Ethical dilemma at work: need guidance

I am working in a Pre Seed GenAI Startup (2020 Founded) as Head of Engineering (Team of 20 with 5-6 in Engineering, No CTO) It's been 3.5 years (3yrs Full Time + 6mon Internship) Previously it is in EdTech now in GenAI Space My CTC is 8 LPA + 0.45% ESOPs (10-12L in 25cr valuation). Skills: Nodejs, Nextjs, Monorepos, MongoDB, AWS, Serverless 1-2yrs ago we were thinking about scaling the tech team, etc but then that EdTech model started failing and then we went to a war time after that we pivoted currently also we are burning money revenue is there but very less (25% of the expense) I was of the view that I want to lead teams and scale products That's why I was there in the team It can be the case tomorrow if we scale but Now I am confused whether I should switch my job and or stick with the startup maybe the startup grow tomorrow or a big VC fund us to scale (as I have ESOPs) or it will just be a waste of time or opportunity cost Please guide 🙏 Anyone with a similar startup experience would really appreciate your help 🙏

4yoe Engineer turned Product Manager. It's been 8 months I joined this B2B SaaS startup as an APM. Engineering team... mostly interns. Most of my time goes into execution following up with devs. Is the PR reviewed, is the bug fix deployed. No Jira, scrum, sprint planning whatsoever. CEO runs the whole show. Only fear driven product management. I have no idea what it means to work on vision or strategy. My career has started off with a shitty foundation. Everyday I feel like quitting. What should I do? Quit right away or wait n switch to a better company?

Hi everyone, I joined a startup back in May which started in May itself. I wrote the first line of code and it has been the backend work since then and have hired a few interns along the way. I took some pay cut to join this startup and i didn't receive any share/ESOPs as well in my offer letter. but whenever i talk to my friends who have worked or are working in these types of companies, ask me to ask for the ESOPs/equity from my founder. I did talk about equity/ESOPs before accepting my offer letter but that time, they said, you will be issued ESOPs later on when we raise some funding. We will make some ESOPs plan when we raise funding. I know that our company has only raised friends and family round of amount near to 1cr. Now I need advice on.. should i bring up this conversation again with the company's founder ? And how much percentage of equity should I be asking..? given that I am giving my 101% daily and leading the backend team.. although i have industry experience of only 3 years but have good academic achievements and has completed graduation in computer science in tier-1 college.

Hey folks! I work in analytics, it's been about 5 years working I had a very good learning time at Zomato, learnt a lot of things and then moved to an early stage startup I'm kind of feeling very dissatisfied at work, this time I have a really good idea worth working. I joined a new company and have built a lot of things ground up here, but am i being too hasty in leaving my job? Should I be prepared to be jobless for a long time if I ever consider corporate again? Because after my first job, i have mostly just worked for a year at every company. And along with my notice period it will be 2 months at my current organisation

For context: Weekends are off. So just fri WFH. This is a Series B startup. I am not even asking for a leave but WFH for just 1 day. I joined recently. The only thing I did wrong was possibly informing a little too late. Want to get opinion if I am overthinking or this classifies as toxic culture in startups where you are expected to push limits above and beyond regularly and sometimes weekends. ---

Hey folks, So I work as a product intern and have an offer to join full time as an Associate Product Manager at a Fintech B2B startup upon graduating. So cutting to the chase, Recently I have been under tremendous pressure to deliver a product. Our organisation does not have any senior product manager to help guide and I report directly to the CEO. I have been given far too much responsibility and an extremely sophisticated product has been put in my care. This product requires a lot of technical expertise and we do not have that kind of resources. I have put this point across to my boss multiple times over the past few months and he always says we will do it. He goes and promises clients that this product exists they even did a soft launch of this product when we literally have not built more than a few screens. Our company has a high employee turnover and people keep quitting left right and centre due to the Co-founders toxic attitude. Recently I have been feeling very anxious starting work in the mornings. Most days go late into the nights because the Co founders work in a different time zone. So the dilemma here is this, I feel the urge to quit this job but at the same time I am afraid that another opportunity will not present itself soon. They also pay me pretty well compared to other product intern roles out there. I know a lot of people are out there fighting for a product intern or an APM role and here I have it and am considering quitting. Please feel free to ask me any follow up questions and forgive me if it sounded more like a rant. I am open to hearing your advise. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Hey folks, So I work as a product intern and have an offer to join full time as an Associate Product Manager at a Fintech B2B startup upon graduating. So cutting to the chase, Recently I have been under tremendous pressure to deliver a product. Our organisation does not have any senior product manager to help guide and I report directly to the CEO. I have been given far too much responsibility and an extremely sophisticated product has been put in my care. This product requires a lot of technical expertise and we do not have that kind of resources. I have put this point across to my boss multiple times over the past few months and he always says we will do it. He goes and promises clients that this product exists they even did a soft launch of this product when we literally have not built more than a few screens. Our company has a high employee turnover and people keep quitting left right and centre due to the Co-founders toxic attitude. Recently I have been feeling very anxious starting work in the mornings. Most days go late into the nights because the Co founders work in a different time zone. So the dilemma here is this, I feel the urge to quit this job but at the same time I am afraid that another opportunity will not present itself soon. They also pay me pretty well compared to other product intern roles out there. I know a lot of people are out there fighting for a product intern or an APM role and here I have it and am considering quitting. Please feel free to ask me any follow up questions and forgive me if it sounded more like a rant. I am open to hearing your advise. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

