Early stage startups are making a joke out of engineers by pitching the bro-culture and talking about freedom and 10X- 100X.
And yeah, with a big hype from VCs and investors tweeting about startupX, Y, Z, engineers get fooled and join a startup and work for 4 years and later figure out it was a bad idea.
It's a very bad idea to join a startup for money unless you know the founders really well who have a track record of selling themselves to Google/Facebook/Oracle/MSFT.