I'll be polite and not accuse you of fabricating. Your experience is extremely, curiously atypical. I know from experience that these clauses are mandatory for several large employers. They are not waived for anyone. If you google, you'll find examples of senior vice presidents being sued for them.
The only way you can have them waived is if you negotiate with small employers who are starved for talent, and even then it won't be easy to do as a junior.
In fact I'm skeptical you even knew what a non-compete was as a recent grad.
> If it's that onerous, sign one to get a job, and while getting paid, immediately look for a new job that doesn't violate it without one.
So your solution is to act unethically, accept a permanent position just to get a paycheck while looking for a new job?
My impression of this comment is sinking by the sentence.
Reality check: if everyone in your area requires a non-compete, and you couldn't get a NC-free offer months, why would you get one now, when you're looking to leave a job you literally just accepted?
To potential employers, you now look worse than before.
> Employment is always a negotiation. If you enter thinking you have zero leverage and are unable or unwilling to find other work, then you do have zero leverage.
Translation:
"I like to make boastful absolutist claims because I have very little actual experience in the job market."
In many areas where non-competes are legal, all employers slap them on their contracts.
So your choice is to sign one, or remain unemployed.
Also, most employees aren't fully aware of what these non-competes mean anyway.
Even now, with the great shortage of tech talent - while is repeatedly used as a justification to import an unlimited number of foreign workers - these very same large employers who complain about this shortage, do not hesitate to reject a qualified candidate who will not sign away their right to work with a "non compete".
Gives you an idea how important these non-competes are to them.
I should mention these were big, powerful employers. You might be able to negotiate them with small employers who suffer from lack of candidates.
You naively conflate "not biting" with "having no teeth".
Amazon forces all workers to sign non-competes. They only sue those who piss them off. Granted, a small minority. But that minority suffers a harrowing ordeal, typically losing their new job and their ability to work.
You better believe the rest are kept in line by the mere threat of such lawsuit, and the courts have enforced the non-compete in the cases Amazon did take legal action.
I said they generally don't because they don't have the stamina, discipline, and curiosity to do so.
Some do. The minority. Most don't.
Respondents are attacking me as if I am saying this is how things should be.
Trust me, I wish it was the opposite. I've been involved in hiring in all my recent roles, and we'd be happy to hire anyone who has enough motivation, discipline, and interest in the field to learn CS and React through books and come work for us.
There's just not many of these.
I didn't make it so. I didn't stand behind people taking Udacity courses and whispered in their ear "give up!" like some sort of comical Satan.
If I could, I'd whisper "Try harder! You can succeed!"
However when I did end up interviewing folks coming out of code bootcamps, I ended up not being able to offer them a job.
Bluntly, most of them seemed to have no real interest in tech. They initially studied something else, were on a different track in life, typically had little interest in tech at best. Then they heard you can make 6 figures in tech no problem, and I met them 4-10 months later, often after they went through some lazy course designed specifically to game my interview process.
Results from recruiting straight out of bootcamp simply do not justify the effort.
In fact they're so bad that despite all our need for talent, we don't hire anyone straight out of bootcamp anymore. We'll gladly be your second job after bootcamp, but never your first.
Because the vast majority who even complete these bootcamps realize the money isn't enough to keep them engaged in a field they don't inherently like - which is why they didn't go to tech in the first place.
My impression is that a large majority of them leave the field after working for a short while on their new job. This is based on reports from friends in the industry + the fact we get a ton of resumes from people who just finished bootcamp, but very few from people who finished bootcamp and then worked in the industry for any amount of time.
All this is for people who signed up and finished a bootcamp, which is already a high bar. The amount of people who bought a "micro-degree" from commercial companies like Udacity is probably far larger, and only a tiny minority of them even completed this relatively easy course (look up MOOC completion ratios), let alone went through a bootcamp which is far more taxing and less accessible.
People will probably attack me like I'm the evil wizard who conjured this unfortunate situation. They're killing the messenger.
The past decade has been very good for tech stocks, in particular for FAANGs where constantly rising prices bolstered generous compensation packages. Very strong stock performance has helped recruitment, morale, and retention in FAANGs.However, now the RSU-heavy compensation policy is being tested, with Facebook and Netflix down over 33%, Amazon declining over 25%, and Google declining 20%.For...
