I've been a bit stressed out about this for a while, and figured I'd post here to see what other developers think.
I'm with a startup company... a very small one. In fact, it's just me, my boss, and his son. I'm the only Software Engineer, as our only other Engineer (understandably) left for a much better job at an established company. As the only Engineer, I'm our Architect, maintainer, QA, Tech Support (which gets REALLY frustrating when I'm trying to get actual development done), Web Admin, and DBA.
Been here for almost 5 years now, and I still don't have health insurance (I'm 27, but not in great shape physically... my wife is 25, and has some minor health problems stemming from a prior term in the military). I'm making $48,000 per year, which my family survives on but hasn't given us enough additional money to pay off my student loans, get our own health insurance, or anything like that.
The thing is, if I leave it pretty much means the death of the company and the unemployment of my boss and his son, who have given me what they can (the company can't actually even afford the $48,000 per year I'm getting right now), and even let me recently begin working remotely when I told them that I had to move out of town to help some of my friends in their business (which I now am on evenings and weekends... and no, they don't have money to pay me a salary at all =) ).
Anyways, I feel like I need to leave this company and seek one out that at least will provide health insurance (if not a pay raise... I need to get rid of these student loans before I can even think about starting to get more to pay for my wife to go back to school again)... but I feel like I am in an ethical dilemma because my leaving will mean the death of the company and unemployment for those currently in it, and I feel like they've tried as hard as they could to appease me when they could.
What I want to know (since I have no co-workers that I can ask) is: what would you do in this situation?
EDIT: Also, more information about the company. We've felt like we were on the "verge" of making it for the past three years, but despite that we can still count the number of customers we have on one hand. We are being strung around by a company that is promising that they can get us more customers, but they're basically using us for free tech support with that promise... which I've tried to tell my boss to no avail. We've never had money for marketing, and though we were approved by the SBA for loan backing, no one will give us an SBA business loan so we can actually do marketing. If this extra info helps. I'm sitting on the fence between thinking "this will never work" and "it'll work if we somehow got an SBA-backed loan".
EDIT 2: Someone was wondering if I have a stake in the company. I have an unwritten one. They have a verbal agreement with me that if we ever become profitable, we'd split it three ways... that was enticing at first, and I still feel like the company might make it, but my feeling that it will has lessened severely in the last year.
FINAL:
Okay, it looks like all that's needed to be said has been said. Thank you all again for your advice. I think, based on what everyone's said, I will:
- Start looking for a new job in earnest
- Once I find a new one, make sure they know that I need some time to transition from my current company.
- Talk with my boss and let him know that he needs to find a replacement, and that I'll help him on weekends after I transition out officially to make sure that happens.
Thank you all again, I really needed this input. Hopefully I'll be able to find something out here.
EDIT: It looks like I can't give the "answer" to multiple people, but if I could I would. There's been an aweful lot of extremely helpful advice here, and I deeply appreciate it.