At my workplace they do these semi annual employee happiness surveys. Our team gave really low scores for the second time in a row. The survey is anonymous. After the first team we had a meeting with our boss and then a second one with his boss. Both meetings were them asking what they could do better. Nothing changed. This time they are having 2 meeting again.

What is my play here? My plays are,
a: say nothing
b: say everything is great
c: mention something small
d: mention large issues

I tend not to talk much and basically my only feedback from management has been that I don't talk much and need to get more involved. I have a written offer that I am l going to take but will be here at least until the end of the quarter.

Hard to give advice not knowing any specifics. But I would definitely mention the large issues, without making a big deal about it. You get raises by appearing happy and productive, not upset and disgruntled.

100% do not say anything. Nothing to gain.

IDK. I outlined a whole bunch of things that were wrong at my last employer before leaving. They seemed to be very thankful and receptive, even telling me if I don't like the move to the West Coast they would hire me back.

They even followed up a few months later to see if I would come back, so it must not have burned any bridges.

If you're seriously considering these guys, make sure you really understand how that 200k is being calculated. If its what they think the Expected Value is or what the shares would be worth if they were public - figure out what their assumptions are. If its the value of the shares for 409a purposes, ask about what they expect those shares to be worth in the event of a liquidity event (with assumptions).

Thanks for the advice, I'll check that out. I think the RSU value is based on share price as of their last investment round/valuation, and would be converted from $200k to a certain number of shares once I joined. But I'll try to get more info. My recruiter was explaining that their RSUs (for people already there, who had their RSUs based on the previous valuation) jumped in value by like 50% based on the most recent investment round increasing the share price by 50%, though obviously that value is on paper and not yet liquid. But I guess the idea of company growth is that future investment rounds, whether private or in an IPO, will hopefully increase the company value, right?

I am seriously considering them; it's nice that the cash component of my compensation is still fairly high by area standards, with the RSU having the potential to be a cherry on top if good things happen to the company. Of the 3 places I interviewed, I think their tech is the most interesting and would be the most fun to work on.

My introduction to my new team was after a bad employee satisfaction survey. We had endless meetings and onerous tasks to try to determine how to bring the scores up. People had to "volunteer" to be "theme champions" and go do a bunch of homework then come back with a presentation.

Basically "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

I was like wtf did I just do? And it never got any better. It was like the worst BS from Office Space x10.

I go and npm install simple-flexbox for react expecting no biggie and it's like a huge installation with a ton of dependencies (says 2 on the docs page) warnings to audit, new things to install and not fixing things and saying my option is to force breaking changes.

geez I guess it worked, but my computer is probably mining bitcoin for someone in the background now.

You're joking but it's not too far off https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

Damn it works good now though. With <Row> and <Column> I can lay things out just as easily as if it were 1995 doing tables.

Any package recommendations for image resizing in node?

Contenders from googling are jimp, sharp, or gm/imagemagick.

Anyone know what kind of person (accountant? probably a specialty one of some kind?) I should look for to talk to about what kind of tax hit I'd take for exercising my options?

I feel like, for the cost of the strike price on my options, I might take a flier on them (like, $20-$30k, something like that) on the chance they wind up being worth 10x that in a liquidity event - but if I took a significant tax hit based on the theoretical but unrealized value (like, $100k?) and would be unable to recoup that in any way if they wound up being worth $0, no thanks.

Also willing to hear arguments that I'm an idiot for even considering this.

Holy crap what a **** show

My experience has been that tax accountants will be pretty expensive and/or generally not that useful in that often it seems basic research you do makes you more knowledgeable. This stuff is generally pretty well documented and you can research a lot yourself. Assuming you're American - the first thing you want to do is confirm they're "incentive stock options" (ISO). Given the amount you mentioned it's very likely they are - but you can have the company confirm that to you.

