At my first US startup the CTO told me that all engineers are making the same slightly below market salaries and receiving same options. A few months later I found that most actually made almost twice and had way more options. I fix this quickly but i still don’t understand how people seem to think that it’s ok to blatantly to somebody
It doesn't even have to be a hand-to-mouth startup to blatantly lie to folks, it can be a multi-billion-dollar multi-national corporation. For instance, when I was a manager at Microsoft I had more than one newly-hired report tell me that their onboard training said there was no stack ranking, which we all now know wasn't even remotely true in the early 2000s.
(New hires would mention this, because one of the first things I'd tell new hires on my team was how stack ranking worked, amongst other parts of the performance review process.)
