mallyvai

Curious about this part:

  without cash in a checking account, people often have to resort to predatory financial products like payday loans or high-interest credit cards in order to make ends meet.

In the testing for this product, was there a noticeable decrease in employee reliance on payday loans?

As a long-time Pythonista who's been using Ruby for work for a year now, I've really grown to appreciate anonymous multiline blocks, and wish they were a Python feature.

I am not a fan of all the syntactic variants in Ruby, and think they add some unnecessary complexity but on balance I think this is something that Ruby does better.

This is a great list of questions! Is there a list out there on how what sorts of questions to ask for engineers or other non-PM roles?

This is really cool! It has a bunch of rover data, altitude tracking, etc.

See: https://starbase.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs-m-accel-5-altitude-v1.1/mg...

Which has some headers like this:

INSTRUMENT_HOST_NAME = "MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR"

INSTRUMENT_NAME = ACCELEROMETER

DATA_SET_ID = "MGS-M-ACCEL-5-PROFILE-V1.2"

TARGET_NAME = MARS

PRODUCT_CREATION_TIME = 2001-01-12T13:29:25.39

START_TIME = 1998-01-22T05:33:03.17Z

STOP_TIME = 1998-01-22T05:39:36.17Z

SOLAR_LONGITUDE = 258.21

ORBIT_NUMBER = 101

PERIAPSIS_LATITUDE = 45.95

PERIAPSIS_LONGITUDE = 83.93

Parsing through this stuff makes me feel like I'm in a Stross or Stephenson novel. Does anyone know of any visualizations or interesting insights drawn from this?

Hey - founder of http://offerletter.io here - some thoughts, in no particular order.

My first thought is, get a lawyer and accountant, immediately.

My second thought is, yes, you kind of screwed up. Generally if you have the opportunity to early-exercise + 83(b), you should take it if you can afford it - it's far, far cheaper in virtually every case, especially for the really early stage.

In terms of forward action, you have a few options:

1) Do a full (or partial) exercise with your own money, pay AMT on the spread

2) Take a loan from someone to help finance the full or partial exercise, let them offset your risk in the short term.

3) See if someone (probably an investor, or your former co-founder) is willing to buy your stock back (probably at a discount)

4) Do nothing and see what happens over the next few months/years, and only take (a potentially much more expensive, but also much more certain) once the company is reaching some liquidity event (or lack thereof).

Here's a more comprehensive blog post on startup equity: http://www.offerletter.io/blog/201412-understanding-and-nego...

Also, even though they're not "your" lawyers, per se (they are the company's) you should still reach out to the company's legal team to understand your options. And if you have a good, open relationship with the cofounder and/or board, then you have a lot more latitude in terms of next-steps as well - if they're doing well they can nicely ask an investor in a subsequent round to give you some liquidity should you desire it.

If you really believe in the company, it may make sense to exercise now and pay the taxes, but if doing so requires a meaningful portion of your net worth, you'll have to make sure you understand you're putting a lot of eggs in one basket. You would basically be going in on an asset that is opaque, and statistically failure-prone. But if you believe in it, it may be worth it. Maybe.

Drop me a line [ mallyvai at offerletter dot io ] if I can be helpful here more specifically too.

No easy solutions - all have tradeoffs - but it's definitely a manageable situation. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or accountant, this is not intended to be formal legal or tax advice, etc etc.

Founder of http://OfferLetter.io here - Harj, love what you're doing with a common YC app, and the spirit of the hiring manifesto.

I'm curious about your approach to making sure the candidate experience is really top-notch since it's still your platform, and how deep you plan on going - even good startups may put forth exploding offers, lowball candidates, forget candidates due to high-pressure sales tactics, etc. This doesn't leave a great taste in engineers' mouths.

Pure top-of-funnel filtering is important, but seems oversaturated. The candidate experience and matchmaking process seem like the real differentiators. What do you feel is the best way to address these?

Patrick's got a ton of great insight into salary negotiations, and this post is no exception. Everybody (especially engineers) - needs to get comfortable talking about compensation and wages in safe spaces. This shouldn't come from a sense of ego, but from a much more humble and sincere sense of information-sharing.

The people who are hurt the most by keeping compensation info secret are precisely the ones that need the information the most - folks from low income backgrounds, people worried about making more than their parents, etc.

As a practical tip, one thing I encourage everybody who's a client to model their equity grant in a simple excel spreadsheet. You need to know

* your strike price * preferred share price * company valuation * total # shares outstanding

As a rule of thumb you can assume your shares are "diluted" (that is your total % ownership relative to valuation) will decrease anywhere on the order of 15%-40%) after each funding round depending on company's performance. Plotting this beforehand, along with where you believe the company will end up, will give you a great sense of what your equity is worth.

[Source: I founded http://OfferLetter.io - We help engineers and other tech workers get what they're worth. If you're interested in free data, you should join Offer Drive (http://offerletter.io/drive.html to learn if you're paid fairly]

I have incredibly mixed feelings about this. Zero-negotiation policies are great tools for eliminating unfairness if executed well, the problem is that you still force the employee to end "trusting someone at their word", and every company claims they're going to make a fair, standard offer. Here's the thing:

1) Yes, being strict and almost formulaic will reduce inequality and increase probability that folks are compensated according to actual value.

2) But you need meaningful transparency around this. I guarantee you, 100% that if I had a live offer at Reddit, I could find some way to negotiate some additional crap that amounted to a meaningful compensation bump in the end.