If they're ISOs the most likely situation you're in is that you wouldn't own any taxes upon exercising (assuming that the company isn't liquid). Then when you sell your shares you pay tax on the difference between the sale price and the exercise price. The amount you pay depends on some factors like how long you've held the shares / when you were granted the options. You can google that, but its something like holding the shares for 1 year gets you capital gains treatment (what you want).

The one caveat to this is the AMT. I don't know the details there, but basically if the difference between your exercise amount and the current fair market value for tax purposes (the company can tell you this number) exceeds some threshold you owe some tax right away. If you think this is something that would affect you - its probably worth it finding a tax accountant.


This is so dependent on your situation. If the money doesn't represent a significant portion of your savings/net worth, you won't trigger AMT, and you think the company legitimately has potential - I'd say do it. You start to change any of those parameters and it obviously becomes much more of a personal decision.

I'd try to talk to a couple of people you trust that have left the company and ask what they did. You can also ask some people you trust that are at a higher level and might have a better idea of future potential of the company. It's still a personal decision, but at least those people understand some of the factors much better than non-involved people.

Edit: Also, if you go the route of using an accountant, ask people at your company or people that have left who they used. It's way better than finding someone yourself. If you're stuck finding one yourself its worth asking how often they've dealt with tech employees / companies. If you're in Silicon Valley, I bet every tax accountant has lots of experience and getting advice might be super cheap. If you're in the middle of nowhere, you probably need to be more careful.

I've used ImageMagick for this for years, albeit not in node. It's got kind of a crusty command line interface, but it's quite useful

We used image Magick for a long time then switched to sharp. Iirc it was because of all the dependencies you need to install to get image Magick up and running became a pain in our docker images. Seemed like a simple to use lib tho

Super dumb docker question. I want to build and deploy C# lambdas with serverless.com framework using AWS Code Pipeline and Code Build. Similar to this process, but with C#.

I also have some shared libs that I want to include. So my plan is to build a docker image whenever the shared libs are updated, which will be used as the base image in the build step of the actual lambdas.

Does this sound crazy?

Assuming this idea is sound, how would you go about it? Would you start with one of these base image definitions, create a docker image from scratch, then add the other stuff you need? Or is that doing things the hard way? Would it be easier to just download a pre-built image somehow and then add to that?

It looks like AWS Code Build does have a runtime that runs docker itself. So that's a good sign.

That's what we do. We start with a minimal OS image, apt update, install whatever packages we need, then build and install our own libraries onto it. All our projects inherit from this base container.

We update our base images whenever there's an update, but also on a regular cadence, because there may be cases where we go weeks or months without updating *our* libraries, but the underlying OS packages have probably been updated. That way you don't end up with base images that don't have modern patches.

How long are you planning to hold them? I exercised my options when I left my last place and the next year they adjusted the valuation of the company and I had to pay taxes on the gain. This year they are zeroing out the common stock... ****ers.

What was the reason you had to pay tax?

That seems strange since if you hold a share you don't typically pay tax on that share unless you do something with it. So anything to do with valuation that happened after you exercised shouldn't have impacted you for tax purposes.

I'm not a US tax expert though (obviously).

I'm no tax expert either. I know when the CEO was telling us about the RSU they were granting instead of options one of the reasons listed was to shield employees from tax liability.

Thanks for the sanity check. I guess I finally have to learn docker beyond hello world.

When I worked for that side startup I got "Founder's shares" for a penny apiece. Supposedly those were better for tax purposes when the company was sold for $100M. Which never happened of course.

My understanding is that founders shares are better because there are generally no tax consequences for just holding shares. So you don't have any of this "Should I exercise", "Will I be hit with AMT", "What made up value are these shares worth today", etc. type of questions.

That's why its strange to me that Kerowo was hit with a tax bill after exercising (meaning while there are cases where you need to pay taxes because of the exercising - it should only involve the information as of that point in time and not be impacted by future events) since after exercising they're just shares and shouldn't be taxable until something is done with them.

This implies that under regular rules exercising options aren't a taxable event until they are sold but under AMT they are.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddgan.../#7456350311db