Assuming the founders held 30%, the employee equity was 1/30,000th that of founders. I don't understand how engineers are ok with their boss getting 30,000X their compensation.
Because the engineer doesn't assume any risk assuming they're being paid market salary? The engineer can stop working when they clock out? The engineer doesn't have their own awesome idea? Or they don't have the desire to run their own company?
There's certainly some types of startups where the risk rationale does apply. For example, the founders who went with zero pay for two years and got an early working version and happy customers before hiring their first employee. Yeah, those founders can justify their big percentage.
But the Silicon Valley mold is: a couple of guys quit their jobs, hit up VCs for a month or two with the roughest sketch of an idea, get funded, and hire their first employee a couple of weeks later. That employee gets maybe 1% maximum, or the order of 1/50th or less of what the founders. Meanwhile, the engineer will bust his ass, show up at work every day and code some more at night, debug on weekends, etc. "We're all in this together, team!"
Then on the happy day years later, the founders start pricing out their MacLarens, while the engineers blink "WTF" at their actual payout.
First, equity isn't compensation, it's ownership. Second, it's about risk. Third, it's about luck.
So, if you get paid a market salary and benefits, you can't really expect to own much of the company that's providing you with that salary and benefits as it's essentially burning money on you. If you came in and said "can I get 1% ownership if I take 15k a year with no benefits" that would be a different story, but that's not how this works.
If you go in to a startup and say "I'll take 15K a year w/no benefits" you'll get a flat-out NO. That big exit-event equity is not for engineers. It's for founders.
