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Just two months ago I declined an offer from a known and well funded startup because of a one year cliff on equity.
The recruiter didn't seem to be able to discuss this matter and I asked them to make sure to bubble this sort of thing up their food chain. I never heard back afterwards.
As an "old timer" in the industry a one year cliff makes absolutely no sense to me. Its like working for credit, which seems very backwards.
Not surprised. I'm probably a fair bit older than the average HN reader (finished undergrad in 1995). This is the hottest job market I've seen since the height of the dotcom bubble (mid 1999 to early 2000), and if it continues along it's current trajectory it will pass that by year end.
> This is the hottest job market I've seen Clearly this is anecdotal, but what types of things lead you to this conclusion?
> Because we see equity as part of total compensation, we believe employees should receive equity as it’s earned — every quarter. This reads to me like someone looked at the data and discovered that almost everybody who stays employed for a quarter goes on to stay for a year. So they decided to try to juice some marketing value out of a policy change that makes no functional difference to anyone. Why else would they…
This makes sense for reduced paperwork if the company is buying back 28% of the shares to pay taxes instead of selling it to the market to pay the taxes - the company can reduce the open market sale on vesting days, but keep it as a single event within the quarter (advance tax payment per quarter).
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?
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.
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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 (ma…
I graduated two years ago. We learned subversion :)
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What I've seen is generally the conversion happens once for the whole package, when you sign. So if the stock grows during your vesting period, the value increases (goes both way obviously). I think here they are mentioning value based, which means that instead of being given X amount of shares/rsu over 4 years, you're given "the equivalent of $X" at the begining of each years. So after 1 year, of the stock doubled i…
That's typical, but I've heard of a move away from it, to a plan where you get a set dollar amount every month(?) and it's converted to employee shares at the market rate then. Sounds like DoorDash just moved to it, and someone has linked a Blind thread where apparently Stripe/Instacart have, and I heard from a friend that Lyft just moved to that as well. I can see the importance of this from the company end - with t…
AFAIK that is not how stock works in this context. The company issues the shares ex nihilo. That dilutes existing shareholders (if not offset with buybacks) but otherwise doesn't cost the company anything. The shares are not vested so if you leave they return to the comp pool. The company doesn't magically issue new shares on your vesting date so any rise in share price doesn't affect the company anyway. The whole point from a company POV is they can pay you in paper (shares) they manufactured out of nothing rather than cash.
They are doing it this way to reduce the total number of shares they need to issue (aka cut compensation). There is basically no upside for an employee, the changes to vesting schedules or cliff are a sop to avoid having to tell their employees that they're cutting compensation. Employees can already borrow against those RSUs if they need money.
The idea that missing out on a 10%-200% rise in the share price over the next four years in exchange for a bit more flexibility in vesting is a joke. If the company actually cared about the flexibility they could just switch to 6 month vesting or monthly vesting without removing the upside. There is no benefit to removing the upside beyond reducing dilution. They sure as hell aren't going to apply that same policy to their executives.
This is good progress. Just two months ago I declined an offer from a known and well funded startup because of a one year cliff on equity. The recruiter didn't seem to be able to discuss this matter and I asked them to make sure to bubble this sort of thing up their food chain. I never heard back afterwards. As an "old timer" in the industry a one year cliff makes absolutely no sense to me. Its like working for credi…
Not surprised. I'm probably a fair bit older than the average HN reader (finished undergrad in 1995). This is the hottest job market I've seen since the height of the dotcom bubble (mid 1999 to early 2000), and if it continues along it's current trajectory it will pass that by year end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I graduated two years ago. We learned subversion :)
I also graduated two years ago. One of my peers in our group project refused to make a GitHub account and instead emailed us his code