It's not a question of what they deserve but what it costs you down the road. My friend and I both worked at the same Bay Area startup under extremely trying circumstances. We knew the deal going in but this was ridiculous (no salary, just illiquid stock plus room and board--in a house that was under construction). When I left, they wanted me to pay for my long distance charges (this was in the 80s), which I couldn't afford to do because I'd been working for free and spending my meager savings down. I was so tempted to tell them "fuck you, fuck your phone bill and keep your stock." But I swallowed my temper, worked out a deal and parted on good terms. When the company was acquired by Microsoft, I was invited up to Seattle to join them. The stock I was ready to throw in the dumpster was eventually worth millions (plus additional stock grants from MS). My friend went the other route and sued the company for labor law violations. He got some short term satisfaction and a $20,000 settlement but burned some major bridges.

The moral here is not to endure abuse politely but to remain civil when possible. Leave before you get to "fuck you" territory. (Bonus moral: you think the startup world is crazy now? You should have seen it then.)

Your story presumes (in a somewhat horrifying way to me personally) that someone should choose to value financial outcomes in a case like this. I don’t see why that needs to be the case. The millions of dollars in your story seem like a bad thing to me, particularly given how they underscore the cumulative inequity and total lack of consequence inherent to the system. I don’t believe it would be morally acceptable to value that more highly than expressing visible signals that may help others avoid the people you’re dealing with in the first place.

If some shitheads get rich, who cares? I certainly don’t want to help them get rich. If I get rich doing that, I’ve failed.

And of course this is all to say nothing of the extreme selection bias inherent to your perspective. For every story like yours (essentially winning the lottery) there are ten thousand people who swallowed their pride, ate shit at work with a smile, did whatever was asked of them, and got absolutely no financial reward for it at all.

Okay, let me try this again. Forget the money. Forget the job at Microsoft (which was a huge deal back then--Microsoft was the center of the software universe at the time). Consider only this: if you have to walk away, walk away. But be civil about it. That's my point (I said as much in the final paragraph). However satisfying, going out with a "fuck you" is going to cost you. Maybe not money, but relationships, opportunity and reputation. I didn't swallow my pride and eat shit. I made a deliberate decision to value that relationship over my temper. I was lucky (as you say); it paid off. But even if it hadn't, even if the stock had dropped to zero, I still would have felt better about walking away from that relationship like an adult instead of an angry child.

My point stands, regardless of the outcome, though I can see how focusing on the money skewed the story for you.

But when you’ve been treated the way modern startups treat employees, the employer has already communicated to you that they don’t value the relationship, at a deep intrinsic level. They don’t value your basic workplace health (e.g. open plan offices, poor hours, poor insurance), they don’t value your career goals (“sorry you can’t focus on data pipelines like you were told... shrug ... wear many hats”), and so on.

If you find yourself later in life needing a professional assistance from that person who utterly does not value you, this is representing some much more gigantic failure and a worry about having burned a bridge is too insignificant by comparison to care.

Having said that, I don’t care so much about the “fuck you” aspect as much as, say, writing an honest Glassdoor review so that job applicants may avoid falling into their trap, or giving them exactly two weeks’ notice and no more despite whatever circumstances the project is in, and simply not staying in touch with them.

A good way to look at this is as a risk-adjusted return. Anybody can get rich by putting their life savings into crypto or some YOLO far-OTM options play, but that doesn't mean it's a good investment.

Why not on the way in then and avoid all the mess?

Hey, I fully agree. We software engineers do such an embarrasingly bad job negotiating for minimally healthy working conditions or wages that more fairly reflect our contributions to profits.

A totally reasonable heuristic if you’re looking for a job that won’t make you miserable is to just wholly avoid start-ups. To be clear, this is a heuristic even for people who are looking to work with modern tool stacks, be given responsibility they might not be given at traditional companies, gain exposure to business or VC insight or networking, etc.

Start-up jobs don’t offer those types of things.