I was into a founder’s office. Working closely with the leadership team of a funded Agri-tech startup (Which shall strictly remain anon in this post) Does it happen to others the same way as it did to me? I was one of the first FOs in the org and I was trying to figure what is up with this startup. About 21 days in to company, I was helping a co-founder with a report that has to go out to investors. I open up the metrics dashboard to enter numbers when he said “he knew the figures by heart”, so we began entering metrics like GMV and others. These were 5x of my range. I said we should just double check ? He said there are factors in the formula that I have not considered at all and I finish the report as per the numbers he gave me. Confused, I later dared to ask the lead PM how are we computing GMV. And told him about my dilemma to tell the founder we need to just double check his calculations. Bless my naiveté. He had a nervous smile and told me we report numbers that keep the startup exciting and afloat. We will catch up very soon with them. The next morning, the founder also took me for a meeting and explained how doing this is important for everyone in the company to succeed. I was very scared but lived in an autopilot of nervousness for 6 months. Part-took in it while being scared of going to prison myself. I felt a terrible dread in my stomach in every interaction with with the admin and CA teams since in my first interaction I came across what I sensed to be a big fake bill. Was I blind to miss everyone in the office get a new chair the last month? I never asked doubts on the money numbers the CA team gave me. But had reasons to doubt it basis other business data I had access to. Everyone seemed to be on the same kind of auto pilot, good people who had never done anything wrong before this as far as I knew. Everyone considered leaving the culture and toxicity every week. The day I left, I had the email of the investors of the company since I’d emailed them countless decks and reports. I really wanted to drop an anonymous email revealing what I knew to them but I was afraid of the following repercussions to my career and I let the matter go.

I'm seeing so many posts where startup employees are cribbing about things like layoffs, work culture etc etc. Doesn't seem like they have perspective on everything it takes to build a startup. I've built a failed startup myself and have immense respect for founders who are grinding it out there in such difficult recessionary circumstances. And then you have so many of the engineers and PMs cribbing about basics without talking about important things like learning growth, building for the future etc. Why such myopia? I work at a big tech and envy the speed at which startups move, the big responsibility everyone gets to handle, the fast career growth. All these things are being cribbed about. They crib about founders wanting more. Their job is to ensure success, not to give lifetime jobs to entitled people. They have more headaches you can imagine. In my small startup I had a million headaches. I can only imagine how hard it must be to run larger ships. Is everyone joining a startup these days looking for a get rich quick scheme?

I work at a small startup that was acquired by a large corporate, primarily via high level contacts of the founders rather than technical due diligence. Founders and employees cash out big FAANG-level payslips without bothering about any actual work or revenue. Being in my late 20s, I believe that our energetic youth should be spent on doing something that we are proud of, when we look back on our younger days. Imagine yourself in your 60s, and your grandchildren look up to and ask you about your life. I would definitely get depressed if I had to tell them that I did nothing of significance, just collected my salary. In this context, I have been telling a few of my close colleagues how we can learn specific tech stacks which are in demand, in interesting domains that we can shift to, if applying to other companies. However, recently I came to know that some of these colleagues have shared screenshots of my conversations with management and claimed that I am violating company policy by apparently encouraging people to apply elsewhere. Didn't see it playing out like this, so it's a shocker for me. Going forward, what would you suggest? Keep my mouth shut and be company policy-wise correct with people to avoid such backstabbers? Or should I continue to be honest and just change company myself?