The other big problem is that start-ups will sweet talk you regarding freedom to choose tooling, getting greater responsibility, etc., but none of that is enfor

The other big problem is that start-ups will sweet talk you regarding freedom to choose tooling, getting greater responsibility, etc., but none of that is enforceable and subject to change on a whim. You’ll go in believing you traded off some salary in order to get freedom or seniority you wouldn’t get at a traditional company, but it’s just a big lie. “Flexibility” will quickly give way to a bastardized “wear many hats” failure mode where you are being grinded into a burnout by supporting a bunch of shitty tooling with no capacity to hire people to handle the workload. You’ll quickly find that growth start-ups == nobody gives a shit about craft or even basic maintenance to keep a product healthy, they just want a small number of overqualified, underpaid people to absorb that headache on a permanent triage basis like employees are band-aids to constantly stop the bleeding.