Typical 22 yr old developer making market rate isn't in charge of creating the foundational product of a company single-handedly. So those numbers are irrelevant. For someone with this level of responsibility and involvement, $500,000 would be a more reasonable salary. He's not a code monkey, he's the main guy in charge of, and doing, it all.
> For someone with this level of responsibility and involvement, $500,000 would be a more reasonable salary.
This is delusional. $500k isn't the going rate for senior software architects even at major companies. It's certainly not the going rate for a junior engineer building a product that may not even have a market.
A typical 22 year old developer is not capable of creating a foundational product. Sounds like he's getting what he's worth. Doesn't matter what the developer they should have hired would be worth.
People always want to skimp on developers. Would you hire a new college grad to design a $100 million building? No? Then why hire one to build the foundation for a $100 million company? It's certainly not simpler.
I was in a similar situation to the OP about ten years ago - 21 years old, very little experience, first technical employee at a company founded by two doctors, low pay, meagre equity given my responsibilities - and honestly, in retrospect I think they should have taken on a full-fledged technical co-founder with more experience and full equity instead of me. I did pretty well on the technical side, all things considered, but I didn't have the knowledge, confidence, and authority to assert myself when the founders pushed the product in unmarketable and technically unrealistic directions. We wasted far too much time writing code that did more to resolve disputes between the founders than to address the needs of potential customers.
As a result of that experience, I'm extremely skeptical of companies with older non-technical founders that hire inexperienced programmers as their first technical employees. It usually means they just want a code monkey to implement their brilliant ideas, and don't understand the engineering and financial challenges inherent in any startup.
I do find that some of the co-founders "ideas" are technically not feasible and this is causing some distress, when trying to explain it to them how things work. Both of the 2 co-founders are mid-to-late 30s, one is a doctor and one had successfully built and sold a company (although in an entirely different industry, a consultant recruiting company actually). Both of the founders have limited technical knowledge and I don't think they understand the iterative process that programming is, they don't understand about refactoring code and rewriting/etc...and so as soon as I create a new feature, they already want to move onto creating another feature without refining what we have
They basically have a time-line of launching in March 2012, and we only started in May of this year. One thing that's worrying me is that I haven't yet done a second iteration of the code and they keep wanting more things added..and I feel that we're not focusing on solving one problem but many (too many). Products that are successful start off as being simple and then more gets added over time...
One of the issues is that one of the co-founders is my Dad's former co-worker's Son, and even though I have some say now that I have equity, it won't necessarily be heard because what does a 22 year old know anyway, right? My suggestions might seem too radical to them, and that is to drop a bunch of what we have, and now that we've had some testers, to focus on what the testers liked, and remove what they didn't.
Several of the testing sessions that we had, the people using this new service had mentioned that because of the relatively private nature of this service, that they feel uncomfortable with a linkedin/facebook login button on registration because they feel like the private information available on the service will be shared with other more public networks. My vote is to drop these "features" but the cofounders seem insistant that we keep them and feel that it "adds legitimacy" even though the testing sessions seem to show otherwise. There are other examples of this based on tester feedback, this is just one of them
"A typical 22 year old developer is not capable of creating a foundational product."
Yes that is what I said. I'm not sure if you're restating my point as a rebuttal or if you are agreeing with me though.
If you can create a foundational product, you are worth what I say. If you can't, then it appears the founders don't know what they are doing and the equity is worth absolutely nothing because the business has no chance of success.
