Equity for a first employee
strlen: I've said a few times recently on this site: if you're the first engineer in a start-up, you're either a (co-)founder or a chump.Ask for founder level equity and founder level control (both over the business idea and the technical implementation: non-technical "managers" have a nasty tendency to make horrible technical decisions for "business reasons" -- think being forced to use "enterprise" software vs. open source alternatives, e.g. ASP.NET + SQL Server or Oracle + EJB).If they say no, move on. There are thousands of early stage start-ups. Being a the most technical person in company of "business guys" sucks for an employee and brings no benefits associated with being in technology start-up (a greater freedom to choose technologies to work with, a chance to pursue fascinating problems rather than build CRUD screens for sales people).On the other hand, if you're working for a large software/Internet company (or high growth, late stage tech start-up) you can at least be sure that your manager is technical and on your side. What rational reason is there, then, to choose to be the first engineer in an already established company (given your equity will likely end up being worthless)? There could be exceptions: if the company broke into an entirely new market (product has to be "good enough" vs. high quality), or if the founders gave you absolute freedom to choose the technology (e.g. letting you use Haskell and Erlang if you so wish), but generally the scenario is "I'm a business guy with a super-duper idea and I want an engineer to build it for me in two weeks, in PHP".To the "business guys": any technical guy who accepts this situation isn't a "gold mine". He either doesn't know his own worth (and thus can't know your products' worth), is inexperienced (won't be able to build a product that would be a fit most market) or has nowhere else to go (can't build a good product for you). If he is competent, experienced and confident, he may simply be looking to take/explore your idea and then build a much better version of it himself (e.g. what Zuckerberg did with Winkelvoss brothers)