also offer flexible work conditions with good pay.

Probably, but flexible work conditions and good pay isn't the sum of what people look for in potential employers. I mean, it might be if we throw the concept of learning new things, amongst other incentives, out the window, but I'm really quite uncomfortable asserting that the average case of hacker has little more to learn, and should be optimizing more for comfort and predictability. My impression has been that the more people learn, the more they realize they have to learn, and the broader the range of areas they find to explore. Maybe I'm missing something?

My advice: 1. Learn what your value as an engineer is in the market. 2. If the startup is underpaying you, tell them what the difference is, and make sure you negotiate a good equity for it. 3. Place it in writing that your salary will go to full market value once the company gets the next round of funding.

1. Definitely, but also keep in mind that value is not compensated for strictly by salary paid. There are other valuable forms of compensation you can get, such as: learning new things you hadn't yet considered as interesting, maybe because you thought there was nothing more to learn from yet another company; a sense of greater autonomy, maybe because you don't believe that someone n-1 hops away from the market compared to your n hops is in a much better position to tell you what is and is not important; and a feeling that you are making the world of a measurably better place by helping to build new technology, maybe because you just have that sort of personality that can't do comfortable.

2. Agreed.

3. This is iffy, because you might be a position where you are reasonably certain that your options and/or shares will not be going nowhere, and in fact may be quite lucrative given the current valuation of the company. Granted, this valuation might be utter crap, but it seems like it would be really difficult to convince people that you deserve the same compensation of a specific sort as everyone else with this in mind. Stock and stock options might be an extremely speculative form of compensation, which only pays off on uncommon occasions, but that doesn't make the expected value of them close enough to zero that you can just dismiss them out-of-hand unconditionally.

At the end is your decision on what you are itching for. Just remember, most stock options go nowhere.

Agreed about the first point. But to temper the second point, it's not just about the stock options. And it certainly isn't about declaring that there's a threshold that gets hit at some age boundary, or some experience boundary, or even some number of startups you've been at, done things, and have a t-shirt to wear around town.

It really strikes me as more of a matter of what things you hold in greater value, and where you are prepared to draw lines in the sand about what you do and do not expect, or hope for, from choices you make. The danger here is falling into presumptive thinking, where you assume that whatever it is you hope to get out of making one choice vs. another isn't going to come to pass, and that you'd best target those choices that depend upon the least amount of serendipity possible.

Sure, you will limit the risk to you and those who depend on you the most in a relative sense (risk in an absolute sense is entirely another matter), but there are costs involved that aren't worth just discarding as irrelevant and/or relatively valueless.

FWIW, I just turned 30, and have someone who depends upon me for day-to-day needs. It does enter into my thinking as I make my decisions in life, but it does not so overwhelm the other factors that they stop mattering entirely. I think it is a mistake to operate from a line of reasoning where they do.

So, I'd probably aim for advice that lies right in the middle of the parent and grandparent commenter: don't discount your value in the marketplace, and don't be so naive as to assume that whatever you are dreaming will work out exactly as you expect. But, don't be so cynical as to assume that there are only a few valid forms of value transfer from organization to individual, and that the rest are crap and purposefully invented just to pull the wool over your eyes while you toil away for someone else's benefit. Somewhere between lies a cautious, and somewhat pragmatic, optimism. I can't say I know too many people where this frame of mind has gone wrong.