&gt; You may work your ass off, but if you do, do it because it is the right thing to do and you want to do it.<p><i>Lana Kane style noooope.</i> Do it for a wage&#x2F;equity&#x2F;benefits&#x2F;vacation package that is satisfactory in helping you achieve your goals. In fact, if you accept anything less than that, you&#x27;re not just doing yourself a disservice, but also all of your peers because you&#x27;re sending a market signal that you currently devalue your own labor. If you reached that decision through careful thought and really determined such lesser forms of compensation were OK for you, given other trade offs, then fine, so be it, that is your market price. But that&#x27;s not usually what happens. Usually it&#x27;s an inexperienced engineer who had no way to know any better because she&#x2F;he had never been exposed to the important points of stock options, never knew what or how to ask, and followed some dopey advice like &quot;just work hard because it&#x27;s the right thing to do&quot; because someone seemingly older&#x2F;wiser&#x2F;with more authority kept telling them to stop whining for more compensation and just do the work.<p>It&#x27;s precisely because a business doesn&#x27;t have the explicit goal of making employees any wealthier <i>than it has to</i> that we have to be vigilant to demand our full market compensation, whether it means negotiating a better exercise window, or better accelerated vesting terms, or a real wage instead of a but-we&#x27;re-a-startup wage, and so on.