Options and shares: still nothing more than monopoly money

If you’ve ever interviewed at or been offered a job at a startup, or even if you’ve just had an unfortunate encounter with an overzealous or desperate recruiter, you’ll be sick and tired of hearing one or both of these words: options and shares. Somehow, rich businessmen (and women for all you P.C. folks out there) have convinced the masses of employees at startups that options or shares in the company are worth something.

Sure, it must have been relatively easy (or perhaps quite difficult, who knows?) for these business folk to convince themselves of this very fact. But what about convincing other business people, executives, VPs, managers, etc? Why are people falling for this?

If I offered you monopoly money to work 16 hour days at meager to non-existent pay for months, neglecting yourself, your health, your family, your passions, your activities, your hobbies, the outside world, the sun, and everything that constitutes your life, would you do it? Probably not. Yet, people do it constantly for something that is worth even less than monopoly money–monopoly money can at least be used to play the board game, which can be quite fun.

Think about the odds of getting rich off of options. Even as the CEO of a new startup, your startup still has to become successful. It must be able to pay off the large parts that were sold to venture capitalists, angels, and other types of investors, and still have money for your 5-10% (if you’re lucky). Money enough to retire? Hardly. Or at least money enough to make worthwhile giving away at least four years of your life for?

Chances are, you’re more likely to win the lottery than become a millionaire from startup options. True, I haven’t actually calculated mathematical probability. I have calculated the probability of that happening at various startups I’ve worked at, however, based on my past experiences and experience at the startup. I have seen people leave startups and not even spend a few hundred dollars to cash in their options. I’ve listened to startup veterans describe the worthlessness of their shares.

The chances of success are not only extremely low, they are made lower by incompetent people, usually of the business or product variety, that will cause even a startup with a lot of potential to lose any value it might have in the off-chance that it might reach its exit strategy and either sell out (good luck) or even possibly IPO (yeah right). Decisions made in a hurried fashion to get a product to market, a product that has no reason to be hurried. Trading a quality product because of perceived competition from whom? And who the hell wrote this horrible codebase to get us here?

In fact, where the hell is here? Where are we? And what are we doing here other than pretending to create something revolutionary and amazing and celebrating this pretension?

For the adrenaline junkies who get a rush from this, more power to you. For the rest of us, myself included, I’d like to stop hearing how “amazing” a job opportunity can be. How it can be “life changing.” Damn right it can be life changing. As in not having a life! Losing years drowned out in working only to get neither the satisfaction of having worked on a great product or the monetary compensation of having worked on a product, whether great, average, or piss-poor.

I’ll take the cash please. If it can’t go towards a plane ticket that takes me to my vacation spot where I don’t need to bring my laptop or smart phone, where I won’t be bothered by people who only value me for what I can do when I put myself between the chair and the monitor, then it’s just simply not worth it. I’ve missed out on years of my life and I’m through doing that to myself.

Repeating the same thing and expecting different results: the definition of insanity. Will this insanity ever stop? I see so many job postings that specifically state you are trading your life away for meager pay and a bunch of worthless paper.

Work to live or live to work?

How much of your life are you going to gamble away? For how much longer?

GA anyone?