321–328 of 328 posts
There is a bigger picture than money. I know I could have more wealth. But I'm pretty happy with my life, despite not having maximized my income and investments. I have enough money to pay my bills, enjoy my life, and still have enough extra to have the first-world problem of where to invest it. Would having focused my energies on making even more make me a happier person? Or a better father to my kids? Doubtful.
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>Honestly what's wrong with just paying people a lot of cash? The context of the blog post is "startups". Startups without significant revenue don't have a lot of cash to pay high salaries. Another reason for stock compensation is to tap into the power of incentives. Hopefully, the potential equity upside attracts employees who think their work contributions can boost the value of the company (and hence their stock o…
> Hopefully, the potential equity upside attracts employees who think their work contributions can boost the value of the company (and hence their stock options) rather than mercenaries who just want a paycheck. It's hard to believe companies genuinely want this when offering 0.025% of common stock to your early engineering hires has become common practice.
Well, you have to add extra information to that 0.025% figure to determine if that seemingly "low percentage" of equity became decent money.
As an example, it looks like Chris Cox, an early 2005 hire of Facebook[1] and now Chief Product Officer got ~0.025% of Facebook stock. (~600k of 2.5 billion shares.) He started unloading some of them in 2014 (2 years after the IPO).[2]
That 0.025% in 2016 now worth ~$77 million.
Of course, not every startup will become a Facebook with a market cap of $350 billion. So instead, let's say we can work backwards from a "nice" target number such as $5 million. For 0.025% stake to be worth $5 million, the company has to grow to a $20 billion valuation. That's still a big number but building a company worth multiple billions is an aspiration for many startups. The pontential employees have to consider if the "lottery tickets" with a payout of $0 to millions is worth the lower salaries.
If a startup sets aside 10% stock for employees' pool, have other companies proven that you'll get better results by granting more than 0.025%? Should they have given Chris Cox 1% so other subsequent employees get less % or none at all? Lots of potential game theory questions to ponder.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cox_(Facebook)
[2]https://www.insidermole.com/insider/cox-christopher-k/transa...
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> you will be kicking yourself really hard because if you'd only prepared, you could've been paying LTCG... AMT... illiquid stock... IRS... CA FTB... ACME... Road Runner... Look, I won't be kicking myself neither hard not soft, because I made a conscious decision to study and become proficient in another field. You finance people work under the assumption that everybody cares—or should care—about the underlying conce…
This is tax jargon. Death and taxes, everyone should care about those two.
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I think that's a disingenuous comparison. If you're comparing to banking software, imagine a plumber that causes four floors of a high-rise to get flooded, leading to 5-figures of damage and additional lost time. Or perhaps an underwater plumber, where the cost to fix the leak is high. If we're looking at house plumbing, it might be more fair to compare it to a CRUD app that facilitates iguana breeding (unsolved prob…
BOSS: Uh, Bob, you forgot to close a loop in your code so we've got a bit of an iguana problem... PROGRAMMER: What kind of problem? BOSS: Call the Pentagon.
I think it's mostly supply and demand, timing and where you live. But those are the factors we rarely talk about. Instead, people complain they are not compensated enough relative to the importance of their work, their intelligence, the hours put in, their title or the length of their education or the risk they take. If people were paid according to the importance of their jobs, I would argue that plumbers, sewage wo…
I think there's truth here, but I also think programmers routinely underestimate the quality and compensation of other careers that they think are "below" them. For instance, you did it in this very post. Do you really think that all high school teachers are locked into making $40k for life? Here where I live (a large city, but also a pretty affordable one), teachers start at ~$55k in base salary, get a whole range o…
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Not the same thing - this tribe can't exist without infrastructure it cannot create or maintain itself. Your caring sharing tribe ain't going to be making a chip foundry or a means of powering it or extracting raw materials for it anytime soon. That needs capital.
What's not the same thing? Plenty of such tribes exist and have existed without centralized industrial infrastructure.
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Hmmm, "And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which start-ups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success" - Marissa Mayer Maybe you can get away with doing just your job and going home to relax. I would wager, you may have difficulty finding your next job however. Have you never programmed so much you start having dreams that it takes s…
>Maybe you can get away with doing just your job and going home to relax. I would wager, you may have difficulty finding your next job however. That's just not how it works outside the Valley. I've only crammed extra hours in to meet a deadline a few days a year, and only at one company. I've worked at 3 different companies in two different cities 400 miles away. Nobody expected 80 hours a week or whatever and I, qui…