This isn't a salary negotiation problem. This is a "you are working for people who pretend they have a company" problem. I did that gig, too. I worked for a biomedical startup that got bought out and destroyed. Then I ended up working for a smaller biomedical startup where I was being paid as an "engineering technician" despite the fact that I was the only person besides the CEO with an engineering degree. And I worked there three months, and it was shit, and the day before Thanksgiving I told the CEO "look - I'm doing legit engineering, I saved you $200k with the warehouse redesign, and I'm making $17 an hour. Either pay me what I"m worth or I'm outtie." They told me that actually, my employment was conditional and they were going to hire me on for another 90 days, but happy trails. And then it was Christmas and then Boeing went on strike and it took me another 4 months to find a gig, but I bloody well found it. I figured they long since crashed and burned but as it turns out, they kept the plates spinning for another 14 years. That was fresh outta college. This chick? 38 years old. Negotiating a 6-figure salary with a $10k bonus and a $40k golden parachute. Which, as she says, she's been unable to find anywhere else. Something something too good to be true.
You're right, I saw fast and loose tactics at the negotiating table and I started to conflate the article with something else. Still... While I'd like to believe that the alarm bells sounding at half the shit this CEO was saying would have precluded me from even considering, if I'm being honest, I'm not entirely sure I would've been immune. Confidence follows competence, so I've still got a long ways to go before I could trust myself to suss out such bullshit.
Dude if someone offers you $135k a year TAKE IT. I don't care if they look like the Hamburgler. You can afford to burn a few weeks figuring out that they're Nigerian scammers. Thing of it is, this is kind of a bad riff on the Dan Lyons book, only more whiny and less entertaining. Far more hit piece, far less think piece.
I loved that book, even if it's a bit scary. One of my friends got a job in sales for a marketing software company in Brooklyn, hawking their products to small and medium-sized companies. Sounds like Hubspot? He described to me their sales room, with their "constant happy hours" and a manager who deals cocaine to the employees, and I realized this all started to sound like Hubspot's Howler Monkey room.