The lack of interest in "Stock Options/Profit Sharing Program" should be a sobering reality for business people looking for technical co-founders/employees.
Yes that surrised me as well - would be inetersting to see it broken down by country
Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not surprised by taking a 10% paycut for a better fitting role. I was surprised that having equity or options in the company was one of the least important "wants".
I took the survey and rated equity/options pretty low. My rationale (which may very well be wrong): 1) Options offerings are typically a fraction of 1%: even for the first engineer at companies with no technical co-founders. This (I think) is a carry-over from the dot-com era where IPO exits came hot and heavy. These days, if you're lucky, you're looking at a low-7 to mid-8 figure exit. And to become fully vested, yo…
Well even big companies with bog standard share save schemes can be very lucative one of BT's 5 year scheams if maxed out would have netted you $70k (efectivly tax free) and that is the scheme open to every one.
Plus we use to get $400 or so of shares per year as profit share
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#33Interesting there is no mention of Pensions
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#34I like pie-charts, but I wish that those who did not respond were shown as a missing slice.
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#35I'm shocked at how many people are in start ups - does that perhaps reflect the fact that if your a start up you're typically building your own tools from scratch in areas you're less familiar with, so perhaps need access to experts you don't have locally (i.e. in your company)?
The breakdown for start up/small business isn't great. We have less than 25 people but the company has been around for 17 years.
Agreed - both companies I've worked for have been around for 7-8 years and only have about 10-15 people.
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#36I noticed 49 people currently work for a company whose size is 'other'. What's this about?
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#37Pie charts for comparison?! Here, I made you some bar charts instead: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Country Thanks to gavinballard for the CSV link. If you want to see different breakdowns, just download the workbook/software and play with it yourself.
Actually that made me think about what pie charts are actually useful for.
I think they are useful when the decreased value of other metrics than our target metric is more appealing than the increased value of our target metric itself.Example: share of profit.
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#38Pie charts for comparison?! Here, I made you some bar charts instead: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Country Thanks to gavinballard for the CSV link. If you want to see different breakdowns, just download the workbook/software and play with it yourself.
http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Experience Where do developers disappear after 8 years? And then pop back up after 12.
management?
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#39I suspect many managers, if they ever see this report, would only take-away: programmers don't care about money and stock options.
I know some of my past managers would (and they would use it as an excuse to justify not upgrading dev machines so often). Unsurprisingly none of them would ever read it as it isn't in the form of a management guru book.
Re: Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
#40I noticed 49 people currently work for a company whose size is 'other'. What's this about?
Perhaps, they are currently between jobs or unemployed.