This is very true, its hard to tell if the company you are going to join is well run, or awful. Stories people tell about startup's don't help since it can norm

This is very true, its hard to tell if the company you are going to join is well run, or awful. Stories people tell about startup's don't help since it can normalize bad behavior and make it seem like that is the industry norm ( i.e. 14 hour days being standard, very low pay, toxic management ). When I joined my first startup I had already worked in a large engineering firm for 5 years, and due to the nature of the work ( small team with responsibility to do everything from funding projects to delivering them ) I knew what kind of questions to ask to figure out how well run the company was. I think advice about how to spot well run startup's would be much better for junior engineers then telling them to just join a large public company.