11–20 of 348 posts
You own 1% of options and company is bought for $10m.
Your payoff?
Likely $0.
He forgot to mention preferred shares given to VC’s with liquidation preferences that likely never disclosed to new engineers.
This is what makes new engineer to sacrifice his salary for a possible liquidation even that likely either never happens or there is no money left for him after VCs took their xN ratios off the payoff.
I've been thinking about low-friction options for getting a sense of the engineering quality. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that technical debt and bad software development practices are a top concern. Being quite senior now, I'd feel comfortable asking: 1 - To see their CI dashboard 2 - To see a sample of their production systems stdout & stderr 3 - Asking to review a recent non-trivial commit (with the person…
I disagree - tech debt and bad practices can be fixed with good leadership. But poor leadership will never give you the opportunities to make such corrections. I do agree that knowing the status quo is useful, but the trajectory the organization is on is more important than today's exact position. I ask questions more along the lines of what is wrong, and how are they correcting it. Good answers there can show a good…
I've been thinking about low-friction options for getting a sense of the engineering quality. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that technical debt and bad software development practices are a top concern. Being quite senior now, I'd feel comfortable asking: 1 - To see their CI dashboard 2 - To see a sample of their production systems stdout & stderr 3 - Asking to review a recent non-trivial commit (with the person…
In my opinion, if you're a start-up and you've got all those boxes checked, you're possibly doing the right things in the wrong order, and that's a red flag for me. What I hope to hear are responses like, "so this is how we're doing CI. It's awful, almost non-existent. But that's because at our scale it just wasn't important. But as we grow it will become VERY important, so here's what we're thinking about doing in the next 6-12 months..."
I've experienced a start-up with lots of tooling and process , none of which matters when you take forever to ship (and stay shipped).
(I think it's hilarious I'm being downvoted for making a factual observation...) It amazes me how different startup culture, and tech culture in general, is from the rest of the country. ---- Every job I've ever worked at: Relocation expenses? hahahaha Equity? haha we'll wave your brokerage fee to buy as our stock purchase program but if you wanna sell, you'll be paying brokerage fees. Responsibilities? You'll do wha…
Option piece is misleading. You own 1% of options and company is bought for $10m. Your payoff? Likely $0. He forgot to mention preferred shares given to VC’s with liquidation preferences that likely never disclosed to new engineers. This is what makes new engineer to sacrifice his salary for a possible liquidation even that likely either never happens or there is no money left for him after VCs took their xN ratios o…
I've been thinking about low-friction options for getting a sense of the engineering quality. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that technical debt and bad software development practices are a top concern. Being quite senior now, I'd feel comfortable asking: 1 - To see their CI dashboard 2 - To see a sample of their production systems stdout & stderr 3 - Asking to review a recent non-trivial commit (with the person…
I've been thinking about low-friction options for getting a sense of the engineering quality. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that technical debt and bad software development practices are a top concern. Being quite senior now, I'd feel comfortable asking: 1 - To see their CI dashboard 2 - To see a sample of their production systems stdout & stderr 3 - Asking to review a recent non-trivial commit (with the person…
Option piece is misleading. You own 1% of options and company is bought for $10m. Your payoff? Likely $0. He forgot to mention preferred shares given to VC’s with liquidation preferences that likely never disclosed to new engineers. This is what makes new engineer to sacrifice his salary for a possible liquidation even that likely either never happens or there is no money left for him after VCs took their xN ratios o…
Can you elaborate on why your payoff is $0 if you have 1% vested common stock in the company?
Usually, the founders and VC have the preferred shares, while someone writing unit tests at 3am does not.
Option piece is misleading. You own 1% of options and company is bought for $10m. Your payoff? Likely $0. He forgot to mention preferred shares given to VC’s with liquidation preferences that likely never disclosed to new engineers. This is what makes new engineer to sacrifice his salary for a possible liquidation even that likely either never happens or there is no money left for him after VCs took their xN ratios o…
Can you elaborate on why your payoff is $0 if you have 1% vested common stock in the company?
Option piece is misleading. You own 1% of options and company is bought for $10m. Your payoff? Likely $0. He forgot to mention preferred shares given to VC’s with liquidation preferences that likely never disclosed to new engineers. This is what makes new engineer to sacrifice his salary for a possible liquidation even that likely either never happens or there is no money left for him after VCs took their xN ratios o…
If you can't get those, then unless the equity is just butter to you, walk .. as you don't really know what the comp looks like.