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

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#261

Post by duped » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

bogota wrote: post #110

MattGaiser wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (ma…

This is anecdotal but I'm not seeing a glut in hiring new grads with CS degrees. It's everyone trying to break into the industry through bootcamps.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#262

Post by reasonabl_human » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

kerng wrote: post #223

tedmiston wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1-year cliff / 4-year vest has been standard as long as I remember. Is this not the case anymore?

No, most big companies don't have cliffs anymore (Google, Facebook, etc...). They pay out monthly or quaterly. At least if you already worked for a while elsewhere (because they have to buy you out basically). Why would you otherwise take the risk? I'm curious about Microsoft- anyone know if Microsoft has a cliff on RSUs?

My non-new-grad employment with Microsoft had a 1yr vesting cliff. As others have previously mentioned, as long as it’s an established company I see no issue with this since you get a solid signing bonus if continued cash flow is the concern.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#263

Post by Schaden_Freud » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

RussianCow wrote: post #23

londons_explore wrote: post #3

The 1 year cliff never really made sense... It effectively gave the company a discount on employees who stayed only 364 days - or to look at it another way, a 'trial period' of 1 year where the pay was substantially less.

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…

You understand that other people aside from Eng. work in tech companies, yeah? Lots of folks in Ops. roles and other non-Eng. roles get really fucked over by these cliffs and don't take a year to ramp and be impactful in their roles.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#264

Post by fridif » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #213

fridif wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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 happen…

fn put_string(array: &mut Vec , input: String) { array.push(input) } fn find_string(array: &[String], input: &str) -> Option { for i in 0..array.len() { if &array[i] == input { return Some(i); } } None // or perhaps more idiomatically: // array.iter().position(|s| s.as_str() == input) } #[test] fn test_find_string() { let mut array = vec![]; put_string(&mut array, “foo”.to_string()); put_string(&mut array, “bar”.to_s…

In the USA you're worth at least 100k. However, like many others who conduct interviews, I'm not the one who signs the paycheck :)

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#265

Post by ErikVandeWater » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 3:32 PM 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…

Are you suggesting basically every retail chain in America is using a fundamentally broken compensation system?

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#266

Post by tedmiston » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #215

tedmiston wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1-year cliff / 4-year vest has been standard as long as I remember. Is this not the case anymore?

It is the case, but it seems like it only persists because it is traditional. I'm not aware of any basis by which the employees should be willing to accept deferred comp for the first year. It sets up all kinds of bad incentives.

I'm right here with you — along with having standard very long exercise windows… 10 years or whatnot.

I've both chosen to exercise and not exercise on a short 30-day window but balancing FOMO vs future regret is hard with the volatility of a typical startup.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#267

Post by kerng » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

reasonabl_human wrote: post #262

kerng wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most big companies don't have cliffs anymore (Google, Facebook, etc...). They pay out monthly or quaterly. At least if you already worked for a while elsewhere (because they have to buy you out basically). Why would you otherwise take the risk? I'm curious about Microsoft- anyone know if Microsoft has a cliff on RSUs?

My non-new-grad employment with Microsoft had a 1yr vesting cliff. As others have previously mentioned, as long as it’s an established company I see no issue with this since you get a solid signing bonus if continued cash flow is the concern.

This is to the point - cash bonus can compensate this somewhwat. And cash bonus typically doesnt have to be paid back in case of layoff.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#268

Post by tedmiston » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

kerng wrote: post #223

tedmiston wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1-year cliff / 4-year vest has been standard as long as I remember. Is this not the case anymore?

No, most big companies don't have cliffs anymore (Google, Facebook, etc...). They pay out monthly or quaterly. At least if you already worked for a while elsewhere (because they have to buy you out basically). Why would you otherwise take the risk? I'm curious about Microsoft- anyone know if Microsoft has a cliff on RSUs?

I should clarify that my experience is with startups (pre-seed to B stage etc) not FAANGs or big cos.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#269

Post by wpietri » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #265

wpietri wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you suggesting basically every retail chain in America is using a fundamentally broken compensation system?

Yes, because basically every retail chain a) can dump a lot of externalities on society at large, b) is or wants to be publicly traded and evaluated on very short-term metrics, and c) is run by believers in the managerialist ideology that dominates American business culture.

Broken systems product broken systems.

Re: DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants

#270

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

ericjang wrote: post #75

dabfiend19 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all of my friends at google say the grant is in dollars and stays in dollars at google. at the end of the quarter you get a variable number of shares based on current stock price. While this reduces upside, it also reduces downside.

Googler here. dabfiend19 is correct, around ~2019 I believe new L3 hires were switched to this new grant schedule. Prior to that, it was based on a fixed number of shares.

Fwiw, I asked around and couldn't find a hire where this was the case. The schedules are different but the conversion to shares happens once just after your are hired.

This is a bit of a change from e.x. when I was hired and my offer letter said N shares, and so when I joined 6 months later my grant had increased in value significantly. But it's still not the situation in these other companies, where you vest 6.25% of the dollar value each quarter, converted to shares or whatever.

Actually that wouldn't really be compatible with googles vesting schedule, now that I think about it.