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.