Right now, this standard recruiter question is on the side of the table that's often being especially penny-wise and pound-foolish...

A weird thing I'm seeing is early AI startups lowballing both salary and equity for AI startup jobs, compared to a few years ago for generic Web/app developer jobs.

You're in a narrow opportunity window of a massive investment gold rush. You probably got funding with a weak/nonexistent business model, and some mostly vibe-coded demo and handwavey partnership.

Now you need to hire a few good founding engineer types who can help get the startup through a series of harder milestones, with skillsets less clear than for generic Web/app development. If you can hire people as smart and dedicated as yourself, they'll probably do things that make a big positive difference, relative to what bottom of the barrel hires will do.

So why would you lowball these key early hires, at less than a new-grad starting salary, plus a pittance of ISOs that will be near-worthless even if you have a good exit.

Is it so that the founders and investors can have the maximum percentage of... something probably less valuable than what they'd get by attracting and aligning the right early hires? (Unless it's completely an investment scam, in which genuine execution doesn't affect the exit value.)

I’ve also noticed this, and it causes real issues long term when you want to build the product. Suddenly management is surprised your senior engineer with no relevant experience is taking a long time and needs to bring in a half million in consultants to actually do the work. It stresses everyone else out and then you end up with a lot of churn, a lot of burn, and very little internal knowledge to build off of for the future