That is what it was like 20 years ago.

Lol, its crazy that 20 years ago was basically the height of the dot com boom. Most companies weren't even lasting 5 years before being acquired or failing.

yall are correct ofc, I just hate interviewing

My company was like Victor's - if you were super a all-star you might get promoted every two years. A solid player - maybe every three years.

Threatening to leave meant very little. They didn't want to upset their pay scale or promote newer people over people who had been there forever.

Me too. I just thought of it as a task that would pay me thousands of dollars per hour.

That's a great perspective

Yeah, exactly this. In my alleged field, electrical engineering, signing bonuses around the time of my graduation were easily 25k+, in 1998 dollars, so like 40k now. So the general consensus was, if you didn't change jobs every 2 years, it was because you were completely worthless, i.e. you'd have changed jobs if you could.

In programming it was similar, especially as the dotcom bubble took off, because any warm body could get a programming job for very good money, so good programmers could write their own ticket.

I don't know if I was lucky or unlucky to be in grad school during this period. I quit to work for a startup and never looked back.

From your posting I thought you were my age. Sounds like you're a youngster in your early 40s. (I'm 51) Wise beyond your years I guess.

I'm 41 and a half

:grandpa:

I feel pretty old basically all the time.

And then sometimes I think, wait, wtf, I have 25 years to go until typical "retirement", I'm not even half way done. They expect me to do this for 25 more years?

I'm going to try to exit before then but man I am often daunted by how much more work lies ahead of me.

Haha 41 is nothing. My manager is 40 and he's basically just one of the guys.

The latter part of your message sure is depressing and daunting lol. Remind me to dump more into savings now

I'm 42 and crushing it imo.

I found 2 outside offers because I was unhappy wanted to leave. The company matched the highest offer (actually went a bit higher) and also gave a level promotion so I decided to stay. So I was getting more money but the reasons for unhappiness still mostly exist (it's org level leadership and culture stuff that's hard to change). Pretty much the first week after accepting counter-offer I realized it was probably a mistake. I've given it 1 year now, and starting to look again. This time I won't accept any counteroffer.

When you guys get another offer, what's the actual approach to bring it up with your current employer? I assume you mention it before accepting and giving your two weeks? Is there a good way to approach that conversation without coming off poorly?

I'll let you know when I finish with mine, lol

Everything I've ever read said to not bother and just accept and give notice to your current after that.

Not really.

Is it really that hard to just ask for a raise ( no experience on this topic ) ?

The cost of hiring new people is huge. you have to spend money interviewing, they are less productive when learning your system/code base/business/domain knowledge to pick up.

they might interview well and be lazy as ****.

Ive asked. Trust me.

Btw, my program just made me able to approve angular typescript PRs. Only one at my job level with that authority.

Well in the past 2 weeks I failed on an onsite at my dream company despite thinking it went reasonably well and did not get approval to start before security clearance background check goes through for the job offer I do have. Apparently average time is 500 days. Pretty unhappy with where I am, and the unhappiness leaves me too tired to look for a job. On the bright side, I am getting payed unlike so many furloughed workers.

Sorry man, that sucks. From my recent round of interviewing, I felt like my perception of how the interview went didn't necessarily map to how it actually went, in both directions (good/bad) in different instances.

500 days to get approved - wtf??? Seems like a significant obstacle to hiring good people on their end.

Anyone ever worked at a startup that had an exit?

I told my manager a week ago about my offers and that I'm probably leaving - he's super chill and we have a good relationship, so I wanted to let him know so he could plan accordingly for our team going forward. I also told him to run it up the chain.

Anyway, talked to one of our founders today and apparently something could happen in the next few months. He told me something along the lines of, "obviously you should do what's best for you, but we'd love to keep you, and you should be aware of these talks we're having to make a decision with the most complete information you can". I have reason to believe, based on the work we're doing at the moment, that he's not blowing smoke up my ass just to keep me around.

At the same time, I lack any frame of reference or knowledge to know what an exit could look like, financially. We are not the kind of company like Instagram that Facebook is gonna buy for a billion dollars, and I was not one of the first 10 employees or anything like that, though I am one of the more senior devs on our team and could presumably be rewarded accordingly if I stick around.

So, curious if anyone's been through something like this and has perspective to offer. My default is to assume that, this probably isn't going to be worth a lifechanging amount of money, and whether it happens at all is a big "if", and I'd feel like a bit of a chump going to DBAM or whatever and being like "uh, so can you hold this spot for me for 3 months and let me decide then". But maybe I'm wrong.

(to be more specific about one aspect - I have 90 days to exercise options after leaving, so I could still get value from my vested stock in an exit by exercising them. But the question is, is it likely the unvested portion, and/or any backend incentives to get people to stay after an exit, wind up being worth enough to significantly sway the decisions I'm making now)

These talks could be legitimately promising, but like you said, there's still a ton of reasons they can fall apart (even when both sides actively want it to happen). I think you have to discount any EV from an acquisition happening pretty heavily.

My $0.02 - if your company is relatively large (Maybe 100+ employees?) and you're not super senior, I doubt there's a whole lot of new stock / compensation coming from the acquisition - at least relative to what you're already going to get from DBAM. Most of your upside of an acquisition is probably in your vested options - and you've got time to wait that out a bit and ultimately to exercise them if you think its worth it in 90 days.

So, I guess in short, barring any special details you have I don't think this should change your decision at all.

I also dont see how it changes anything.

Presumably if you were in line to get golden handcuffs in a few months you would also be getting a very serious counter offer now.

I think you/jj are right but I don't think the second sentence is the reason why. If anything I think keeping the books tight to make the company look attractive is more of a priority right now. Plus the whole reason I went looking elsewhere is because my company doesn't really compete with the DBAMs of the world. Nowhere in this conversation did the idea even come up of them actually matching the offers I got.