You'd be surprised. Many programmers don't negotiate, don't ask for severance or bonuses or better acceleration/vesting terms etc., feel afraid to be rejected a

You'd be surprised. Many programmers don't negotiate, don't ask for severance or bonuses or better acceleration/vesting terms etc., feel afraid to be rejected after completing interviews, and a lot of people end up working for far lower pay than they could have otherwise gotten. I've known a lot of people who joined start-ups because they were promised various things (freedom to work on X, guarantee of publishing research, attending conferences, etc.) and then 6 months later they feel miserable that they accepted lower pay and none of the promises turned out to be true (sometimes through no intentional fault of the start-up founders, but sometimes through complete bait and switch shenanigans). The risk that start-ups won't follow through on ambiguous work promises is super high, yet people keep falling for it year after year.