Then I got to the final footnote. That kind of Kafka-esque bullshit is what 
    keeps me working in startups.

While I agree that big companies can have weird Kafka-esque bureaucracy, they're still generally a lot better at record-keeping than startups. I've never had a big company ask me if I could go without pay for a couple of weeks while they waited to "sort out my payroll paperwork". I did eventually get the back pay, but it was pretty tense for a couple of weeks, as I waited and wondered if I'd made a terrible mistake in quitting my work for a large corporation to go work for this startup.