Is it not possible they simply were having trouble finding work elsewhere, or were willing to accept below market salary to work on something cool? Etc?
I know there are certainly folks out there being taken for a ride. But take me for example- I know I personally could find more extravagant wages if I wanted, but I am not optimizing for salary. I am optimizing for happiness, which is what keeps me where I am.
Anything is possible. But at the time Powerset was a high profile startup with a reputation for being engineering driven. The financial crisis hadn't hit either. So it's not really plausible for them to have been hiring engineers who were unable to find any other work.
As for taking a paycut to work on something particularly cool, sure, why not? I've certainly done it in the past. But accepting a salary lower that doesn't even cover your cost of living (as implied in the article), when joining a company that's reportedly taken $20M in venture capital... That seems pretty unreasonable. Even exploitative.
Happiness is the function being maximized, whereas money is just one of several parameters/variables in the equation. It's an important distinction. You can't treat them as two parameters being maximized - for a few rare people, for example, the two are completely inversely related.
Not optimizing for money is setting yourself up for long term sadness.
I'm not saying work for minimum wage. Money is obviously a component to happiness, because while you can't buy happiness, it's hard to be happy when you can't afford to eat. But you probably don't have to hit 100% of your maximum earning potential to avoid starvation-induced unhappiness, which is why optimizing for money is not my approach.
I know there are certainly folks out there being taken for a ride. But take me for example- I know I personally could find more extravagant wages if I wanted, but I am not optimizing for salary. I am optimizing for happiness, which is what keeps me where I am.