One thing people need to remember is the world runs on incentives. And on this topic, there is a HUGE incentive to mislead people.
The facts are:
1) Tech startups usually need a bunch of good engineers
2) Investors and founders want these engineers for as little money as possible, as almost every owner-labor relationship in history has gone
3) Stock options have mystique from once-in-a-lifetime companies like Google but are overall very complex financial instruments
4) Many engineers are a combination of poorly informed about these complexities and easily impressionable to be “sold” that these options are a good idea.
The end result is a massive amount of effort expended to hoodwink engineers on this topic. The existence of the term “founding engineer” is exhibit 1, they are an employee and could simply be called software engineer, the term was invented to add the mystique (and workload) of a founder to what’s just a regular employee without founder equity.
Exhibit 2 is this idea that being a founding engineer is a path to being a founder , this gets repeated ad nauseum despite being easily disproven by 5 minutes on linked, a slim percentage of hot startup founders had previously been “founding engineers” . Of course some startup experience might be useful but just as often you’re the code monkey hired precisely so that the actual founders have more time to do the founder stuff you’re not doing and therefore not learning.
YC is basically a VC firm so it’s like taking Exxon Mobiles PR about climate change risk at face value. There’s a huge potential for bias. And even by VC firm standards YC has been shown to be exceptionally employee- hostile in their communications to founders and the behavior of their portfolio companies.
Once again, people ask “what would a union do” and once again, here’s an answer. It could hire lawyers with a collective budget to review startup option terms and make them less likely to screw over early employees. Because the lawyers that the VCs hire are working to protect the VCs, not you. And the blog posts they publish on employee equity are written to serve their interests, not yours.