I think the biggest problem with these offers is that the payoff for the founders vs a "founding engineer" is so wildly out of whack despite minor differences i

I think the biggest problem with these offers is that the payoff for the founders vs a "founding engineer" is so wildly out of whack despite minor differences in their work and effort. That is, after a seed round, founders typically (obviously "typically" is doing a lot of work here) retain ~80% of the company, and after a Series A ~20-30%. So, lets say there are 2 founders, and a founding engineer is hired shortly after the seed round. That means at that point each founder will have about 40x the equity of said "founding engineer". Yes, the founders had to come up with the idea and get the initial seed funding, but that process usually takes on the order of 3-6 months. The founding engineer is going to be working just as hard after starting as the founders (oftentimes harder), usually making similar cash compensation, for 40x less equity. My main point is if you think you might want to be a "founding engineer", just be a founder instead. As a good example, consider Nathan Blecharczyk, one of the 3 cofounders of AirBnB, and was its original CTO and coded its first website. He's now worth about $10 billion and according to Wikipedia is the 203rd richest person on the planet. If he instead took a job as "founding engineer" at AirBnB, and let Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia instead take on the sole founder titles, he'd be worth orders of magnitude less (granted an order of magnitude less than $10 billion is still hundreds of million, but point being there is no reason he should be compensated less than his other cofounders).