Absolutely! Which is why people do get fired all the time if they rub their managers or the rest of the team in the wrong way.
That's why making blanket statements that "all our firings are due to pure performance reasons" is such a blatant lie.
I'd like to see the manager who puts up with someone they just personally dislike, for the most mundane reasons, every single day, for months.
The article states that upper management also encourages managers to fire employees, which makes this decision just a little easier and more likely.
At best, you're going to get a laundry list of various issues people encountered at (what they consider to be) successful startups.
I'd answer the question a bit differently: the downside of working at a successful startup versus a successful mature company.
At a mature company, success is more of a uniformly good thing. There will typically be growth, people will be promoted, there will be a strong inclination to keep the current team ("don't change a winning horse") so often anyone in influential position will see increased bonuses and other benefits. Very often you can expect promotion, especially if it's a mid-sized growing outfit rather than a huge one.
In startups, "success" often means your shares are worth more on paper, but not necessarily more profit. For example, "success" at a startup may mean your userbase is exploding, but you're not making profit on each user, and perhaps even losing a bit. Like every other process, success can lead to less stable and predictable results in startups versus mature companies.
Often it will increase stress, as more successful startups are under even more pressure to keep performing, since you are now a potential unicorn. There will be a lot more investor interest, but that comes with increased scrutiny and pressure to succeed.
It's quite likely there will be changes, including personnel changes. Many startups are a wild bet at first, so they start with a "B team", a group of people whose opportunity cost is typically low, which means they're not at the top of their field and often don't have a solid track record, so they're willing to take the risk on an unproven business model. As the startup shows signs of success, investors will be willing to pay more, and the bet starts to look more promising, so "A players" will start showing more interest. Very often there will be pressure to bring such A players in to replace anyone important all the way up to the executives. This is especially true when VCs are involved, and they will often have an "A team" in mind to replace the old "B team".
So I'd summarize that success at a startup will tend to bring more pressure and a lot more risk of bad outcomes for you as an employee. For many employees, that may be a net negative. There's also a positive though: if you're considered an essential, well-performing employee, and willing to work very hard and withstand the increasing pressures, you may end up as part of the new "A team", which may get you a fat package of shares that are now more likely to be worth something. But I've also seen startups where any one who worked there so far was looked down upon as a stereotypical "B player", with even great performance disregarded and ignored. So there's potential reward, but a lot more risk.
There are also many horror stories about how getting dismissed as a "B player" at this stage also involves the owners trying to suck back every piece of equity you may have hoped to retain. Now that the equity is worth something, you'll find the majority owners typically a lot less willing to share it. You'll obviously lose any options that haven't vested. Sometimes "B players" with a lot of yet-unvested options will be dismissed for that reason alone...
Instead, this article for instance advises employers to "increase developer productivity" and "outsource":
> If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity.
"Increasing productivity" typically puts pressure on developers. This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset. Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc.
You may have graduated from MIT and done hard psets for 4 years, but the most you ever negotiated was that $50 desk you bought on Craigslist.
> the only way you fall for it is if you have serious self-esteem or assertiveness issues.
Which young engineers, being often introverted and nerdy, do tend to have...
Recruiters are basically sales people, so they're on the other end of the extroverted scale: extremely assertive, used to interact with, read, and manipulate others. Is it any wonder they try to push engineers around?
For example, the author counts numbers of troops, but completely neglects their quality. Anyone with passing familiarity of military history will tell you that professional soldiers can easily outperform a force of untrained fresh conscripts several times their size.
The author then uses his half-assed, data-poor model to dispute findings of actual military experts who studied all aspects of these generals' performance over many years.
Great article... to demonstrate the perils of naive, lazy, arrogant data science.
I mean, they're just engineers, right? They should be thankful for anything thrown their way, even if they'll never be able to afford a house or raise a family on it.
They should be working for the lowest comp possible, just like the founders, chief executives, and the VCs.
P.S. there was a NYT article posted here just a couple of days ago about how it's become incredibly easy to raise VC rounds of $100m+. There's a ton of money pouring into tech right now, and everyone is benefiting, from VCs to chief executives. Except engineers. We're not supposed to enjoy this success, I mean, all we do is build the products.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/technology/venture-capita...
