Stop trying to match Big Tech comp. You will lose that fight every time. Sell what they structurally can’t offer: real ownership, fast feedback loops, and the chance to build something from scratch with a small team that actually ships.
I’ve been building the engineering team at Dropbyke for the past several months. Shared mobility is still early. We’re pre-Lime, pre-Bird, pre-everything. The concept is unproven, the funding is modest, and the salary bands reflect that reality.
Every good candidate I talk to has at least one offer from a company that can pay 30-50% more than I can. Some of them have offers with stock grants that look like a second salary. I can’t match that. I learned early to stop pretending I could.
But we’ve still managed to hire well. Here is what actually worked.
Be honest about money on the first call
Nothing kills trust faster than dancing around compensation. I bring it up in the first conversation. “Here is what we can pay. Here is the equity. Here is what the equity is worth today, which isn’t much, and here is what it could be worth if we execute.” No hand-waving. No “competitive salary” language that means nothing.
Most engineers respect directness. The ones who are only optimizing for cash will self-select out, and that’s fine. The ones who stay in the conversation are evaluating the whole picture, and I want to talk to those people.
Show the work, not a pitch deck
At Dropbyke I started doing something that felt risky at first: I gave candidates access to our actual codebase during the interview process. Not all of it, but enough to see how we build. Our code reviews. Our deployment pipeline. Our monitoring setup. The real thing, not a sanitized version.
This did two things. First, it filtered for engineers who cared about craft. If someone looked at our setup and got excited about the problems, that told me more than any whiteboard exercise. Second, it made the job tangible. They weren’t imagining what the work might be. They could see it.
One engineer told me he accepted our offer over a much higher one because, and I’m quoting here, “your codebase looked like people gave a damn.” That stuck with me.
Sell speed, not “startup culture”
I never use the phrase startup culture in interviews. It means nothing. What I do talk about is speed. At Dropbyke, an engineer can go from idea to production in a day. Not because we skip process, but because our process is light and the team is small enough that decisions happen fast.
I tell candidates about specific examples. Last month one of our engineers noticed a pattern in user drop-offs, proposed a fix, built it, shipped it, and we saw the numbers move within 48 hours. At a big company that same change goes through three teams, two planning cycles, and a prioritization meeting. Maybe it ships in a quarter.
Speed isn’t about working more hours. It’s about fewer layers between you and the outcome. That’s genuinely compelling to a certain kind of engineer, and those are exactly the engineers I want.
Autonomy has to be real
Every startup claims to offer autonomy. Most of them mean “we don’t have enough managers yet.” That isn’t autonomy. That’s chaos.
Real autonomy means an engineer picks the approach, owns the tradeoffs, and lives with the consequences. At Dropbyke, our engineers choose their tools. They design their own systems. They are on call for what they build, which means they build things that don’t break at 3 AM.
When I interview, I’m specific about this. I describe a recent technical decision and who made it. Not me. The engineer closest to the problem. If a candidate has been stuck in an environment where every architecture choice needs three sign-offs, that story lands hard.
Hire for the team, not the role
I can’t afford specialists. What I can afford is sharp generalists who get better at everything by doing everything. At our size, an engineer might write a service, set up the monitoring, debug a production issue, and review someone else’s database migration in the same week.
Some people hate that. Others thrive on it. I screen for the second group by asking about the last time they worked outside their comfort zone and what they learned. The answers tell me whether someone wants range or just wants to go deeper on one thing. Neither is wrong, but only one fits where we’re right now.
The peer interview matters most
The single best recruiting tool I have is my existing team. When a candidate meets the people they would work with every day and those people are sharp, thoughtful, and honest about the hard parts of the job, that’s more persuasive than anything I can say.
I make sure candidates spend real time with the team. Not a panel interview. A working session or a design conversation. Something that feels like the actual job. If they click with the team, the salary gap shrinks in their mental math. If they don’t click, no amount of money would have made it work anyway.
What I got wrong early on
I wasted time in the beginning trying to compete on perks. Free lunches, flexible hours, the usual startup bingo card. None of it moved the needle. Engineers saw through it immediately.
What moved the needle was being specific and being honest. Specific about the problems we’re solving, the systems we’re building, and where we’re going. Honest about what is hard, what is broken, and what we haven’t figured out yet.
The best hires we’ve made came from conversations where I said something like, “Our deployment process isn’t great yet and you would own fixing it.” That kind of honesty attracts builders. Glossy pitches attract people who want to be at a company that sounds good, not people who want to do the work.
The uncomfortable truth
You will lose candidates to higher offers. It will happen regularly. Some of those candidates would have been great, and it will sting.
But the engineers who join you despite the lower salary are making a deliberate choice. They are choosing the work, the team, and the trajectory over the paycheck. From what I’ve seen, those people build better things and stay longer. Not always. But often enough that I’ve stopped trying to win the compensation game and started focusing on winning the “is this work worth doing” game instead.
That’s a game a startup can actually win.