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

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#241

Post by glenngillen » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #201

glenngillen wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: Ex-Amazonian, so discount as you see fit based on whatever brainwashing you might assume I’ve been subjected to ;) The rear weighted AMZN approach made sense to me in terms of both optimising retention and some proxy for reward to contribution. I say this also as someone who left after 2 years and as a result left most of their stock unvested. It definitely made the choice to leave much harder so I’d expe…

Can you say how does the "rear weighted" approach works? Is it just RSUs with a cliff? Also I would curious what you left Amazon before those vested?

As the other reply said, vesting was 5% first year, 15% second year, then 20% per six months.

As for why: a rebalancing of priorities re work/life/travel balance and a better sense of connectedness to my actual work and the success of the company. Not gonna lie though, I look back at what I left on the table and the AMZN share price over the past 2 years and I still wonder if it was the right choice.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#242

Post by RussianCow » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

breck wrote: post #138

RussianCow wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know personally I turned down a few opportunities at promising startups simply because I was young, in my twenties, and a year felt like a long time. I found the probability of a life changing event that would require me to move and leave a company too high, and didn't want to bust my butt for 10 months with a salary cut, then have to leave and get no equity. So I said "no" to a few opportunities that otherwise w…

> I'm curious: Did you try to negotiate? Not back then. Was not bright enough. That would have been smart. I think if I had phrased it as "I'm very excited about your potential, but I'm young and black swan events may happen and I might have to leave early, how about a 6 month cliff?". Probably would have worked. > If someone is so unmotivated at a job that they're not making an impact I didn't phrase it well. What I…

> What I'm getting at is that risk taking is disincentivized your first year.

Ah yeah, that makes sense and I didn't think of it that way. I guess I personally don't look at it like that, but I can definitely see and appreciate the thought process.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#243

Post by spotman » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 5:37 AM UTC

jamiequint wrote: post #217

spotman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At high-quality VC-backed tech companies? I guess it might be possible it you were super early.

It’s happened multiple times for me, all with extremely well known VC backed companies. Once at later stage, but applying for a very senior role, and another at an early stage, where there was a good fit.

It can be a tough sell, and recruiters are trained to just say no, but persistence pays off. Same thing applies to getting jobs in general. If you aren’t persistent in your application process and aggressive in your negotiation process, you simply won’t have the best outcomes. It just becomes easy to turn you down.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#244

Post by nsonha » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 5:43 AM UTC

yroc92 wrote: post #240

riffraff wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you know that was the reason?

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#245

Post by ericpruitt » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 5:47 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.

Something I don't see mentioned in the sibling comments is that this can also put the employee in a bad position when they don't like their job but are in the mid to late stages if their first year. You either tough it out the remaining _X_ months or quit and take a huge hit in income because you're leaving before the equity cliff.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#246

Post by chipotle_coyote » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 6:12 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #203

crooked-v wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this isn't much of a company relationship thing: If you're getting paid every 2 weeks, sometimes you'll get paid the first/third week of the month and sometimes the second/fourth, which can be a pain if you're trying to keep a consistent amount in a checking account while also having bill pay and auto-transfers to savings/investment accounts. Or, tl;dr, it makes it easier to automate money without leaving a lar…

How is having an extra 2-4 weeks of income in checking "a large buffer of cash"? This seems like a silly thing.

I think what you want in checking -- if your circumstances allow for this kind of money-shuffling, at the least -- is more along the lines of 4 weeks of expenses, not 4 weeks of income, which would (hopefully!) be considerably higher. I'm not sure I'd call it a "large buffer," but even if you're not in the "shove absolutely everything you can into index funds and live like a pauper despite the fact that you're making $250K+ a year so you can retire at 35" camp, the more money you have in higher-return places, the better, so you probably don't want it in the checking account. (And probably don't want a lot in a low-interest savings account.)

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#247

Post by qqtt » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 6:16 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #231

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Employers are also human, and prone to the fallible traps of responsibility that befall many people managers and executives, including but not limited too:

* not trusting your team to do their work and by extension questioning whether they are working "hard enough" (or dreaming of ways to extract more blood from stones)

* some flavor of impostor syndrome, needing to prove your value by making sweeping changes to the team process even if inheriting a successful team

* not having either the back bone or clout to question status quo, including demoralizing cultural habits such as stack ranking

There is a reason the majority of employers (including managers) are generally bad and the good ones are few and far between - it's human nature.

I'm reminded of Microsoft Japan piloting a 4 day work week and announcing in 2019 that the trial ended up increasing productivity by 40%. They ended up not making the change permanent. One small company in New Zealand - Perpetual Guardian - did the same trial in 2018 and saw the same effect, they made it permanent.

Most companies operate like Microsoft.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#248

Post by ramphastidae » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 6:31 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.

It absolutely happens. I worked as an early employee at a company for its first 11 months … the founder was the main investor and a serial entrepreneur. He clashed with the CTO from the start and progress stalled … after a major disagreement, he decided he would rather sell the company to a competitor than continue to deal with the CTO. At the 11 month mark we were all told that we were fired, the company was shutting down, and and if we wanted severance, we’d have to sign away our rights to any claims from the sale.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#249

Post by hyperhopper » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 6:32 AM UTC

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #239

__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 minim…

I haven't heard this rationale before. What do you think the root causes, and their fixes are?

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#250

Post by nsonha » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 6:41 AM UTC

yroc92 wrote: post #240

riffraff wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Downvoted for asking a question?