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. Not to be difficult. 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 ↓
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