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.

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.

Right now, a pretty diverse mix of other engineers, managers, PMs, founders. Depends on who is asking - PMs are better at helping PMs, for example.

If what you're saying is true, that's a bit disappointing, but it may also target a different segment of the market than folks like you.

FWIW over at http://OfferLetter.io, we spent a lot of time figuring out the right pricing model - We let the candidate choose either %-contingency-on-increase, or flat-fee. This seemed to be the best route for incentive alignment. If you have any other ideas for pricing models that work well, do let me know! mallyvai-at-offerletter.io

[We discarded the %-of-net-compensation model - it felt too extreme, and it wasn't clear we could add sufficient value in every case.]

1337biz - Our core claim is that an an advisory/coaching model is a better fit for the tech industry. It's why we brand ourselves as "Advisors", and not "Agents". In addition to compensation advice, we provide meaningful career coaching advice as part of the process - this helps you figure out which place is actually a better fit along non-monetary dimensions.

Also, our fee structure is much more reasonable than an agent's - we're charging 20-30% of the cash increase, or a $2k flat fee, whichever folks feel is more reasonable. Incentive alignment is important, but there are also cases where candidate may get a huge bump in equity they can't can't necessarily pay us out of.

It'd be interesting to consider derivatives-based model in the future to align incentives better by capturing the value of the equity increase, but that's a long ways off, and not terribly important to us at the moment.

Well, yes, for the immediate set of transactions, it's entirely the case that companies are incentivized to dissuade candidates from reaching out to us. This doesn't mean the statements come from a bad place, just a particular viewpoint - it's why I wanted to point them out specifically. :-)

We have a range of methods for gathering compensation range information. The more interesting question is: How can you actually execute on a good negotiation plan?

There is an enormous psychological component to this, and just knowing market rates and ranges for various companies is enormously important, but is only part of the problem (otherwise WealthFront and Glassdoor would have solved this problem already). Getting the right counteroffers and navigating the personal psychology here are enormously important too. That's where we differentiate ourselves with our expertise and guidance :-)

I'm the lead engineer and founder of http://OfferLetter.io - We guide engineers (and designers and PMs) by helping them navigate the "last-mile" - that is, the offer selection/negotiation process - in exchange for a fee from the candidates. (We got brief shoutout in the article along with Dave and our friends at HackMatch)

I want to specifically address 1) Sam Altman and 2) Chris Fry's respective points about the problems with regards to models that align with the candidate more directly (like ours):

1) Much respect for Sam, but he's dead wrong with respect to the 'negative selection' problem - yes, good people have no problem finding work, but the key problem is that the opportunity cost remains phenomenally high for suboptimal decision making. We have actually worked with outstanding engineers who are at YC portfolio companies, simply because they wouldn't have known how to get what they're worth otherwise and push for more. And Sam is missing the point entirely with regards to worth - people in the industry are not getting paid based on their merit - not at all. The gender wage gap is perhaps the most stark example of this, but we see it, starkly, along many other demographic slices as well.

2) With respect to Chris Fry's comments - I was actually in Twitter's eng org when Chris raised the internal engineering referral bonus from 2.5k to 10k because the company wasn't getting the volume of quality people it wanted. Chris is a really great guy, but I find his point about "[at] Twitter, you get the best résumés on your desk already [via recruiting department, referrals, etc]" somewhat misleading - there's no way he would have raised the referral bonus as sharply as he did if he really felt that. In fact, there wouldn't have to be an referral bonus structure at all. Twitter is wonderful, and I loved my time there, but even there we weren't getting all the high-quality people we wanted.

[#plug: check out http://OfferLetter.io - we all deserve to get what we're worth]

This is a great point. If you have more detail or insight about how we might go about this (or precedent around it) , definitely let me know!

VisaDoor is a great resource, and we recommend it pretty heavily at http://OfferLetter.io .

There's something very visceral about being able to look at someone's specific offer, knowing that there is a person out there

I also wrote a bit about salary research in general, on our blog:

http://offerletter.io/blog/201410-research.html

And yes, to your point - absolutely more accurate than Glassdoor.

This is a really cool idea :-) looks like you guys are using Stripe's recurring billing features?

One big thing I wanted to clear up is that I'm addressing college hires' broken mental models of compensation package and ranges, and that "narrow range" means different things to different people - the founder's definition of 'narrow range' is different than the engineer's.

Say as a founder, you offer 100k to someone. You're mentally allowing yourself to go to 115k base at most. That may be a relatively narrow range to you. But to most candidates (especially out of college) that 15k is a massive bump, and can make or break an offer. If they're afraid of asking for more because they assume they can't, then they will just end up saying "No", if someone else gives them more money.

We've actually prevented a couple cases of new grads feeling they had to turn down a $100k base salary offer at a startup, simply because they felt that asking for $115k would build bad blood. In every case the founder was happy to bump the base to $115k because it wasn't a large deviation, even though it felt like it to the new grad.

http://offerletter.io takes a similar but distinct tack - we generally find that advice tends to work better. A little bit of coaching and mentorship can go a long way here. Drop me a line if you want to chat! :-) mallyvai at offerletter.io

This is an interesting side effect of http://offerletter.io , I've noticed - we've been aggressively institutionalizing knowledge around many of these kinds of processes. Tends to give folks we work with a leg up.

(Incidentally - We offer precisely this kind of help and coaching - let me know if we can help! mallyvai at offerletter.io :)