I think some people are misinterpreting "programming is easier than I thought it would be" to mean "programming is easy".

Just because the barrier to entry is lower than I expected does not mean I think your job is easy. I have a ton of respect and admiration for developers. I have led teams of developers that could do things I could never do. There is no need to get defensive.

The google translate metaphor is actually pretty good. Tech is evolving to make it much easier to learn. A lot more folks can dive in now. You don't always need to find a translator :)

Thank you very much for this clarification.

I'm glad you're getting your feet wet.

Did not realize the tax implications of the proximate living bonus when doing the analysis, but found out later. Thanks for pointing it out.

Keen also has <$1M in investment. My salary isn't quite market-rate for an engineer, but it's not too far off when you include perks (proximate living bonus, lunches, healthcare, etc). If we do raise series A (or become profitable quickly), we plan to adjust salaries toward market rate.

Well said, tptacek.

Thank you!! I describe myself as "hard-working generalist". I'm good at coordinating teams and getting things done. I've been working on short and long term goal planning, customer dev, testing, documentation, and I wrote a rails dashboard that uses our API. I'm also involved in our design and strategy discussions. Lots of early startup stuff :)

Nice!

It'd be pretty strange for a startup's first hire to be an office manager ;-)

I wrote this article because I wished it existed when I was going through this. Even something as simple as an example of a early employee's salary at a seed-funded startup is helpful. I also think the links I shared are pretty good. I'm shocked that my post got over 150 tweets today -- many of them saying "read this if you're considering joining a startup" or "great read". I thought some people might take interest in the story, but I'm completely surprised by how many did. There have been over 16k unique visitors since I posted it this morning.

I think that regardless of how much influence your friendships and relationship had on the process, your analysis was thorough and very interesting, so I personally got value out of reading it. Thanks!

Phil - I agree :)

OP here. You're right - it was confusing! I tried to evaluate my offer objectively and wanted to share the tools I used to do that (as well as get feedback on the approach). My relationships with the founders were a key part of the story that I didn't mention until late in the post. I added an intro which hopefully makes it more readable now.

It just occurred to me that I should have posted this on HN before finishing the negotiation. Would have been great to get this input then.