3) Every company that does this ends up making exceptions for people the higher-up you go. Wealthfront, Stack Exchange, and now Reddit, will join the club of companies that negotiate with execs they hire, VCs, and bizdev partners, suppliers - basically, everybody except their employees. And even then only "most of the time"- there are always exceptions - just hold out for a higher comp band. Get a stronger inside referral. It's always possible.

Something very close to the Buffer model is the only real way to do things. You can tweak the variables, but you need strictness and transparency. https://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-open-equity-formula/

Ellen, Alexis - If you're reading this, I'd love a chance to understand your challenges in crafting these policies, and see if I could offer any input from my perspective as well.

(Source I founded http://OfferLetter.io - we help engineers and other tech workers negotiate for what they're worth. I've personally had literally hundreds of conversations with folks about this.)

What's the most exciting non-traditional segment (bio, energy, manufacturing, etc) you're looking forward to funding startups in?

This is an absolutely silly mentality:

1) A lot of people do make money off of employee stock, you just have to be reasonably intelligent about it. This blog post is a good way to model risk/reward.

2) Thinking of your employer as your enemy is a great way to set yourself up for failure.

3) Don't think of stock as worthless, think of it as a bunch of lottery tickets. It has some probability of being worth something based on the lottery.

San Francisco | VISA | REMOTE

I'd like to put in a word for the Career Agency team at http://OfferLetter.io - we are building the first true talent agency for tech. We align incentives with individual engineers (and do not take money from companies), help them improve their messaging and polish, intro them directly to CTOs and VPs to help cut past recruiting bullshit, and provide negotiation advice.

We want everyone to find "the team", not "a team".

I'm an ex-Twitter (Growth) / ex-Amazon (Identity) engineer, and am building what I would have wanted at every step of my career.

One of our client profiles [#35 employee at Twitter] is up here, for the curious: http://offerletter.io/blog/201502-Fifteen-years-of-durabilit...

[0] See http://OfferLetter.io for more information

[1] We are neither recruiting agency (since we do not take money from companies) nor job board, and as such are compliant with the terms of the post

[2] We are located in San Francisco, but have worked with people in Seattle, New York, and Austria, and regularly help folks on visas.

Why did you guys pivot away from employee referral amplification? The original idea seemed incredibly powerful - we all know hiring is broken, and amplifying the referral graph seemed like a great way to add a lot of value to growing orgs.

Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately TypeForm (which we're using right now) is a little difficult on the internationalization front, but you're welcome to input the specific unit of currency alongside the value.

This is exactly the right answer - if multiple rounds of deflection fail to work then you should state, "I expect a competitive offer to be $X".

Market rates are complicated, and it's not unusual for employers to do this. For high-value people, the big guys (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) can and will match crazy high counteroffer numbers a lot of the time. It sucks, and this leads to the exact scenario you're describing. The justification these places use is that, "We don't ever want to lose good people simply because of money."

The flip side of this is that it's easy to bump your market rate - just get counteroffers. This provides the basis firms are looking for. Some people are more ruthless about than others, of course - it can lead to the sorts of disparity you're seeing.

In an ideal world we would have more uniform salary numbers with transparency around them, but until we get to that world, it's contingent on individuals to put in the work to set themselves up for success.

[0] I founded http://OfferLetter.io - we provide negotiation advice and career services

[1] PS - you should check out the Offer Drive (http://offerletter.io/drive.html) - "Confidentially submit your offers. Learn if you're paid fairly." as the tagline goes.

This is exactly why we are launching the Offer Drive:

http://offerletter.io/drive.html . In short - submit your offer and equity information, get back access to a statistical pool showing where you stand.

A few notes on this subject from my perspective as the founder of http://OfferLetter.io (we provide negotiation advice and career matchmaking to developers and other techies).

Companies also oftentimes just don't know what someone is worth, and don't want to publicly publish numbers that are too high or low for fear miscalibrating expectations w.r.t. large swaths of potential candidates.

0) If a company tries to play the, "What do you make?" game, it's important to deflect, deflect, deflect and if they insist, simply state, "I expect a competitive offer to be on the order of $X"

1) Market rates are complicated. As I've written about before, the outcomes that people can see because of outsize startup exit scenarios means that their market rate can be very very high. Google doesn't publish this kind of info because they can and will match even crazy startup exit numbers, but don't broadcast this for fear of screwing up expectations.

2) At the end of the day it is contingent on the individual to define their own basis and see what places are willing to offer what compensation, and how much they are willing to budge. This is how markets work.

3) On a related note, oftentimes, companies will try and prohibit discussion of compensation by saying it's confidential, or a trade secret. Confidentiality and wage secrecy requirements in the workplace are illegal under California law. The exact statue is here: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection... As we have seen repeatedly, these kinds of requirements tend to disproportionately harm people from many kinds of non-privileged backgrounds.

And, under national labor legislation, companies cannot prohibit discussion within the workplace.

It's fun to see this being built, and definitely hope it gets released!

I chuckled at this bit: "As you know one of our key concerns is privacy, so to give users a safe browsing experience while on the web we included password protected history into the browser."

I think you'd be surprised - we are informed by certain awesome recruiters, but we've found that people generally feel most comfortable when talking to their peers about this stuff. There's a broad mistrust around recruiters.

One thing we could do is work with more recruiters more aggressively for data and guidance - ping them every conversation for example, instead of for larger industry trends. But we'll have to see if that could truly add value.