It would also be interesting how people are valuing stock at companies like Stripe. If that’s option exercise price that’s probably worth a lot more. If it’s not, then it’s very fuzzy what the true value is.

I suspect, but cannot confirm, that those would be RSUs, not options. Places like Uber give RSUs despite still being private, as an example. My employer gives us options and does not really even try to put a dollar value on them. We of course have access to information to try, based on 409a valuations or the valuation in our latest funding round or whatever, but no one's ever said in salary negotiations "hey on top of your salary these stock options are worth $X".

As long as you can answer "If we got sold for our current valuation in 5 years, how much would I get?" then I think you can usually ballpark it.

I missed the post about barrin’s friend but holy **** that is low, i make 1.5x that and i am not even technically a developer or at a large company

Even RSUs are hard to value, right? Although a place like Uber is probably providing liquidity someway, so there’s be a valuation there.

The 409a valuation will almost always be a big underestimation of the value. And depending on funding history that’s not always useful either.

I know for us we can now get a decent idea by comparing to some of the similar public companies, but even that has a big margin of error and depends on a lot of assumptions.

But for a company like stripe that’s probably pretty hard to answer.

Wiki says stripe is valued at $9B.

I'm more of a fan of pushing complete code snippets so, personally, I would never push a commit that has associated work that isn't complete.

No, it was valued at that almost 2 years ago. And even then it wasn’t really valued at that in terms of employee options because that valuation assumes all shares are worth what the new people are paying - but we often don’t know what conditions the new purchasers are getting.

Imo if you don't push every commit eventually you will lose work. It might take a long time but it will happen. Since we squash and merge to master I don't care about feature branch history anyway.

Sure but at least it's a ballpark # to start with. Which even if you knew an exact public stock price - 5 years in a the future is gonna have a lot of variability.

We just tell devs they should pull the feature branch into their dev branches once a day or risk nasty merge conflicts.

This is my point. So somebody put a specific dollar value on their options. We don’t know if that number is crazy pessimistic (409a) or crazy optimistic (some crazy multiple of a 9 billion valuation).

When I got options their "value" was denoted at my buy price, which was notionally tied to the company's current value somehow. But it was not an estimate of what they might end up being worth. When we got bought they ended up being worth something like 5x as much as my buy price.

Right - same thing we don't know about what the stock market will do in 5 years. But at least it's a starting point.

Maybe Stripe becomes ubiquitous and becomes the next big thing. Could happen. I think that's why the valuation is so high. Maybe 19 out of 20 times Striped settles into a nice little $1B company, but 1 in 20 times it goes bananas.

Of course the biggest guesswork is if they IPO or not. Which of course adds a lot of variability but that's true for any non-public company, nothing special about stripe.

I'd put stripe at 50/50 to go public? Sure why not.

So if I'll own own .05% of the company in 5 years, my expectation is 50% (IPO or no) * .05% * 10% * 9B = $125k. Not bad. And if they do pull off a huge second act you have a lottery ticket to make 20x more.

There has been more work "lost" from merges certain people made that really ****ed up the code base than I've lost because it's buried somewhere in my giant pile of stashes.

I have SourceTree set up to auto push every commit. Great feature.

Ive only lost work once because I obsessively make backups of everything i do on my local FS. But the downside of that is trying to find where i put things

I work with a nervous laugher. Second time in my career. Basically every conversation begins with laughter even when there's absolutely nothing funny. Eventually in the middle she might stop laughing and settle down, but then it breaks out again randomly. My step grandmother was like that too. After a while you don't notice it.

Hmm ITT people aren't getting me but uh w/e

Well at first I thought you meant committing/merging from dev branches to feature branch. But you just mean devs committing and pushing from their local individual dev branch to their remote individual dev branch, right? Basically you're saying their local HD is gonna fail or some other weird thing happen and they'll lose work?

One great thing about Sublime - even if the files change behind the scenes while you have it open - you can Ctrl-Z to get back to the previous version. Only works for open files obv. Now I remember why I didn't like Visual Studio - that's a big one for me. That and opening more than one project at once (or solution or w/e).

Another thing that's changed my life is ClipMenu. I have it set to remember my last 1000 clipboards. You can recover a ton of stuff that way. It saves clipboards across reboots. The best is you can copy 4 of 5 things and not have to immediately paste each one. So if I'm typing a bunch of stuff on the web I will copy it in case of browser weirdness, but I don't have to worry about copying something else over it.

Although it could bite me in the ass someday I guess if my computer is compromised. But - I got 10 good developer years left, YOLO.

Suzzer, I don’t really know what your point is. (In regards to Stripe).

This is what I mean. If that guy is getting 100k+ of options at the buy price it’s worth easily half a million or more. I doubt that’s what it is though.

Whenever a company does a round of investment, a valuation is created. Usually your hire-in options will be based on that valuation. So if you start the day after an investment round, your options will be worth about $0. You need the company to continue growing (and eventually have an exit event) to cash in.
In contrast, RSUs typically have some value the day they are granted but you have to wait some time to cash-in.

I’m not as familiar with RSUs, but this isn’t true for options (at least in jurisdictions I’m familiar with).

Shortly after an investment round there are two important numbers. There’s the price paid by investors per share. This is going to be higher than the per-share value of your options because they’re getting preferred shares with a bunch of extra advantages (like protection of their capital or return, different forms of control, etc.).

There’s also the 409a valuation (or equivalent) that is the value as assigned for tax purposes and it’s almost always very pessimistic and generally doesn’t take into account potential, market conditions, etc. This is usually the exercise price of your options. But this is almost always less than the expected per-share value of your shares.

Basically if a company exited shortly after an investment and shortly after you were granted shares (ignoring vesting) you would generally make money even if the company didn’t grow.

Edit: And obviously this assumes fairly standard conditions on the preferred shares. If it was a tough raise the new investors might have things like ratchets that cause them to get a bunch of money and common shares to get nothing.

There’s lots of complexities here but it’s kind of amazing how little people generally understand about this when it can make up a large percentage of their real or perceived compensation.