YC lets them in because the people making that decision believe said founders have some (unspecificied, but non-trivially non-zero) chance at building a company they can sell (to other investors or "the public" in an IPO) for far more than they invest in it.
It seems people are making a category error with respect to YC. YC's purpose is not to foster a cradle of technical innovation with an engineer focus; it's to maximize returns on high-risk investments in what happen to be technology companies. Engineers in the startup world are like engineers everywhere else in technology work: second-class workers who exist to expend their life in the form of labor for (relatively) token compensation in return, with lots of ego stroking to help deflect attention from that.
> Engineers in the startup world are like engineers everywhere else in technology work: second-class workers who exist to expend their life in the form of labor for (relatively) token compensation in return
Be careful, that breaks the marketing veil too much ;-)
The problem is that to attract and keep engineers busy and happy it is important to tell them stories about changing the world, "breakthrough technologies", paradigm shifts. Also it is important to explain inability of many engineers to discern how equity gets allocated, how options and stock work and so on. "oh look you get 10000 shares!" type tricks.
Now, granted, those are not mutually exclusive, some do work on breakthrough technologies.
It seems people are making a category error with respect to YC. YC's purpose is not to foster a cradle of technical innovation with an engineer focus; it's to maximize returns on high-risk investments in what happen to be technology companies. Engineers in the startup world are like engineers everywhere else in technology work: second-class workers who exist to expend their life in the form of labor for (relatively) token compensation in return, with lots of ego stroking to help deflect attention from that.