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

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#231

Post by wpietri » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:15 AM UTC

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #225

fragmede wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fascinating reasoning. It makes sense, but that's the same sort of logic where employers will give hourly employees 39.5 hours a week because if you give them 40 they become "full time". Has that kind of short sighted thinking really invaded the software engineering industry? That's scary.

Why would avoiding paying employees benefits be short-sighted thinking? If anything it was short sighted of the US government to ban increased wages during WWII - leading to employers paying benefits which gums up the labor market.

It's short-sighted because employees are humans, which perform much better when healthy and excited to work. Stingy/hostile employers have high turnover and employees who treat work as a zero or negative sum game.

A good example of this is the This American Life story on NUMMI: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

Toyota took one of GM's worst plants and turned it into one of its best by treating workers with respect. Hearing the workers talk about the transformation stunned me.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#232

Post by wpietri » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:16 AM UTC

quelltext wrote: post #191

endtime wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't necessarily that the employee expects to want to leave in under a year, so much as they don't want the company to have an incentive to let them go in under a year.

Now they'd have an incentive to let them go in under a quarter, by that logic. Not sure if that's really their concern here. Companies don't just ditch reasonably well performing employees because they want to avoid compensating them. That would already mean that each time RSUs vest the company would have an incentive to fire.

Much less so, because productivity is low in the first few months.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#233

Post by rejectedandsad » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

smabie wrote: post #86

rejectedandsad wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only had 4 offers to choose from. It's a bimodal distribution between the 200K+ 0YOE folks and everyone else.

4 is a lot

Is it? Most folks seem to have like 6-7. Only 2 of mine were "real" from full time interviews, other two were from internships. I had a really low hit rate and didn't get into any top companies.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#234

Post by wpietri » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

brutus1213 wrote: post #170

spotman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really true. Have achieved multiple companies removing the 1 year cliff for me.

The one year cliff is not that problematic to me since I would expect I am getting paid market, and the options are like a hiring bonus (which you often must return if you quit within a year). What am I missing? Is people really worried that a startup whose stock has risen will fire a productive employee? That said, I have seen 5 year vesting (which seemed like a red flag to me), and have heard of Amazon's schedule w…

Depends on the company. I joined Twitter in 2016. The stock, which was circa 1/3rd of my total comp, had a one year cliff. 7 months in, one executive got the upper hand in a power struggle, pushing out my boss and laying off the people he hired, me included. I don't think they did it because of the stock. But I'm sure it didn't hurt. I'm still mad about it.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#235

Post by ec109685 » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #151

kerng wrote: post #141

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…

I am so fascinated at how my grandfather would spend decades at a company, my Dad would spend a decade, and now people decline jobs over the expectation that they stay 1 year. And I was in my first job 51 weeks. I don't think you are wrong in doing so as the market in tech moves fast while employers move like slugs, it is just such a shift from what I grew up to expect.

It also smooths out when people leave by spreading grants out. Some companies have stock grants vest and bonus payout all at once, once per year.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#236

Post by riffraff » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:23 AM UTC

endtime wrote: post #154

MattGaiser wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so fascinated at how my grandfather would spend decades at a company, my Dad would spend a decade, and now people decline jobs over the expectation that they stay 1 year. And I was in my first job 51 weeks. I don't think you are wrong in doing so as the market in tech moves fast while employers move like slugs, it is just such a shift from what I grew up to expect.

The problem isn't necessarily that the employee expects to want to leave in under a year, so much as they don't want the company to have an incentive to let them go in under a year.

Do companies really fire people at week 51 to save some stock?

Hiring is tough and you waste a lot of time onboarding people and getting them to a productive state, firing them just to save some stock after 50 weeks seems a bad idea, not to mention the morale implications.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#237

Post by vmception » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

Delaware should regulate this at the state level

and if you don't like the statutory result, you can incorporate in at least one of 55+ other sovereign jurisdictions within the United States

People that really think they need a state-level business court system for their multinational unicorn, in a place they never physically will be, can just keep using Delaware for no reason, and their employees will subsequently have better earned securities laws.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#238

Post by toomanybeersies » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #151

kerng wrote: post #141

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…

I am so fascinated at how my grandfather would spend decades at a company, my Dad would spend a decade, and now people decline jobs over the expectation that they stay 1 year. And I was in my first job 51 weeks. I don't think you are wrong in doing so as the market in tech moves fast while employers move like slugs, it is just such a shift from what I grew up to expect.

I was in a meeting the other day where one of the attendees had been working at the company for 20 years and another for 15. By my guess, I reckon people work here for about 7 years on average before moving on.

In my experience, people tend to be either lifers and stay for 10+ years, or bounce between jobs every year or two. Lifers tend to accumulate in companies that cater towards them (good work/life balance and job security) due to low employee turnover, so if you're in the other group, it appears that everyone in the industry only works for a year.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#239

Post by b9a2cab5 » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:46 AM UTC

__te__ wrote: post #156

Note: DoorDash employs the labor of approximately 104,000 people. Of those, about 4,000 are classified as employees. Of those , only a portion (of unknown size) are "equity-eligible." Only equity-eligible roles classified as employees get equity. For everyone else employed by DoorDash, and on whose backs DoorDash is built, let them eat cake.

That is ultimately the result of minimum wage. Because minimum wage is above the market equilibrium (since these jobs are unskilled and there is a surplus of unskilled labor in the U.S. due to illegal immigration and deindustrialization) and the market moves faster than legislation, there will always be loopholes through which the standard of pay (or associated benefits) is lowered below what nominally would be minimum wage.

If you ban DoorDash someone else will pop up to exploit the system. Or someone like Kiwibot or Serve Robotics will come along and automate the whole thing and remove the jobs from the market entirely.

Legislators should stop fixating on minimum wage and fix the root causes behind low pay rather than trying to legislate band aids.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#240

Post by yroc92 » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 5:02 AM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #236

endtime wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't necessarily that the employee expects to want to leave in under a year, so much as they don't want the company to have an incentive to let them go in under a year.

Do companies really fire people at week 51 to save some stock? Hiring is tough and you waste a lot of time onboarding people and getting them to a productive state, firing them just to save some stock after 50 weeks seems a bad idea, not to mention the morale implications.

Happened to me.