A handful of relatively minor frustrations, a desire to try a bigger company on for size, and some concerning involvement of HR in engineering matters were all reasons that a move made sense. But what made me start looking ASAP was a disrespectful interaction with HR.

I've read too much Michael O' Church for my own good.

Heh good luck. How long before your options expire?

Interesting announcement at my company regarding compensation. My company is folding our 15% bonuses into our base salary. So everyone gets an automatic 15% increase. What they are going to do instead of bonuses now is providing more equity for high performers.

In addition to that, they are adjusting salaries based on some 3rd party salary study that was done. Most of these studies had other participants, like Pinterest and Lyft involved. They are aiming to be at the 55% percentile of market rate. If you were being overpaid, you will get 15% increase in salary, no more. If you were underpaid, you were adjusted more than the 15% increase.

For example, if you are making 100k but the survey said you should be making 90k, you still would be making 115k after the salary adjustment. But if the survey said you were supposed to make 150k, you would get adjusted to 150k.

Got some mix reviews in regards to this. Some of my coworkers are pissed since they are thinking that now everyone will get paid the same at every level. The equity as the new "bonus" is really just paper money since no one really thinks an IPO is coming anytime soon.

Not sure how I feel about this. It's going to be hard to attract talent during new hire negotiations. Putting some arbitrary guideline of 55% percentile and not going budge on the base salary is going to get us 55% percentile engineers.

Will be interesting to see if I'm in the overpaid group. If that's the case, I won't be getting any raises in the near future unless I get promoted.

Seems really weird.

Not sure what you mean by expire in this context Barrin.

I have the standard 90 day exercise window when my employment ends. But I was able to negotiate transitioning to part time remote on my own hours. Meanwhile I'm continuing to vest and the 90 day window hasn't started yet.

I do seem to recall something about the options being forfeit some years after vesting if they had not been purchased. I'd have to go dig up some paperwork but I'm pretty sure it's years away.

10 years for me, probably similar at most startups.

I didn’t know your company was a startup. Hard for me to imagine anyone being pissed about this - but I guess when it comes to salary people can always complain.

I thought three months was the most common.

10 year option purchase period is a very modern employee-friendly movement that's gaining traction, and it's super great. But sadly it isn't standard.

blackize was talking about when his options flat out expire - not the period of time you have to exercise them after leaving. For the former, my options just die after 10 years (even if I'm at the company the whole time) if I don't exercise them. Like him, I'd only have 30-90 days (don't know exactly) to exercise my options if I left the company.

Ok I read that exchange 3 times and the second time I thought it was that but the other interpretation won out.

10 years to exercise is so much more fair to employees tho and should really become the standard.

Have you heard of Elsagate?

Uber used to have a 30 day use it or lose it policy after you leave. They are more generous now in that if you worked for at least 3 years, you have up to 7 years to exercise those options.

I'm not getting options but some of the early employees at my company are and it is a golden handcuff for many of them.

There’s a whole lot that depends on your option agreement and the company itself. Your best bet is to probably talk to someone senior you trust at the company and see if they have any specific information.

In many cases your company is likely going to be involved so you can always ask them what their official position is and what options you have.

There are 3rd party companies that can also help. Some are reputable and some are probably not. A common thing is getting a loan to exercise your options that you only have to pay back if your shares become liquid. They get a set fee + some percentage of your shares. This is just to exercise your options - not to sell the shares themselves. I’m not sure if they’ll also give you money to cover tax payments.

I’ve heard of some companies that also buy the shares from you but it’s often kind of a gray area based on your option agreement and they’re getting a huge discount. I don’t know much about these situations.

Looks like you and I are moving on about the same time blackize. I'm still in the looking stage but hopefully will have something in short order.

Edit to add: While your complaints seem to be pretty specific mine are pretty broad issues with my employer as a whole.

I'm making a thing in react/redux and I can't decide if I'm using it wrong, or it just rubs me the wrong way, or if there's something about it that just isn't compatible with the way I like to program. If there's anyone who's really familiar with using it I have some questions - or maybe I should just start a thread. All the material on the web is not particularly helpful to me, because it's either super-basic or it's "here's a fully written app with no explanation for anything"

Another problem is that due to the fractured nature of JS libraries (which I find maddening) everyone's dev environment is some bizarre snowflake. I spent at least an hour trying to get an example of something to work last week before realizing they were using "thunk" and that changed how actions can be written.

"everyone's dev environment is some bizarre snowflake"

This is one of the biggest anti-patterns in all of programming imo.

The two biggest offenders I've seen in my life are C++ and javascript and frankly javascript is way worse than C++, even though both are bad.

JS seems to encourage these little micro-libraries that do one little thing, as opposed to macro-libraries that offer a ton of functionality. In C++ for example, almost everyone uses Boost in some manner or another. This is fairly good because it means if someone writes an example using Boost, you can replicate their build env fairly easily. If instead they download and install 20 small libraries to do the same thing, you'll spend all week trying to figure out how to replicate it, and which parts of the 20 libs produce which results (and which things are *emergent properties* of libraries combined with each other.

Most of my last few years have been python where 95% of everyone's dev environment are fairly standard well documented libraries, and there is a fairly large corpus of "official" libraries that are present in most python installations by default. It's so nice to sit down at almost anyone's computer and know what will be available.

I looked today into in-JS CSS styling and saw that there are, no joke, like 40 or 50 libraries for it. What the literal ****.

I've spent the last 12 months of my life doing react/redux and went to an advanced training, so I generally feel like I know what I'm doing.

redux-thunk is pretty nice and I like using it, but like redux itself and many of its eco-system things, "you probably don't need it (TM)".

In general I'm not sure how I feel about redux and the redux eco-system. It seems like there is so much respect for Dan and others that wrote and maintain redux, that people don't want to insult them or say negative things. But instead, it seems like people are gradually silently moving away from it, which in my experience seems to mean that the eco-system is going to become fragmented and frustrating to work with.

Recent example, I re-wrote the Router for one of our apps. It is react-router 2.x connected to redux. If you look at the repo for react-router-redux, you see it was dropped by its maintainers into react-router proper. But now, react-router has silently deprecated it and is pointing toward an even more obscure repo. Why would the react-router guys drop "official" support for Redux, it seems to be that it is losing favor silently. Also redux devtools is awesome but crashes a lot.

When I did reacttraining with Michael Jackson, he was personally not interested in using redux, but also was down with it if you were already using it.

The new context API is really easy to use and nice, but isn't a replacement for redux. I've heard good things about mobx as a replacement, but everyone I know still uses redux.

If the ecosystem stays really strong and isn't currently in the state of silently dying (which is my suspicion), I would gladly keep using Redux because I think its nice and I've put tons of time into learning things like redux-form.

Can I bug you by pm or email a bit?

pm sent

The one thing you can pretty much always count on with these all-in-one frameworks (IE - not jquery) is that they won't be cool in a couple years.

Based on my job search, I'd hate to be an angular master with very little other skills right now. There's still jobs - but mostly with established companies - many of whom will probably be moving away from angular at some point.

You can probably still get work as an EXT developer. But it doesn't sound very fun.

Why would you need redux at all to work with react-router?

tbh at this point I really hate redux and am rapidly losing respect for dan a. in general. I'm working with another one of his tools (react-dnd) and its a ****show kinda. I now just axios fetch stuff unless its critical to be used app wide then I just throw it into even more boilerplatey redux saga and connect where needed.

If you're not using the "ducks" style of organizing redux def look into that.

Pretty sure an anyone who "mastered" Angular could easily and quickly pick up react or vue.

Anyway, what would you recommend?

I hate JS :/