Here's the rub: The offer was horrible. Seriously, my friend has 2x as much as experience as me and now I make 3.5x more than them. There's not even a equity upside: It was less than 0.1%. I couldn't believe the offer when they told me. I had higher offers from startups straight out of college.

It seems that this might be common with startups that refuse to negotiate. Reddit, Stripe, etc: All of them report pretty low salaries. I couldn't find any salary stats on Jet.com or Magoosh, but they both hard sell their "awesome cultures" so I wouldn't be surprised if they pay beans too.

Is this just a clever way to take even more advantage of engineers, or do these particular companies just pay poorly across the board due to their "amazing culture?" Do they really think they're putting candidates at an advantage? It looks like they draw more underrepresented candidates in, but the result seems to be that the supposed wage gap is made even larger.