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Question on exercising and such. I have all exercised options, but not all vested, been here about 2 years, so half vested. Didn't pay taxes at exercise because there was no difference between exercise price and market price.
What happens taxwise if my company goes under? Don't I only owe taxes if I sell vested options?
Around 1992, my friend and I started doing desktop database apps as a side gig while we worked at a consulting firm doing IT. We decided to do this full time. With connections in the music industry, we started doing websites and online stores for some big names like Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Phish, and others. By then there were about 5-6 of us, working out of my friend's house. We weren't real employees, and only g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be fair, true developers were not really negatively affected at least not more so than other professions. That was my experience as well, all the weird roles got cut in companies, all the crazy extras removed, but the companies that had working business models kept on trucking and hiring competent developers, and competent developers at unsustainable businesses had no trouble finding new work. Because at the end…
Austrian school of economics believes that occasional recessions are useful because they destroy bad ideas (not exclusively bad ideas, but many bad ideas) and therefore free up resources for new ideas. Some of which will be good, some bad. For a huge example: Madoff was only discovered because of the 2008 crisis. SEC had plenty of evidence against him for years before that, including the fact he did not actually trad…
I went from being a hotshot who had multiple offers all the time with sign up bonuses to somebody who could send out 100 resumes and not get a single response and once I got a response I was offered much less than I was used to. It was very depressing but also educational. It took me quite a while (probably too long) to accept this new reality. I feel the same may happen to a lot of Startup guys who make big money in…
Indeed. When 2008 hit, it was reminiscent of what ~2002 felt like, except instead of tech it was basically happening to everyone. In that way I felt more prepared to deal with the new crisis because I'd learned from the old one.
What followed was almost straight out of the Silicon Valley sitcom. Management know our existing product was a dead-end, but with 85% of the company laid off, our remaining VC funds gave us a decent runway, so they decided to pivot to ... something. That is, the entire company (about ~15 of us) would sit around in the boardroom and try to come up with new product ideas. Needless to say, that went precisely nowhere.
The CEO was pushed out fairly shortly after that and I had been brought in through his network. My layoff came about ~6 months later in the second round of layoffs which constituted only me. Thanks to the VP of engineering going to bat for me, I did get 3 months of severance. I spent 9 months looking for another job and finally found one in fintech in NYC which turned out the be, to this day, one of the best jobs of my career. I also met my now-wife and many of my best friends there. That time was both the most traumatic experience of my working career and the best thing to happen to me at the same time. I know it was much harder on many other people, but it turned out for the best for me.
Got stuck with a huge tax bill on my stock options when Yahoo went under, took 10 years of brutal back to back contracts to pay it off. The state didn't care that I had nowhere near the opportunities again they just mercilessly hammered me for taxes until I paid it off a couple years ago but took nearly 15 years to pay off the tax debt and meanwhile I could invest in nothing else.
Not sure how he resolved it (whether he negotiated his tax bill down with the IRS or came up with a payment plan).
I was at ask.com during the crash. The first bad part for me was the options. I planned on selling them the instant they vested. A week before vesting they were trading in the low hundred dollar range. The day they vested they were in the dollar range, with a strike price of 10 dollars. Thank goodness I didn't exercise them or I'd be stuck in the tax boat. So it was demoralizing, but I still had my salary, and I was…
In a matter of a few hours all new IT/IS project were cancelled and budgets for IT/IS were frozen to below the minimum in all companies. It took almost a year to recover a little.
I started my career during the summer 2001. I was hired in seconds without any technical test.
All (no exception) my friends who wanted to chill during the summer before finding their first job... ended jobless for 1 full year.