61–69 of 69 posts
The author repeatedly mentions $XXX RSUs. It's been a while since I've worked for a pre-IPO company. Is it common for companies to give RSUs a dollar value instead of a number of shares and "heck if I know the valuation"? And how are RSUs different from straight ISOs?
What are taxes on non-liquid RSUs like?
In practice most companies will allow you to surrender non-liquid RSUs to pay the tax withholding so you don't have a massive tax bill from a non-liquid asset.
Does anyone know what computer science problems hes referring to for interviews? Does anyone have a resource i can look at?
For people who are currently looking, they should be thankful for this post. This guy really was a master negotiator and provides lots of hard numbers. The key is to get some initial leverage (at least one offer from anywhere) and then keep cranking. If you can get a Google offer, then you can really squeeze out every last drop. I think him publicly posting this will cause a lot of resentment at his company. I wouldn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are salaries trade secrets on US? Here usually we talk openly about them.
America is full of fools on this point. We don't talk about salary because, in the back of our minds, it's a determiniate of our value. This is not true in most philosophical systems, but it's true in our post-modern materialism. The end result of our self-censor is a weak labor market. We don't know what we're worth. Americans, aside from our verbrato, tend to underestimate our worth. There are people working for 80…
"Bravado". I wouldn't correct you except that it took me a good five minutes to think of the correct word :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "I hope revealing salaries doesn't get him in trouble at AirBnb. I know I would be a bit annoyed if he revealed all of this before joining if I were an employer." I hope it doesn't get him in trouble, too. It would be both illegal and a gross ethical violation on Airbnb's part. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gives all employees the right organize and "engage in concerted activities", including the right t…
The trouble is probably a social one, not legal. Every engineer there is comparing themselves to a guy with a year of experience and thinking that they shouldn't be paid less. All at once. Either AirBnB ends up making 230k the minimum salary for everyone or people will take this guy's advice and start negotiating, getting counter offer from other places and possibly just leave. Management ended up paying a lot more t…
More transparency is overall a positive thing. Underpaid people should know that they're being underpaid, and engineers notoriously suck at negotiation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A talented junior developer is still a junior developer. Read his biography - the entire reason he has been able to achieve everything he has in life is because he doesn't have such a close-minded and pessimistic attitude. Rather than just letting the conventions of society dictate what he gets and does, he instinctively finds ways to work around them. While everyone else is busy checking the boxes expected of them…
On your advice I read the about page on his website (I assume this is the biography you mentioned). I also checked out App Academy on LinkedIn and Angel List. Angel List even had the job posting for his old position. I still believe he's a junior developer. He didn't magically cram more than a year of development into that year. If anything he did less development. Out of his one year of experience some was spent as…
This guy was able to accomplish a ton in a year, acquiring the technical chops to get offers at top companies like Google. If he can do that in one year, imagine where he'll be in another year.
The two blog posts were interesting reads, especially with the raw numbers given. In addition, it also shows how blind most companies are to talent - they're not interested in discovering the diamonds in the rough unless a company like Google does it for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trouble is probably a social one, not legal. Every engineer there is comparing themselves to a guy with a year of experience and thinking that they shouldn't be paid less. All at once. Either AirBnB ends up making 230k the minimum salary for everyone or people will take this guy's advice and start negotiating, getting counter offer from other places and possibly just leave. Management ended up paying a lot more t…
On the flipside, more talent would probably apply to AirBnB knowing that a guy like him can land 230k. Not to mention he's indirectly marketing for AirBnB by explaining why he was attracted to the company and chose them over Google (often seen as the holy grail of software engineering). I highly doubt that management is pissed. More transparency is overall a positive thing. Underpaid people should know that they're b…
I just don't think AirBnB can pay higher than Google in the long-term--are they really making $1M in revenue and quarter million per employee?