I have never paid attention to shares or vesting schedules in contracts. I would stay until I had made the improvements I sought out to make and was bored. I would leave with whatever has vested at that point. I do not acknowledge golden handcuffs ever. Leave when you do not enjoy the job anymore, or are not bringing maximal value you know you could elsewhere.

Startup stocks are ephemeral lottery tickets unlikely to ever make as much as 30% base pay bumps every 2ish years.

Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.

> Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.

Would love to hear your experiences doing this. I took a break from FAANG to do this, and I was making the same (which is great!) but doing utterly boring work (control over my hours was the point). And now I'm back at FAANG making almost double the equivalent since salaries there accelerate after 15+ years exp. You make 150-250 in the lower bands, but like 350-1M after that.

Can you provide any thoughts on what kind of activities and tools you use on a day to day basis? And how your clients measure your success?

Question for you, have you always moved directly from one job to the next? I'm contemplating leaving my current role and taking a couple months off before the job search, and while I'm not worried about landing a new job, I am concerned that being unemployed may result in lower offers.

Late, but my understanding is that in the non-FAANG world this is extremely true. If you are currently employed you are desirable and they have to lure you away. If not, you are some desperate loser who got fired god-knows-why in the recruiter's eyes.

This may be mitigated at FAANG because they vet heavily on leetcode grind.

Usually you have a cliff of 1 year, getting something like 25% of the shares then. Now include the fact that you got a signing bonus paid for the first 1 or two years, you can get a new signing bonus in a new company… I’ve seen people doing that. From a career progression I had the feeling they were slower and doing just the greedy optimization

There is usually a 1 year cliff. So as long as you stay longer than a year, you're not losing out on any stock options.