Yes but according to the article, he wanted his normal salary and the equity. So the only part of your comment that applies is leaving a stable job for an unstable one.
This is a risk but not a big risk at all if the engineer was "one of the best engineers in his area" because he would be able to find another job easily.
I think the issue that people are picking up on is that if that is how you spend your own money, it is likely that you will spend company money in the same way making you a riskier investment.
I know my comments haven't been full of praise but I enjoyed your post and it seems you have the personality that is needed for success.
Inspired, I hacked out the feature that was the answer to the flunked question and used it on the partners.
If it was such an easy feature to add and so important that you had several strong answers to the issue that required the feature, why wasn't it already part of your product?
edit: If the feature was already present in your product, it would have been almost impossible to have gone blank.
But the more valuable it is the more unlikely it is that it will be given away. Is spending time and money on the extremely small chance of getting hold of zap.com smarter than using those efforts to get hold of zap.co or zap.me? How much more is zap.com worth to your business over other alternatives?
If a few days and a few thousand pounds isn't worth much to him then I understand but if resources are scarce, using them on long shots that might not even pay that much over the alternatives is not good business.
To what do you vehemently disagree? That it is a slim chance of securing the domain name? If so, why does the rest of your comment discuss how important YC is to UK programmers?
I felt like that at first but I think the issue is that the potential employee wanted his normal salary in addition to equity. He would not undertake any risk for that equity and that can definitely lead to problems in company camaraderie.
Having said that, I think that the post has a slightly angry tone which I do not like. People can ask whatever they want in exchange for their work. If they are not worth it, don't hire them. If they are, get them on board. No need to write a blog post about it though.
Besides the conflict of interest, I find the fact that a significant portion of their articles are about themselves, or other tech journalists, extremely irritating. Like when a documentary is about the filmaker making the documentary instead of the subject matter.
It is frustrating how the American government is trillions of dollars in debt, waging pointless/dangerous wars and quickly turning America into a police/welfare state but instead of worrying about foreign and monetary policy, the most important issues seem to be abortion and gay marriage (things the government shouldn't even involved in).
I feel that the four day work week is the sweet spot for productivity and I will institute this when I start hiring. 28-32 hours of work a week is better than 15-20 hours of work and 20 hours of facebook and lolcats.
It would be interesting to read a preview of the book.
I think that releasing software quickly is completely different to releasing a physical item quickly. You continue working on the software and update as necessary but you cannot update a physical book that is sitting on someone's coffee table.
How much time was spent on the content of the book versus the design? Is the content alone worth the price asked or is the content just a filler for the book design/marketing effort?
I agree that apple did bring it all together rather well (over a sustained marketing and development phase) but I just don't see how anyone could think that smart phones similar to those that we have today weren't inevitable with or without apple.
Why can Facebook only come up with monetization strategies that take advantage of its users?