He gets it in his the first point. Exits are so low these days that a <1% pre-dilution employee grant is basically meaningless. Unless you work for the next Google (and how many of those have their been in the last decade?) the best-case scenario is that your equity makes up for all the unpaid overtime you worked getting to the acquisition. The risk/reward ratio is far more in your favor as either a founder or an employee of a funded company.

"The entrepreneurs that impress me the most are the ones that are completely rabid about solving a need"

So what impresses you the most about developers who join startups?

Joining a startup is not inherently impressive. The characteristics of employed developers that I most admire are: intelligence, loyalty, and ability to execute (read: ship code). Being employed doesn't affect my opinion of someone regarding those characteristics.

I was just trying to arrive at the conclusion of the article. I think it starts out listing reasons why developers choose to work on their own startups rather than join other startups. Then it says that the listed reasons are not really good reasons (they don't tend to produce impressive entrepreneurs). The conclusion seems to be that the respective developers would be better off joining startups instead. Hence my question if that would be more impressive than working on one's own startup for the wrong reasons.

Another way to interpret it would of course be to still opt for the own startup, but for better reasons.

Fair point. Most of my posts drift like that because I write my way into ideas. It's like thinking out loud... and then I hit "post".