The offer from an Austin startup came in on day 51. By then I'd been through five rounds of interviews and 22 applications I was working through at the same time.
The process had been thorough: a technical screen, a take-home infrastructure scenario, two panel interviews with the platform engineering team, and a final conversation with the VP of Engineering. I was interested in the hybrid DevOps role. Austin made sense geographically, the team seemed sharp, and $132k base was competitive for where I was in my career. Then I got to the equity portion of the offer letter. The package included 0.15% over four years with a one-year cliff. Not unusual on its face. But equity is only worth something if you can actually evaluate it. Any time stock is part of a comp conversation, I ask for the most recent 409A valuation and some visibility into dilution history. Those two documents tell you almost everything about whether the equity is real or just a number on paper. I sent a professional note to their CFO asking for exactly that before I'd sign anything. What I got back was a runaround. The first response was vague and pointed me back to the offer letter itself, as if the strike price listed there was enough context. I followed up and ↓