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Leaving Google
321–330 of 464 posts
Re: Leaving Google
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are RSUs tax advantaged?
The award is taxed at the same rate, but theoretically (in the States, at least) you can hold them for a year after they vest and only pay the much lower long term tax on the appreciation of their value. In order to easily compare apples to apples this assumes that in the alternative to getting RSU's that you would actually get compensated more income instead in proportion to the value increase of the company. An equ…
That is not a tax advantage. It is simply paying long term capital gains tax rate on long term capital gains.
Companies are not paying with RSUs because of a tax advantage, they are paying because it is cheaper than paying with cash.
Re: Leaving Google
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.
No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing. Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fi…
>most business in the world survive
While this may be the case for capital-intensive businesses (oil, consumer goods, energy), this is usually not the case for intangible-asset businesses (media, tech). In the former, the assets will generate cashflow, whereas in the latter it's a people-centric model
What was the last time you chose yahoo over google or altavista over google?
Google was always greedy, but when it was small it was cool to be the disruptor. Now it's perceived as only greedy. This is typically the case for any successful company (from HP, IBM, to the new 'big tech').
Good (related) book recommendation btw: capitalism without capital
Re: Leaving Google
#324site is currently down: https://archive.md/YV9AQ
Re: Leaving Google
#325“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical” In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and som…
Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background. I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too. Another very…
> Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct.
Of course the CoC is not binding, but having that in there was a statement, which meant, roughly interpreted, "the impact of our work should not be net negative". The removal of the line itself did not change anything, of course, but it was a clear statement that this priority had been dropped. I think it's quite obvious why this is seen as not great.
Re: Leaving Google
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that. Every other large tech company has generous stock grants, and as you pass a couple years of experience your stock will generally be larger than your cash compensation.
> Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that. Netflix is also 20% of FAANG companies, so that's not as lonely as it sounds.
In the context of this discussion, it is more useful for FAANG to mean any tech company or tech adjacent company employing a lot of software engineers with comparatively high pay, in the form of cash or cash + stock.
Re: Leaving Google
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.
Not sure I'd call taking existing technologies and putting them in laptops/watches innovation rather than iteration on existing stuff, but we're all different so it's all good.
If that's all it is, why isn't everyone doing it? And to the extent that they are doing the same sort of things, why are Apple taking on the order of 90% of the profits in multiple market segments? Clearly they are doing something different.
Re: Leaving Google
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
The award is taxed at the same rate, but theoretically (in the States, at least) you can hold them for a year after they vest and only pay the much lower long term tax on the appreciation of their value. In order to easily compare apples to apples this assumes that in the alternative to getting RSU's that you would actually get compensated more income instead in proportion to the value increase of the company. An equ…
That is not a tax advantage. It is simply paying long term capital gains tax rate on long term capital gains. Companies are not paying with RSUs because of a tax advantage, they are paying because it is cheaper than paying with cash.
While it's unclear whether grandparent was referring to tax advantages for the company vs. the individual, I'm not sure I understand your comment about lack of tax advantage in the context of individual awards.
Scenario A: Company X gives me a sign-on bonus of $10,000 and an agreement to bonus me $100 * y%, where y is the increase in value of the company.
Scenario B: Company X awards me $10,000 of RSU that vests after 1 year.
Let's say I'm in the highest bracket, $523,601 or more in income. The tax rate for that bracket for 2021 is 37%.
After 1 year, the stock price goes up 100%.
In Scenario A, I have vested RSU's worth $20,000. If I sell $10,000 of that (the gains only), I pay short term capital gains equivalent to my tax bracket, or $3700. If I hold that stock for 1 year after vesting and the stock price stays exact same for the next year, I pay the long term rate of the highest bracket which is currently 20%, or $2,000.
In Scenario B, I get a bonus of $10,000 just the same, but there is no situation where I'm not stuck with paying $3,700 on that $10,000 gain. In Scenario A, I can save almost 50% of the tax bill by holding it for a year.
Re: Leaving Google
#329Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those: First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite ha…
> I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. It's hard if you're on the wrong project (read: low impact and/or low visibility). There are different routes to L6 at Google, but by far the most successful was to become TLM or just M of a medium impact project. It's hard to make the case as an IC for L6, but colleagues did it multiple times. Large enough, long-running projec…
For those of us without direct knowledge what are IC, TL and TLM?
Re: Leaving Google
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral. I am not sure if that is called survival. And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are e…
This is what people seem to forget. A company that doesn't grow for all intents and purposes is a dead company. Or in the M&A world we call it "distressed". It doesn't matter how profitable you are if you don't get grow there are serious implications - employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services, etc.
I don't see how employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services are related to the need for unyielding year on year growth.
There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high.