What a load of crap. If companies paid that much then unemployment would be next to nil.
Not sure about the bay area but $100k salaries are common in Australia. It isn't much money when you consider how expensive everything is.
How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to the ugly, ugly truth about startups. Employees have so little equity compensation it's almost hilarious - and yet founders will hand out 0.1% offers and expect you to take huge haircuts for the privilege of owning a tiny sliver of a 7-8 figure exit ( potential exit, actually). Having seen the stock and bonus structure at Amazon and Google, I can confidently say that your expected outcomes are considerably…
I'm sorry, do you mean "paycut" or is this some sort of idiom I'm not familiar with? What does hair have to do with it?
It's a Valley-ism - but yes, "haircut" simply refers to a (substantial) pay cut.
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to the ugly, ugly truth about startups. Employees have so little equity compensation it's almost hilarious - and yet founders will hand out 0.1% offers and expect you to take huge haircuts for the privilege of owning a tiny sliver of a 7-8 figure exit ( potential exit, actually). Having seen the stock and bonus structure at Amazon and Google, I can confidently say that your expected outcomes are considerably…
I'm sorry, do you mean "paycut" or is this some sort of idiom I'm not familiar with? What does hair have to do with it?
While the term has more specific meanings in finance, "haircut" it has been generalized to often mean "a small paycut".
Wiki page with more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_%28finance%29
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to the ugly, ugly truth about startups. Employees have so little equity compensation it's almost hilarious - and yet founders will hand out 0.1% offers and expect you to take huge haircuts for the privilege of owning a tiny sliver of a 7-8 figure exit ( potential exit, actually). Having seen the stock and bonus structure at Amazon and Google, I can confidently say that your expected outcomes are considerably…
I'm sorry, do you mean "paycut" or is this some sort of idiom I'm not familiar with? What does hair have to do with it?
Haircut is usually a term for taking a reduced return on an existing investment that is otherwise unlikely to pay off - for example many European banks have taken a haircut of upto 50% on Greek government bonds, otherwise the greek government would leave the Euro, default anyway and take its chances.
Said haircut of course then stuffs their balance sheets, so they need bailing out, from for example Spainish government, which then cannot payout its loans and threatens a haircut to its investors. Who are the same damn banks it just bailed out.
This leads to two situations - one ECB chief saying it will pay anything to anyone to stop this idiocy, just ask. And two, the philosophical approach to wealth "hair today, gone tomorrow"
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#35What a load of crap. If companies paid that much then unemployment would be next to nil.
I've noticed you make comments like this every time salaries are mentioned around here, with usually the same reception. You seem to honestly believe what you're saying, and you seem to be genuine when you say that you've observed lots of low salaries in your portion of the industry. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsolomon But you'd benefit from knowing that it's not like that, pretty much anywhere else in th…
You sucked me in! I didn't recognize the name, but I remember him as the "DC Guy With Clearance". I browsed his comments over the past year, and it's pretty clear to me that he either enjoys being underpaid and views it as a badge of honor or is so completely mistrusting of other people that he thinks that we are trying to screw him over when we (tens if not hundreds of people) suggest that he can easily get a higher paying job else where.
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#36What a load of crap. If companies paid that much then unemployment would be next to nil.
I've noticed you make comments like this every time salaries are mentioned around here, with usually the same reception. You seem to honestly believe what you're saying, and you seem to be genuine when you say that you've observed lots of low salaries in your portion of the industry. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsolomon But you'd benefit from knowing that it's not like that, pretty much anywhere else in th…
I think you meant "for a private sector company".
What dsolomon is saying sounds completely incredulous to me: I've yet to hear of a single company that requires employees to purchase their own hardware or software. This is true not just of the top tier SV companies, but of _all_ companies who are aware that building software is their core competency. That's simply the difference between software being a cost center vs. a profit center.
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#37Am I reading this wrong - out of 8,000 employees surveyed, no-one had more than 1/10th of 1% of equity. That's a nice pension contribution not an equity share. If you were in facebook at that level, you might get a house. But really why is that level of equity share of any influence in anyone's hiring equation? Or am I missing something?
Welcome to the ugly, ugly truth about startups. Employees have so little equity compensation it's almost hilarious - and yet founders will hand out 0.1% offers and expect you to take huge haircuts for the privilege of owning a tiny sliver of a 7-8 figure exit ( potential exit, actually). Having seen the stock and bonus structure at Amazon and Google, I can confidently say that your expected outcomes are considerably…
It's a founder generated myth - come here and work for me cheap in the hopes I become a billionaire and change the world blah blah blah. The funny thing about equity is the guy who starts benefits disproportionately by simply being there earlier than others of equivalent technical ability. Contrary to popular belief - most founders are selfish morons compared to some of the people they hire later to make them rich. It's the halo effect that occurs when some of them succeed luckily that makes people think founders are different from normal people - they aren't.
Fun fact: You know all those perks provided by startups to their employees that are marketed like charity - the value of said services doesn't come close to the haircut taken for becoming a startup employee. It's psychological arbitrage.
I wonder if startups are just an exercise in psychological arbitrage driven by myths and lies that allow them to take the delta of wealth from their employees' haircuts and transfer them to founders. 40% haircut for 100 employees for 3 years at 100k par value is worth 12 million - more with DCF and even more with an adequate investment strategy investing said wealth to acquire users below cost and psychologically arbitrage big company fear into a sale or acqui-hire.
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#38What a load of crap. If companies paid that much then unemployment would be next to nil.
I don't think unemployment is caused by out of work programmers. It's more the folks who have no or low skill jobs and those effected most by the recession such as construction workers. It's hard for me to imagine a construction worker being able to transition from the blue collar culture to the white collar culture that most of these jobs fall into. Again, It's not so much that construction workers are stupid, but i…
Actually, since the recession, unemployment increased by the same proportion in all sectors of the economy. That is, software engineering unemployment is about twice what it was before; construction unemployment is about twice what it was before; etc. etc. etc. This indicates that the problem is not structural (i.e. not due to people having the wrong skills), but due to a shortfall in demand: everybody tightened their spending at the same time.
Sources can be dug up if desired.
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#39Why would I use this instead of the BLS data: http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1627.txt
Search for "Software Engineers, Applications"
Re: How Much Should Startup Employees Earn? Wealthfront Tells Us With A Clever Tool
#40From the actual Wealthfront page: "I illustrate the importance of growing the size of the pie to one’s share of pie to my entrepreneurship students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business by reminding them of the formula for a circle’s circumference versus its area. The formula for circumference (a proxy for share of pie) is linear (2 πr) vs. the formula for area, which is exponential (πr²)." It seems to me that…
The bullshit you buy when you became a startup employee. Big companies grow their bullshit in linear time - whereas startups are exponential (whoops - I'm a wealth manager to stupid to do basic maths - of course I mean quadratic).
Seeing these math flaws make me wonder if most wealth managers are, in fact, morons. I'm guessing they are - otherwise wouldn't they be making their own wealth to manage?
Oh wait - this is how they are going to do it - ride the tech bubble and impressionable young millionaires to make their fortune.
Clever girl (Jurassic park reference).
/sarcasm