toocool

Thanks for your detailed explanation. It’s so horrible. I wonder how long it will take for the US system to realize what a big mistake mistreating highly trained stem workers is.

Best of luck.

Would love to hear more details about this too (same comment as the one I left in the parent message).

Heart breaking story, really (from a heavy Kubernetes user btw).

Would you mind giving more details about what happened exactly? Why did you have to go back? What was the reason why they didn't renew your visa (I'm assuming it's a renewal problem since you mentioned 3 years)? And is there something that is being done by your company or yourself to get your US life back, or you just "gave up"?

I mean why the hell would a person with a 250k+ offer be kicked out, assuming you didn't commit any crime? Isn't the offer itself a proof that you're desperately wanted here and it should invalidate any RFE?

I took on a project in Java (web backend project) a few months ago, first Java experience, I was excited.

After a couple months, the gratuitous (or what felt like gratuitous to me at least) verbosity of the language and all sort of abstractions and intricate relationship of classes/interfaces in libraries (the typical Java programmer mindset) drove me insane. Icing on the cake was the atrocity of frameworks (had to work with a legacy Spring codebase) and the need for using an extremely complicated IDE with a billion options and knobs in order to write any sort of code.

I was incredibly happy when I finished and deeply regretted taking on that work. I didn't think it would have been that bad.

I think if Java was my only option, I'd probably switch to a different non-programming career.

To put things in perspective, I am a C (kernel development)/C++ (system programming)/Go (backend development) programmer usually, working with tmux+vim and respective plugins for lightweight code completion and navigation.

Thank you Sir/Ma'am, much appreciated.

I personally know sales folks in large enterprises (say Cisco) who do a lot of travelling and are able to get base salaries of ~250k and commissions of ~400-500k a year, on top of essentially life time personal unlimited travelling due to millions of miles points accumulated. So yea, pretty high.

Haha I hope you're not being serious. If I had to estimate the probability of Google ever blocking my account over my life time I'd say 0.01%, whereas the probability of someone successfully attacking my mail server/dns records/... if I really became a target would be easily 100%.

Oh wow that would be really bad (not catastrophic since again I could recover Google with backup codes and from there email recovery for the other accounts).

I heard good things about Authy but I've been a bit cautious to add yet another service (which sounds ironic considering the 430 accounts I originally mentioned) just for what it seems like a simple TOTP client, and I don't need any other fancy feature such as cross-device sharing because of the above mentioned recovery procedure always being available in extreme cases.

Plus I was under the assumption that Authenticator data was backed up via iOS backups or iOS keyring, but I admit I've never tried it so I'm just speculating.

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, with Lastpass you can export all your data to a csv that is generated at runtime using your master password. Although, to be honest, why would I need that? Assuming every important service in that list has some sort of MFA via Google authenticator/gmail/google voice number and a recovery option via the gmail address, what would a backup be useful for?

Essentially, the only passwords I really need to memorize in my head are the lastpass and google ones.

The biggest point of failure to me seems some bank account that I tried to recover in incognito mode which apparently just asks social security number plus some other idiotic information instead of relying on sending a recovery email. And there doesn't seem to be any way to change that, beside changing bank that is.

Thanks for your reply.

That is a possibility, I might be naive but I consider it on the very unlikely side. What I would imagine in that case is that I would reset the important other accounts such as the bank ones by showing up in some physical office with my passport, or something similar, while waiting to solve the situation with Google.

What alternatives would you suggest? Spreading the accounts over different email addresses? Letting aside the privacy issue, to be honest I don't think there is another mail provider that I'd trust better than Google from a security point of view.

Your logic makes sense. I have to point out though, that in reasonably "high quality" startups, what I've seen is:

- Absolutely 1X liquidation preference

- strike price between 0.1X and 0,3X the preferred

- No accelerated vesting :)

- Significant retention plans are given upon liquidation to the the productive engineering team members, regardless of how many options they owned (I personally know folks who made little fortunes even if their options were completely worthless on liquidation day)

That being said I agree with your salary discount thing. I worked in other startups and I had been victim of that, and I'd never take a significant haircut again for some Monopoly money, all it takes is some education.

> A minor quibble: if you consider options/equity as part of employee compensation, then I see nothing special about preferred shareholders than means they 'need to recoup the money they invested', any more than employees need to recoup the time they invested.

