The value over time thing a lot of people talk about is often hugely biased by the stock market run we’ve had. Like a lot of the people making close to a million bucks at some of these companies are mostly benefitting from the fact that their RSUs are now vesting after 4 years and the company’s stock has killed it over that period. It’s not likely to repeat again over the next 4 years.

And then of course there’s often the claims that you’ll get promoted in that time and so comp will go up a lot more. Which is quite possibly true but it’s not a fair comparison to current offers at companies.

Basically I think it’s silly to put much weight in what you ‘could’ be making after 4 years when considering offers because it’s so speculative that it’s almost never an apples to apples comparison with the present day offers.

Yeah, it’s just silly. It’s also not static for a person and what properties are valuable also seem dependent on what’s needed.

I know we don’t like to acknowledge this in our industry, but sometimes a company just needs a maintenance person or person that can work with well established technology and solve a generally common problem. “Trusted professional” is exactly who you want to find. Someone good at their job and happy to continue doing it.

I think that could be realistic it you make L5 or whatever the other bigco equivalent is. I'm at the equivalent of L4.

Also, I wonder if numbers like that could have a lot to do with stock market performance in recent years. If you got a 200k RSU in 2014, that probably wound up being worth closer to 300-350k (traveling, can't do the math atm).

Googles more than doubled. Amazon has gone up 4-5x. Netflix 4-5x. Microsoft doubled. Apple almost doubled (depending on timeframe). Facebook more than doubled (until recently). And so on.

Yes, I think this is kinda what is inflating all the eye-popping numbers you see. 4 years ago a bunch of people were probably offered something like 140k base, 80-100k stock and all those stocks have quadrupled and their base probably went up 25%+ so now they are taking home 400-500k. I don't think you can count on that happening again over the next 4 years. If they offer you 100k in stock now, you should think of it as a range of 60k to 150k by the time it vests.

and "Core Employee" is also bad!

Trusted professional sounds like high praise to me. If I was hiring for a position, that's exactly the kind of people I'd want.

Trusted professional (by the y-axis) basically means you'll never get promoted at that company imo.

I think the people that I have worked with that have the highest job satisfaction fall in the "trusted professional" category.

Been doing the job a long time, have a role that they can easily fulfill and they still get to do interesting work. Low stress, etc.

Basically the guys that made Staff Engineer and then stopped caring about progressing. Show up to work, do a good job, go home and not stress about anything all while collecting a pretty good paycheck.

I think I'm already starting to fall into that category and I've only been out of school ~4 years. Been promoted 3 times already and now they are trying to get me to progress even farther and take on more team leadership roles, manage a couple of remote employees, etc. I just want to write code and get paid decent money to do it, the extra stress doesn't seem worth it to me. Maybe I am an outlier in that sense.

Yeah well I'm a lead trying to get staff and then I'll be like all the other staffs who WFH 3 days a week and don't appear to have JIRA tickets assigned to them ever

Exactly! Low stress, good pay... at this point I don't really care if I ever get promoted again....

I like how you make this post then goofy and max go on to say the exact same thing w/o acknowledging you. Maybe you are invisible lol.

Which is why I like Core Employee. You can move in any direction!

I slept on it and decided I'm still very mad about the numbering system on this thing.

Get a side job!

Hah, I wasn't going to point that out.

Heh, this time I legit did not see that post, not sure why. What jj said, then.

found a cool way.

Object.keys(MyEnum).includes(myField)

Ya that works

Assuming Google, this is more like an L3 offer than an L4 offer, so if they're leveling you at L4, they are majorly lowballing you and you likely have tons of room to negotiate. If you are being leveled at L3 for some reason, you should be able to get promoted fairly easily - L3 -> L4 is an easy promotion at any of the majors even for new graduates.

