DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants • Hacker News Board

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#101

Post by RussianCow » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #46

RussianCow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that doesn't see that as unreasonable? It's not like you aren't accruing equity during that time; you still get the full year's worth of options at the 365 day mark. And the ramp-up time with new engineers can be so long that the first year isn't nearly as productive as consecutive ones. A buddy of mine who worked at a giant company (not strictly tech but you'd recognize it) said he heard from his b…

I think we need to consider each company separately. Smaller firms may have smaller codebase and less complex infrastructure and processes to get familiar with. Learning all of that wouldn’t take more than a week or a month, tops. Larger, public companies like FAANGS will often have completely custom stacks, specialized developer tools and a ton of checks before anything you write hits production. Learning to navigat…

You're completely right—to be fair, the company I was referring to is giant and likely has several months' worth of things to learn, which is very different than joining a startup. But even if a one-year cliff seems excessive for most companies, I still don't think there's anything wrong with a cliff of some sort. Maybe 6 months makes more sense for a medium-sized company, but there's still a breakeven point for new hires, and unless you're one of the first 5 or so employees, that point is probably somewhere between 3 and 9 months. I don't think it's unreasonable for companies to want to pay less during that "trial" period; if you don't like it, join a different company, or just hold out until your equity vests.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#102

Post by mason55 » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #69

milofeynman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a problem across the industry. Companies don't want to give engineers adequate raises so they get trained as juniors and walk out and get 20-30k raises. So then everyone is only interested in seniors. Senior has all but lost its meaning too... It describes how long you've been in the industry, not if you have the skills to be a technical leader, etc. At larger corps when a senior leaves, you're often…

I don’t think it’s a question of raises, more like they’re just not willing to invest the time. Most non giant companies don’t have good processes for on boarding engineers so it’s mostly yolo. They want engineers to be productive very quickly. Someone just out of college will likely not have the skills required to drive projects on their own to completion without help/supervision. Bigger companies have pretty great…

Yeah I always see this expressed as a criticism, like "oh these small companies just hate junior devs! Everyone wants to hire a senior dev, no one wants to hire a junior dev and train them!"

But it's not always that easy. If you're a small company still looking for product-market fit or doing a fair bit of greenfield development, there's just not much work for a junior dev to do. These companies aren't all stupid or lazy or discriminating against new grads for some reason.

It's the same reason estimates are hard - we're building brand new things that we've never built before and a lot of the work is in the design. Junior devs need to be told what to do. The architects/senior devs become a huge bottleneck because they can only design so much stuff at once, so until you can find more of them you can't hire more junior devs because there's not going to be anything for them to do. Until you get to a point where you're doing repeatable work or your design/architecture is solidified enough to keep people on the guard rails, there's just not a ton of work for a junior dev to do.

Finally, you also have the issue that a lot of devs don't want to get into any kind of management but they want to be managed by technical people. You end up with a shortage of decent managers (where "decent" means both someone who's ok at the job of management and is acceptable to the team).

If we had more work to give to junior devs we'd happily hire them - they are so much cheaper!

And one other contributing factor is a lack of unions. Say what you will about seniority-based comp/perks, they do make people stay in one job for longer, which makes it more worthwhile to invest in a junior dev.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#103

Post by bradlys » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #98

soheil wrote: post #34

It looks like DoorDash just put up a big banner at their front door saying if you want to stay less than a year and still get paid highly apply here. Wouldn't this move incentivize employees seeking short term employment thus diluting stocks given out to existing long term employees?

The number of people looking for full-time jobs and intending to only work for 3-9 months is way less than you think.

People who find out the company is a bad fit. It is very common within the valley for people to leave just after they're 1-yr vest because it was a bad fit. If you can get this bad fit employee out faster, the better.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#104

Post by deregulateMed » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #96

digianarchist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing /r/cscareerquestions it looks like entry level folks are having a hard time breaking into the industry. Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems.

There are a surprising number of people who graduate CS/CE without writing any meaningful amount of code. To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News. There are a lot out there who have never done so much as make a web page with more than copy/pasted Jquery and expect to get jobs.

I've seen these people get a job in testing and never leave... Or they move to a program management position.

On the flip side, self taught coders can do pretty much anything with bad form. Although even at my job I find myself doing things with bad form unless the task requires it to be written well.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#105

Post by soheil » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #98

soheil wrote: post #34

It looks like DoorDash just put up a big banner at their front door saying if you want to stay less than a year and still get paid highly apply here. Wouldn't this move incentivize employees seeking short term employment thus diluting stocks given out to existing long term employees?

The number of people looking for full-time jobs and intending to only work for 3-9 months is way less than you think.

The world is a dynamic place. If you think this won't have a large impact on the number of people job hopping not sure what you think will.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#106

Post by thebean11 » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

fallmonkey wrote: post #30

With Google doing front loading(33/33/22/11) and other companies also shifting away from conventional 25% per year vesting to make first few years more attractive, they gotta catch up to stay competitive. Uber recently did the same of removing cliff.

Ehh, aren't the front loaded grants smaller in total? I don't see front loading as a good thing necessarily.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#107

Post by MattGaiser » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #66

digianarchist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing /r/cscareerquestions it looks like entry level folks are having a hard time breaking into the industry. Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems.

> Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems. Because no one is going to hire a junior developer to work remote. The job market isn't especially hot, it's just temporarily distorted in a way that favors more experienced developers.

Eh, even as someone with 1.8 years experience (at least I still feel very junior) I get a steady flood of recruiters and can easily get a pile of interviews.

I think it’s that if you have zero experience, you are a huge unknown. Anything more and work abounds.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#108

Post by thebean11 » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

B-Con wrote: post #99

fallmonkey wrote: post #30

With Google doing front loading(33/33/22/11) and other companies also shifting away from conventional 25% per year vesting to make first few years more attractive, they gotta catch up to stay competitive. Uber recently did the same of removing cliff.

Source on Google doing front loading?

I don't have a link, but seen this on Blind quite a bit

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#109

Post by fridif » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #96

digianarchist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing /r/cscareerquestions it looks like entry level folks are having a hard time breaking into the industry. Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems.

There are a surprising number of people who graduate CS/CE without writing any meaningful amount of code. To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News. There are a lot out there who have never done so much as make a web page with more than copy/pasted Jquery and expect to get jobs.

>"To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News"

In what time period? With what features? With what non functional requirements? Show me a senior who can!

I have a better test for evaluating anyone's skills:

Write a function that puts Strings in an array. Then write another function that goes searching for a string in an array.

Write a unit test to confirm your code is working. Explain what happens to the performance of our code if we can guarantee our array is sorted.

If they can past this test, you're already better than most candidates in my eyes, and it takes about 10 mins to find out.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#110

Post by bogota » Wed, Jul 07, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #96

digianarchist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing /r/cscareerquestions it looks like entry level folks are having a hard time breaking into the industry. Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems.

There are a surprising number of people who graduate CS/CE without writing any meaningful amount of code. To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News. There are a lot out there who have never done so much as make a web page with more than copy/pasted Jquery and expect to get jobs.

Yes unfortunately almost all US and likely other computer science degrees are geared largely at making you a good researcher. I was lucky in that i loved playing with some home servers and with that led to figuring out how to build my own software before finishing school. I think college does a very bad job of preparing you for the real world use such as most having people turn in zip files and not even using git (maybe this has changed).