That is a fair point. Although, can you compare this situation to other businesses where the treatments towards the workers are more fair? For example, I invest in real estate partnerships (syndications) where the sponsor does all the work (i.e. puts in time) and investors provide the capital to the sponsor to buy the deal and execute. in 100% of the cases, upon liquidation investors receive all their money back plus a preferred return (usually enough to make a 5-10% IRR). After that, if anything is left, the profits are split between sponsors and investors depending on the agreement. The sponsors also get a monthly fee (usually a % of the gross monthly revenues) to justify their time investment. In this case, the situation is quite similar to a startup, where employees get a monthly salary and have the option to participate in the upside, if they execute well. These kind of arrangements are quite customary in all industries where private equity is a way to bring capital.

> Advantage relative to what?

I interpreted your original statement as if you were implying that the strike price of the common options is typically equal to the current price of the preferred shares (quote: "the company may justify the strike price based on the valuation of the company at the last funding round"), and I was pointing out that's not the case, so the pricing has a slight advantage with respect to the price of the preferred shares, so if the company were to be sold today at the exact last round valuation (e.g. X), the employees would still net X - Y per every option they have (where Y is the strike price), as opposed to 0, even if those options were granted while the company had the same exact valuation. Maybe I just misinterpreted.

Of course it would definitely be better if startups granted shares rather than options, but I am not aware of any company at early-medium stages doing that.

Good points. Two considerations:

First: Is it correct to assume that in normal conditions you should run away from any company with shady liquidation preferences?

I've been in a few "high quality" startups, and in most cases if the company was liquidated for a price larger or equal than the last valuation, essentially the preferred shares would convert to common, since the preferred status didn't give any advantage to them from that point on.

If the company sells for less than the last valuation then yes, common holders will be progressively wiped out since investors (preferred shareholders) need to recoup the money they invested, but at that point you really just placed a bet on the wrong startup, nobody has been "screwed".

Second: on strike price, from what I've personally seen one "advantage" of common options is that the strike price is usually a fraction of the actual preferred share price (let's say from 1/10th up to 1/3rd) so, even if the company valuation doesn't increase much, the employee can still gain some benefits (and this is assuming that my first consideration holds, since if there are aggressive liquidation preferences you're going to be screwed, and that there won't be too many dilutions down the road).

Mind to share your opinion? You seem very knowleadgeable

Why would this post be flagged? I'm humbly looking for an explanation.

Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107117

No house, all liquid.

It's really not that much if you look at the other responses. Anyway, the answer is linearly saving ~50% of income, I hope I'll get some sort of liquidity event from some stock options I have, but I'm not banking on it.

Very nice! Did you get there through normal income and aggressive savings, or had some liquidity event from startups?

Impressive! Bitcoin, business or inheritance if I might ask? :)

I was right there at 24 :)

Always use percentages with respect of the fully diluted number of stocks (preferred + common), absolute numbers are worthless. In my current company:

- I joined as a senior software engineer among the first 3 employees (seed round) and got 1.8%. Junior engineers got ~0.5%

- At series A (30 employees), senior engineers got ~0.5% and junior ~0.1%

- At series B (70 employees), senior engineers got ~0.2% and junior ~0.05%

- At series C (100 employees), senior got ~0.1% and junior ~0.01%

Agreed. In my case the side project was preparing 4 months to interview at the big 4 companies, and I interviewed with 3 of them and luckily got 3 offers :)

Not necessarily. If you would otherwise earn X in a fulfilling job but by resting and vesting in an unfulfilling environment you make 3X because of the vested equity, it might make sense to stay a few years in the latter and try to not completely waste your time by, for example, keeping learning other technologies not related to your actual tasks with the hope of remaining somewhat competitive. It's not "never work again" money, but it certainly can make a difference towards an early retirement.

I'm thinking about this. However, how unreasonable it really is to stay at a tech company for less than 8+ years? All my acquaintances in Silicon Valley, especially the most talented ones, never had a gig that lasted more than 2-3 years. Things always "happened" to them. Putting all my eggs in this basket for such a long time makes me a bit uncomfortable. By moving to Google-like, I would shake things a little bit more for my career and possibly chase some luck.

Dumb luck and sheer stupidity, I joined because the idea was cool, the founders were friends and I wasn't aware at that time how much big companies pay. It was my first startup experience, was working in a slow enterprise environment before and it seemed like a fresh breath of air.

I would never, ever, do it again unless I was a cofounder, in which case the stake would make it more worthwhile. I would have looked at Google to begin with.

But now that I got "lucky" (and I put it in quote because it's all on paper, all it takes is a little bump in the road and my equity gets washed away by unfavorable dilution terms, especially if I leave), I am in this conundrum of leaving vs staying.

I am honestly 50/50 on this. I don't want to live a miserable life, but if by "getting bored" for 4 years I can gain financial freedom by a huge margin, it's something worth considering (and that's what I'm struggling with).