4 ms·

That's where I am. I'm pushing $300k total comp at Twitter as a senior SWE out in Colorado. Before this I was first employee of a startup that eventually sold

That's where I am. I'm pushing $300k total comp at Twitter as a senior SWE out in Colorado. Before this I was first employee of a startup that eventually sold to Google. Even if I'd stuck around for the acquisition I'd have gotten $0 from my stock options—employee options were wiped out completely. Why put up with that bullshit when a big publicly-traded company will reliably deposit large sums of money into my bank account every quarter and I don't have to work crazy hours?

brendonjohn 8y ago
Speaking as someone that has stock options... how did your employee options get wiped out?
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  The usual way is that all the investors, who hold preferred stock, get paid before all the employees, who hold common stock. If there's not any money left over after the preferred holders get paid, the value of employee equity is 0.
tayo42 8y ago
how did you get that much? Hired as senior with a lot of rsu? is it mostly rsu after the jump the last few weeks? If I got to senior I wouldn't be making that much based off what Im being told about comp increases. I must have gotten a shit deal when I joined lol
- saryant 8y ago
  I worked here during the years when the stock was in the toilet and managed to get some retention grants that have turned into a tidy sum. Plus I joined as a SWE1 so there are two promos in there.
  - jessehu 8y ago
    After your startup and Google experience, you were hired as an SWE1? Also, curious if the experience of the startup or subsequent integration was perhaps more valuable than the opportunity cost.
    - saryant 8y ago
      I never went to Google, I left the startup a year before that happened. That startup was pretty much my first job out of college and I was there for about two years. In that specific case, I believe the startup was worth the opportunity cost. I was coming from San Antonio, not exactly a tech hotbed, and from a small liberal arts school nobody's heard of. I'd interviewed at a bunch of companies out the Bay and was rejected by all of them. A friend was an investor in TechStars' seed fund for their San Antonio program and he put me in touch with the founders of one of their companies. Those guys took a chance on me and hired me on a contract to solve some scaling issues while they were still in the program. Once they graduated and raised a series A, they brought me on full-time. I worked remote for another six months after they moved the company up to Boulder, eventually following myself. They let me go after about two years but during that time I gained a ton of StackOverflow reputation for Scala and Akka, which led me to one of Twitter's open source advocates who made the intro for Twitter's Boulder office. That was back in 2015. About a year later the company sort-of sold to Google, who then fired almost everyone and re-sold the IP (or something, it was weird and I wasn't there, but my investor friend gave me some of the details). So, in my specific case, the startup was worth the opportunity cost because my opportunity cost wasn't that high. I didn't have a six-figure SV job as a backup, but I was able to leverage the risk I took into that sort of job.

brendonjohn 8y ago

Speaking as someone that has stock options... how did your employee options get wiped out?

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
The usual way is that all the investors, who hold preferred stock, get paid before all the employees, who hold common stock. If there's not any money left over after the preferred holders get paid, the value of employee equity is 0.

tayo42 8y ago

how did you get that much? Hired as senior with a lot of rsu? is it mostly rsu after the jump the last few weeks? If I got to senior I wouldn't be making that much based off what Im being told about comp increases. I must have gotten a shit deal when I joined lol

saryant 8y ago
I worked here during the years when the stock was in the toilet and managed to get some retention grants that have turned into a tidy sum. Plus I joined as a SWE1 so there are two promos in there.
- jessehu 8y ago
  After your startup and Google experience, you were hired as an SWE1? Also, curious if the experience of the startup or subsequent integration was perhaps more valuable than the opportunity cost.
  - saryant 8y ago
    I never went to Google, I left the startup a year before that happened. That startup was pretty much my first job out of college and I was there for about two years. In that specific case, I believe the startup was worth the opportunity cost. I was coming from San Antonio, not exactly a tech hotbed, and from a small liberal arts school nobody's heard of. I'd interviewed at a bunch of companies out the Bay and was rejected by all of them. A friend was an investor in TechStars' seed fund for their San Antonio program and he put me in touch with the founders of one of their companies. Those guys took a chance on me and hired me on a contract to solve some scaling issues while they were still in the program. Once they graduated and raised a series A, they brought me on full-time. I worked remote for another six months after they moved the company up to Boulder, eventually following myself. They let me go after about two years but during that time I gained a ton of StackOverflow reputation for Scala and Akka, which led me to one of Twitter's open source advocates who made the intro for Twitter's Boulder office. That was back in 2015. About a year later the company sort-of sold to Google, who then fired almost everyone and re-sold the IP (or something, it was weird and I wasn't there, but my investor friend gave me some of the details). So, in my specific case, the startup was worth the opportunity cost because my opportunity cost wasn't that high. I didn't have a six-figure SV job as a backup, but I was able to leverage the risk I took into that sort of job.