This sounds typical to me, and I've been through this a number of times in various forms. It's a classic example of why so many people are heading off to do their own thing. Nice, eh? "8 million for me... 10K for you."
Imagine it's your company, your idea, your co-founder and you stay up late for weeks, you incorporate, you structure 8M shares each, and 2M aside to "dole out" to hire in people.
How much do you give your employees as you hire them?
Do you give them a bunch of equity "out of the goodness of your heart"?
Or do you do the Socratic thing and ask them, "what would it take?" Or make your best guess at what it would take?
Or do you believe in ensuring long-term motivation of strong employees, and give them a worthy amount? What if they turn out to be an underperformer?
On one hand, you could argue that ideas are cheap -- execution is hard. On the other, plenty of people don't have many ideas, and need a leader to show them the way and press them to excel. I claim that the real challenge is to both have a great idea, and to execute well, and even if you do that, chances of failure are still very high.
If you're not happy with the level of equity, look elsewhere.
If you don't have confidence and respect and faith in the founders, look elsewhere.
If you're surprised that the founders are doing a poker-table-style "8M for me, 10K for you...", pulling a huge pile toward themselves and giving you the small peanut pile... get used to it, buddy.