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Golden Handcuffs

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Re: Golden Handcuffs

#51

Post by sokoloff »

oogabooga123 wrote: post #43
azinman2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d have to be one hell of a hire to convince anyone to agree to something that will complicate all finance rounds going forward. I cannot imagine the average employee could get away with this.

It’s as easy to imagine as it is to imagine a VC getting this kind of deal. The first employees are the ones who literally build the company and usually take far greater personal risk

VCs can somewhat commonly get pro-rata rights in future rounds. That's quite a bit different from a guarantee of never being diluted.

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#52

Post by xyzelement »

nineplay wrote: post #23

I've talked to two FAANG-level recruiters recently about remote openings, which are all the rage now. One was willing to give a base-salary range but absolutely refused to provide any comp information beyond that. Signing bonus? Equity? "We are still working out those numbers for remote employees, we'll negotiate when we give you an offer" The other - everyone at the same level at the same location gets the same comp…

This is an incredibly nearsighted approach for reasons other responses partially point out.

First you have confused uncertainty with a bad scenario. For all you know the offer from the first company would end up much higher than from the second but you won't know.

Second, and this is probably a bigger deal - lack of exact range often indicates flexibility in seniority, skillset and scope. So in your case, your only good scenario is if you match exactly the picture of an employee company 2 has in mind for the role/comp. If you are just a little under, you won't make the cut. If you are any over, they will underpay you.

Comoany 2 gave themselves more flexibility with hiring and paying you. Eg if you aren't quite on the level they thought, they could level you down as a say in, which you would appreciate. Similarly if you are beyond what they expected they may offer you more than you'd think, and more than company 2.

Mainly, you have cut yourself off from valuable information and potentially leverageable competing offers because you couldn't hang with a bit of uncertainty.

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#53

Post by staysaasy »

ProAm wrote: post #6
aledalgrande wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The options offer with no percentage ("we're giving you a very generous 80,000 options"), always blows my mind!!! And often even without a strike price!

Always ask for a non-diluatable percentage early on.

I imagine that that would be really hard to achieve (or manage for the company) in practice, although I'd love to see a world in which employees could essentially get pro rata rights to purchase more shares built into their employment. That'd allow them to participate more fully in the upside of companies taking off like rocket ships.

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#54

Post by flashgordon »

I wonder if this is a good thing for "early-ish stage startups" in the long run? If all big-cos start doing this (and since the first few players have already folded I dont see a reason for the rest not to) this may end up standardizing pays with no upside for the employees. So finally the risk-taking employees have more of an incentive to found or join startups. May be even better, since this kind of greed is (possibly) a by-product of the size more of the startups will be motivated towards more realistic exits instead of growth for the sake of growth!

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#55

Post by choppaface »

kemitche wrote: post #46
choppaface wrote: post #4

The C-level to IC comp ratio is still way too astronomical. If a VC is telling you he feels there’s a better way to comp, he has a financial interest in ensuring your loss. Do not support investor-focused comp models like backweighted vesting (Amazon) or outright fraud like a start-up giving you a stock offer with no percentage or no 409A. Employees deserve high-quality equity on par with investors. The OP’s suggesti…

Did Amazon return to back-weighted comp? The offer I received two years ago had comp that shifted from "cash focused" to RSUs over 4 years, and had equivalent cash value over the 4 years. Obviously, by year 3/4 when comp was mostly/all RSUs, the stock could have gone up or down significantly. Given that the year 1 cash could be used to buy stock if I really wanted, it didn't seem an unreasonable approach to comp to m…

The Zoox acquisition offers are all back-weighted. There are several posts on Blind recently disclosing back-weighted new-hire grants. The mean tenure time at AMZ is 2 years and most engineers I know do NOT vest 50% at the 2 year mark.

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#56

Post by elefanten »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #36

Can we just link directly to the Coinbase post [1] instead of this 8-sentence blog spam? [1] https://blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-is-rethinking-its-app...

Thanks. This was much more informative.

For those wondering, they’re doing:

-increasing comp targets to be at or above industry 75th percentile across the company

-no negotiation for comp (standardized starting offer by location/role)

-yearly stock grants with no 1 year cliff upon hire

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#57

Post by hinkley »

nineplay wrote: post #37
hinkley wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll work it out when [we] give you an offer Maybe I'm a cynic, or I've read too many books with a powerful cabal that lies while telling the truth. But one interpretation of these words is that you are going to be a test subject in that 'work it out' activity.

I wouldn't be surprised after all the hemming and hawing about how they don't have remote compensation numbers in place. "How much less can we pay people who don't live in SV? Let's bring a bunch of chumps in and low-ball them to find out."

I think we underestimate the amount of self-deception that goes on with these deceptions. As evil as some people can be, I think more often we are just unwilling passengers on someone else's delusion.

Waking up every day thinking that things aren't going to work out is hell. At some point you have to do something about it, or you can't keep going on. Hope doesn't care if it's objective or not, and evolution preserves it if it actually works slightly more than never.

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#58

Post by oblio »

drewg123 wrote: post #22

One of the things that I love about working for Netflix is that they just pay you every 2 weeks and that's basically it. There are no RSUs that are stacking up, no yearly bonus, etc. No smoke and mirrors. No internal websites to calculate the value of your compensation like at Google. I remember how much trouble the yearly bonuses caused when I worked at Google. In the fall, some people would become much less active…

Why would they become less active in the fall? Wouldn't it make sense for them to be less active after January?

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#59

Post by drewg123 »

oblio wrote: post #58
drewg123 wrote: post #22

One of the things that I love about working for Netflix is that they just pay you every 2 weeks and that's basically it. There are no RSUs that are stacking up, no yearly bonus, etc. No smoke and mirrors. No internal websites to calculate the value of your compensation like at Google. I remember how much trouble the yearly bonuses caused when I worked at Google. In the fall, some people would become much less active…

Why would they become less active in the fall? Wouldn't it make sense for them to be less active after January?

There was a mental perception that if you left just a "few" months from the yearly bonus payout, you were leaving money on the table. So people would normally leave in the spring and summer, but try to stick it out until the bonus if they were thinking about leaving in Oct. or later, since it was only 3 more months..

Re: Golden Handcuffs

#60

Post by dang »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #36

Can we just link directly to the Coinbase post [1] instead of this 8-sentence blog spam? [1] https://blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-is-rethinking-its-app...

Hmm - turns out it had a thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27119787. We could re-up that one instead, but it's not very good.

Normally I'd agree with you and merge the threads or similar—but I'm not sure I'd call this post blog spam. It's true that it doesn't go deep, but he's raising a general question that isn't quite the same thing as the OP.

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