We have the top executive of a major Valley tech company, on the record, encouraging illegal discrimination against older people.
We have ongoing lawsuits by experienced engineers getting fired after their co-workers and superiors openly mocked their age.
Yet this practice openly continues, with CEOs like Zuckerberg feeling brazen enough to publicly tell their thousands of employees to break this law.
The legal prohibition is thus the most blatantly violated employment law in the book. Anyone who ever worked in the Valley knows that most folks over 40 can't get hired, certainly not by the many companies and startups routinely complaining about "talent shortage".
Incidentally, Mark, you are now 34 years old, which is "old" by Valley standards. Shouldn't you be quitting?
Obviously it's not good for the bottom line to raise pay for the same work. But trying to avoid that is short-sighted, and leads to the much greater eventual expense of turnover.
As an employee, if market comp for your work has risen substantially what your current employer pays you, then it is only rational for you to change to an employer who will. Once you find a job that will pay your market rate, the employer may try to match, but as we all know - at that point it's a bad idea to stay.
So the problem isn't "damn immature millennial job hopping", but that many employers aren't efficient at keeping up with market rates in a boom economy, and their retention rates therefore suffer. They're effectively penalizing employees who stick around and reward job hoppers.
Everyone expects layoffs and pay freezes (or even pay drops) on recessions. Why aren't the pay raises in boom times commensurate?
Blaming the "job hoppers" will not help.
First of all, the problem isn't that it's "compiled" - Python is "compiled" too, but still has one of the best REPLs available.
The problem is that the language is static. But static (and compiled) languages can have REPLs, for example C++ has an excellent REPL called Cling.
It's not impossible, just requires some more effort.
As for Crystal, it looks like a neat language. However, if it's going to try to compete with the fast compiled runtimes such as Java, it will need some parallelism support.
None of the companies in top tier tech can afford to pay substantially less than any of its competitors. That's why they're "top tech".
If what you said was true, and FB or Google paid a lot more than say MSFT or AMZN, then all the best senior engineers would eventually leave the latter for the former, and only the bottom talent will retain. Then the latter won't be top tech in any meaningful sense.
In reality, FAANG are grouped together because they pay about the same and can compete with each other for the same level of talent. Other companies are in this category, just not as famous.
First of all, kudos to you for being so dedicated and courageous.
Most startup founders that I know aren't like you at all.
Often they have seed funding very early. Not only do they pay nothing out of pocket, but typically they can draw a modest salary pretty early on.
The other thing is that nobody is claiming you shouldn't get more equity, that is fair. My argument is against ridiculous assessments that "founders always work x100 harder than any employee".
Most founders I've seen weren't like you, and I've seen early employees working harder than founders in some cases.
For anyone who's been at all aware of its history, it is clear that Kaspersky is at the very least actively collaborating with the Russian government, most likely doing its bidding, and possibly can be described as a cyber-security arm of Russian security forces.
I'm honestly surprised their products aren't already banned across all US government agencies.
Even the strongest advocates of "practice makes perfect" doctrines, such as Anders Ericsson, talk about something called deliberate practice, which is an expertly designed regiment, requiring exhausting mental and physical effort, the close tutelage of a veteran teacher, and adequate rest periods for its positive effects to properly ripen.
These authors typically assess that even a top motivated and well-rested individual can only engage in "deliberate practice" for 4 hours daily at the very most.
So if you want to do that, then far from almost doubling the length of your workday, you should actually cut it in half, and ensure plentiful rest and light recreation before and after your workday. Basically, mimic the way top athletes train.
Otherwise, don't delude yourself that you are "practicing" or "improving". You're simply working, chugging along sub-optimally, doing what you already know without substantial improvement or room to grow or learn much.
These very same authors predict that by working a punishing 10-12+ hour daily schedule, your skills will not improve, and likely will deteriorate, since you will become deeply disengaged (cf The Power of Full Engagement).
The idea that perpetually over-worked, over-stressed, nearly-exhausted engineers are "practicing" or "improving themselves" is a romantic wishful-thinking with no basis in reality or scientific research.
Anecdotally, I've seen such places up close. Most people there burn out and/or move on quite quickly. Turnover in these companies tends to be very high, and they only keep those who can't find a better job.