ciguy

It seems like every HN Hiring post over the last 6 to 12 months is for "Founding Engineers". When you read the job ads, what they are actually looking for is a unicorn engineer who can build the entire product including Backend, FrontEnd and DevOps while also being an AI domain expert and any number of other demands.

This post is a perfect example of this: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/roe-ai/jobs/CZrzxk6-founding-engineer

They usually offer 0.25% to 2.0% equity and 150k to 200k per year.

I guess I am curious if there is a reason they all started doing this at the same time? Was there some kind of YC memo telling them to do this?

Why would someone with those skills and qualifications go work for a startup building their entire product for 2% or less vs just building it for themselves and retaining 100% equity?

This whole trend seems super misguided and somewhat exploitative from the outside but it must be working if they are all doing it?

I'm thinking primarily of the Indian and Eastern European shops that try to hire junior devs and then pass them off as seniors and charge accordingly for simple outsourced web work. I got curious because much of this market seems like it was driven by cheap VC money for MVPs that has now dried up.

A few weeks posted an ad for a freelancer for a simple Node.js project on a few of the freelancer aggregators. It was to update a simple app to the latest Node versions and add a page. When I posted something like this just 2 years ago, I got maybe a dozen low effort replies and it was hard to get anyone to even agree to interview. Now I have received 100% quality applications from individuals and dev shops practically begging for the project. Some have even offered 1 or 2 weeks free work.

This got me very curious about the sentiment in these areas and how the devs are currently feeling. I know in SF the market in big tech companies has dropped off somewhat with the layoffs but most people I know found new jobs pretty quickly. Is it the same in India and Eastern Europe or has the drop in VC funding had worse effects? Just curious to get thoughts from anyone in that market on the general sentiment.