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Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

reuters.com

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Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#151

Post by ideals »

adriancr wrote: post #92
zaarn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your overall leverage is increased through the union so you are more likely to get a fair compensation than before.

not if the union negotiates upper limits on compensation. Or it negotiates yearly raise brackets. You can negotiate better individually if you are good and there arent union enforced guidelines, if you're not, the union deal would work out better.

Do you see yourself as becoming a top earner in your field?

Do you know if you earn more than your colleagues? If so, is this because of your negotiating skills?

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#152

Post by chrisseaton »

ideals wrote: post #147
chrisseaton wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instrumental in ensuring that disabled employees have access to tools they need to do their job and the support they need Accommodating disabled employees is a majority view. The majority of people agree with it. As we said, unions are democratic so how did this action get implemented if it wasn’t a majority view? The problem is when you’re in a minority view. > Your employer does not see you as significantly diffe…

Do you feel you are a top earner in your field? If not, do you think you will become a top earner in your field? Do you know if you earn more than your colleagues?

No and no (never realistically going to be that outside something like Google in Mountain View). No I've never asked them.

You think a union would make everyone be paid like a senior at Google? Yeah....

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#153

Post by pc86 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #144
pc86 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else brought these two up elsewhere in this thread. Are there no examples of regular people who aren't making tens of millions of dollars a year?

Unions have largely been crushed in the US so if you keep asking for more examples eventually things will run dry. But the screen writers guild is another example if you don't want to look for one where top performers are paid eight figure salaries.

I'll have to look into the writer's guild more, thanks!

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#154

Post by dragonwriter »

Thorrez wrote: post #69
eric-hu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like it would be very valuable information to the investors.

It sounds like it might be illegal, maybe it could be reported to the FTC.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems a lot more SEC than FTC.

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#155

Post by bobthepanda »

ideals wrote: post #135
spurned_dev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh gonna need a throwaway for this one. I had an exit interview where the founder told me their endgame was to destroy the value of the company to buyback the equity they sold to investors. I've never been more insulted in my life.

And you're still protecting them even after they admitted to fraud! This is in response to someone saying we need to look out for each other. Our fellow devs and employees. Y'all need to stop being so nice. Your founder isn't. You need to stop trying to play fair , your founder isn't. You need to put the people you work with on a higher level than your founder and get over this appeal to authority.

Generally if you’re doing that, you want to make the first move, and you probably don’t want the first move to be exposing yourself to a libel suit.

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#156

Post by bobthepanda »

jonathanliu wrote: post #131
sjg007 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, seems strange.. seems easier to start another one. I mean we have a wide range of forum sites.

Reddit has an established dominant position on google search, in culture, etc, would be very hard to start from scratch.

Reddit replaced Digg, so it’s not impossible for something to replace Reddit.

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#157

Post by tinco »

mrep wrote: post #118
tinco wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and that someday stock worth 10s or 100s of K will be worth 100s or 1Ms This sounds a bit dodgy. I don't endorse paying someone with less than 5 years 250k/year but if you're looking at someone then the amount of options you give them should be worth at least the salary cut over the vesting period. So say you're looking at some VP potential that could get 400k per year working at Netflix or something and you're goi…

> Then you should offer them (imo) $750k in options vesting over 3 years. That's in now money, as in that should be whatever the investors in your last round paid for that same stock. Except those investors got preferred stock whereas you are getting common stock which has less value. Thus, they are offering you the option to pay 750k for stock that is actually worth more like 600k losing you money. Now those options…

Yeah, but their investment is a lump sum, while you can get out at any time. I do get what you mean, I'm just setting a sort of baseline standard, that you're off by 15% on way or the other doesn't really matter, it's about that you're getting an offer that's in the ballpark of being fair.

I don't think that the option greeks are very relevant, especially not in public companies as they have very different dynamics.

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#158

Post by mthoms »

bobthepanda wrote: post #156
jonathanliu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has an established dominant position on google search, in culture, etc, would be very hard to start from scratch.

Reddit replaced Digg, so it’s not impossible for something to replace Reddit.

Reddit was quite popular before Digg failed. It didn't spring up over night. But yeah, something might replace Reddit one day. Getting there will be extraordinarily hard.

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#159

Post by trytozoom »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #70
trytozoom wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a ton of this on HN for the past couple of years, "Go work for FAANG, startups are worthless." As someone who has started a company, gotten it funded, and would like to hire high quality engineers, this is deeply disheartening. I've tried to hire a few people, offering them market rate or close to it for base salary (_very_ rough ballpark 150-200K for 2-5y experience) and a decent chunk of equity (highly va…

As a FAANG engineer that used to work for start ups I’ll give my honest feedback on why I don’t consider working for a start up anymore. A 15% options pool is insulting as you’ve decided to split off 85% for yourself and non-employees while leaving a measly 15% for the people who will actually build the company. 2% is just way to low to be of interest to me. And the sad part is, that is much higher that most offers.…

I appreciate the feedback, it's useful to hear this.

I'd be willing to boost the options pool, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to do so right now for a few reasons.

1.) I don't trust that someone isn't going to come in, get offered a large chunk of equity (lets say it's 10%), and leave after 2 years with 5% of the company. In many ways that would be unfair to a future employee who works with us for a longer period of time and gets dramatically less equity. This could be solved with highly backloaded option grants (I've been thinking about doing this), but I suspect you wouldn't be interested if 8 of the 10% vests over years 5 and 6 or years 5-8 either.

2.) At previous startups I've worked, there are often follow-on grants that mitigate dilution for employees upon fundraising events. As a founder, I definitely won't get such a grant until I'm close to fully vesting. If we take some of the sting out of dilution, then that effectively is growing the option pool over time.

3.) I currently have 50.1% of the company. Had I cofounders, we would together own 50.1% of the company. This is helpful because it allows me to make some decisions without relying on our investor (who's been lovely so far, but still). Later, that will change, but at that point we'll have more infrastructure.

On accounting/books, I don't know if I can do that. I've never seen it done across the org, though I'm happy to show senior management rough projections and our current burn.

Unlimited vacation is an accounting construct. The pain of having to deal with accrued days vacation is not worth the hassle for a small company. When we have better financial infrastructure, maybe we'll revisit.

A lot of this sounds like I need to foster some trust in my potential hires that I'm going to take care of them more than anything else.

Regarding the equity, how would a long or highly backloaded vesting schedule work for people in your shoes?

Re: Former Zoox employees sue, alleging rival offer was better than Amazon's

#160

Post by trytozoom »

tfehring wrote: post #77
trytozoom wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a ton of this on HN for the past couple of years, "Go work for FAANG, startups are worthless." As someone who has started a company, gotten it funded, and would like to hire high quality engineers, this is deeply disheartening. I've tried to hire a few people, offering them market rate or close to it for base salary (_very_ rough ballpark 150-200K for 2-5y experience) and a decent chunk of equity (highly va…

Do you and/or your investors have preferred stock/liquidation preferences? If so, that dramatically reduces the value of employees' stock and creates a misalignment of incentives, and my impression is that that misalignment has been the biggest source of horror stories of employees getting screwed. If a $250M exit will make you rich, your investors happy, and your employees nothing, and you and your investors are the…

I do not, the investors do. I sit in the same shoes as the employees and intend to keep it that way.

It's entirely possible for our investors to recover their money, and for me and the employees to make $0. However it's not possible for me to make something and the employees to make $0.

One small wrinkle is that my strike price was microscopic because of when the company was incorporated, whereas the strike price for an employee is merely very low, so there could be some outcome differences there.

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