Don't forget that refreshers also vest over time, usually over the same schedule as your initial grant from the point it's granted. For example your annual refreshers may be 1/4 of the typical initial grant at your level (depends on the company but it's typical since this way, by year 5, refreshers entirely replace the initial grant) and vest over 4 years. So your initial grant was 200K vesting over 4 years, netting you 50K a year, your annual refresher may be 50K over 4 years, which results in your stock compensation over time like:

Y1: 50K
Y2: 50K + 12.5K(from Y1) = 62.5K
Y3: 50K + 12.5K(from Y1) + 12.5K(from Y2) = 75K
Y4: 50K + 12.5K * 3 = 87.5K
Y5: 12.5K * 4 = 50K

This is assuming no promotion, no inflation and no changes in compensation formula, nor otherwise outstanding performance that resulted in extra grants. So generally speaking, your comp, even without any increase in stock prices is expected go up significantly from what's quoted in the offer. When you see people quoting really high comp numbers relative to their level, it's often when they are in year 3/4 where they are on both their initial grant and accrued significant amounts of refresher grants. Also strong performers are almost certainly going to get something to compensate for Year 4 to Year 5 cliff though there aren't that many people who are significantly impacted by this as most of the big tech companies were significantly smaller 4 years ago and most people are hired at fairly low levels, then get promoted over time, which means their refreshers are much more significant than initial grants.

20k bonus and you're base is 60k lower than current, that still sounds like a very high base for L4. Assuming 20k is 10%/average performance. 140k RSU is pretty low these days from FAANG. STock is easiest to negotiate. Base is harder, and level is near impossible to negotiate.

Apologies for the lack of acknowledgment. I agree with what you said that the stock performance is creating a very weird compensation comparison at this moment in time. I don't agree with all of this last part. It's definitely not silly to consider what might happen in 4 years. There could be crazy differences four years out. It is correct that it is impossible to know what the future will bring, but 4 years isn't that much time and it would be prudent to think about several possible scenarios playing out.

Yeah, I probably overstated it. But its still much less important than the current offer details in most cases.

If the refreshers work the way Candybar described, then I also underestimated the value of them. My company still does option refreshers more ad-hocly and the only big public company I know of that does refreshers does them differently (at least as it was explained to me by a friend). Basically they just keep you always having 4 years of vesting. So at the end of year 1 you get a new set of RSUs/options that will vest monthly after 3 years.

Promotions / raises can result in extra options vesting immediately, but thats more incremental in nature.

lol my friday entertainment consisted of me doing some dude's homework for him because he couldn't figure out how to make this -_- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(game)) still took a 1/2 hour sadly in vanilla js

You guys will love this story.

Our team has been working on this project for close to a year now. Without getting into too much details, this project involves pulling data from two different 3rd party sources and doing a merge of them together. It's a relatively straight forward project, we used a unique shared identifier from each of the two sources and merge the relative data points into one grouping. This is then shown for each user's account.

If the above is confusing, think of it as if we are trying to merge list of books that a user might have ordered from Barnes and Nobles and Amazon. You would use an ISBN as an identifier and merged attributes like:

1. Date ordered.
2. Description.
3. Reasons why it was ordered.

If for some reason a user ordered from both Barnes and Nobles and Amazon, we would merge all the data points together based on some domain logic we thought of.

We got it up and running and we found that the it is working as intended. We get metrics that we get some matching between the two sources but no real insight into the % that actually successful match.

So we are trying to get people to consume from our service that is running in production. We touted that our service can accomplish what our company has been wanting to do, provide a merged view of a single point of data that is provided by a user. Teams of designers do mock ups based on this idea and it is even presented at our townhall.


6+ months pass by and we have 20+ other people spread across several teams working on this and we are close to launch day. Testing with mock data and everything looks great!

We finally launch internally to ourself and this is when things start to hit the fan. We find out that this shared unique identifier isn't actually shared. The 3rd party gets them and actually obfuscates them due to privacy reasons. Or it may have may have been provided to the 3rd party obfuscated. Either way, when a user is supposed to see only X amount of things, they see 2*X, essentially doubled since our service isn't able to match across correctly.

We are debating whether or not to use other data points to try and join the data, but knowing how unstable the data is, it might increase our matching just slightly. Our other alternative is going to some kind of Machine Learning approach, which no one on our team has expertise on. Joining the data isn't easy since many of the attributes for the same data is free form might be reported differently. Ie. Chase vs CHS, BOA vs Bank of A vs BankOfAmerica.

Project is at a total standstill and it's going to be an interesting week.

Is 3rd party not involved with the project, and you're just consuming some public API?