17 ms·

Downturn career decisions

276 points by vincentchau 4y ago

skmurphy 4y ago
Some key bits of advice I found useful. If you were in the job market in 2008-9 or 2001-3 you may view this article as very pessimistic. I don't think it is. "If any given role can prioritize profit, pace, learning, prestige or people, then this is a good time to be focused on working with good people in a role where you’re learning. There’s a lot to learn right now as many companies are abruptly shifting from long-term growth-oriented goals to short-term, profitability orientation" See https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/ https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/ for more." "it’s a tricky time to chase prestige as many companies that were prestigious a year ago like Netflix are in an awkward place or going through a hiring freeze like Meta. Although FAANG will remain prestigious, the most prestigious companies of 2025 are far less obvious than they were twelve months ago" See https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125571/meta-hiring-freeze-commerce-messenger-kids-facebook-gaming https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125571/meta-hiring-free... Related https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/07/19/apple-slow-hiring.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/07/19/apple-sl... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/09/21/heres-how-meta-google-are-shrinking-workforces.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/09/21/heres-ho...
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > many companies are abruptly shifting from long-term growth-oriented goals to short-term, profitability orientation Pull the other leg. Companies haven't care about anything but the next quarter's results since the 80s.
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    But what is important in the next quarter's results has shifted. A company that might have prioritized reporting strong user acquisition might now prioritize cash.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    This treats it as too binary IMO. Maybe the 80s marked a shift where companies started caring more about next Q than they did in the decades prior - but there is still plenty of long term execution happening at larger companies that can be reined in for more short term focus.
hackitup7 4y ago
"I have personally seen friends get filtered out of senior and executive opportunities for having “too many” short stints in their resume" I think this is great advice, and it runs counter to advice from sites like Blind that essentially encourage you to treat your career as a graph search algorithm optimized for any incremental increase in compensation. Hopping around is fine in small amounts and can work for increasing comp. But if you establish a pattern people notice, and they won't want to be the next stop on what they perceive to be a hot potato adventure (whether that's fair or not doesn't matter in practice). Also a good callout that this is extra true for senior roles where it will be more complicated to replace a short-tenured leader.
- metadat 4y ago
  This is a shortsighted hot take. If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement, or even for an orthogonal move to a less toxic environment. When the situation is good or at least reasonable, the rational person will stick around and see it through. There are endless shitty places to work. You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly. Hiring managers who choose to judge a person in this fashion, solely based on their resumé and how long a person put up with a mediocre or poor work environment in the past, have nothing of real value to offer and don't deserve the good employees. They don't take good care of them.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    The author agrees with you. From the article: "You can absolutely explain those stints, and a reasonable interviewer won’t penalize you, but my lived experience is that landing a senior role requires passing multiple somewhat arbitrary process gates"
    - hackitup7 4y ago
      Yeah, and in my experience it's also about the pattern. There isn't a rule or anything. 1-2 short stints, totally fine. 3-4 short stints but with one or more 5+ year stints, probably also fine. 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months? Whatever is going on, it doesn't seem crazy to expect that it's going to manifest at job #6 as well.
emptysea 4y ago
I found the option repricing history fascinating. "what about me", cries the person with a $300 RSU price while the stock is trading at $100 -- it always seems like the first thing that comes up in company chat when the company stock tanks. Part of the deal I suppose. Other option is to jump ship, but that's scarier in a bear market. Also jibed with: > my general advice to folks would be to stay where you are as long as you’re reasonably happy day to day and feel like you’re learning at a good rate. Even if your effective compensation has declined a bit, it’s very hard to determine if the compensation at any other company will hold up either.
- tharkun__ 4y ago
  What about it? Someone with an option actually paid money to exercise it. They actually loose some of their own money based on their own decision. Someone with an RSU they thought was worth $300 when they negotiated and thought it would be at $600 by the time it vested and they could sell it now only get $100 per RSU they actually sell. My answer to "What about me"? Well boo hoo! Random internet search yields and example on blind: FB offer $185k base + $200k RSU/year = $385k total comp Let's apply your 300/100 example. So the poor guy "only" makes $185k base + ~66k RSUs. IFF he actually sells.
  - menage 4y ago
    > Someone with an option actually paid money to exercise it. If you still have the option, then you haven't paid to exercise it. Once you exercise it, you have a stock (or the sale proceeds in the case of an exercise-and-sell transaction).
- ip26 4y ago
  RSUs are a very different story from options. That $300 RSU still has 33% of its value left; the option is worthless. This is one of the reasons the industry is moving toward RSUs. No repricing drama.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Well, there were also accounting rule changes.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
> If you find my following perspective to be overly conservative, I’d gently push back with the observation that most folks I know in or pursuing executive roles view my career decisions as moderately risk-seeking I wonder if this reflects the demographics of people in executive roles more than anything else. People who need to take risks to end up in an executive role are naturally filtered out due to risky behaviour, whereas people who have better 'pedigree' (You know what I mean) don't have to take many risks.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  People end up in executive positions largely do so because of connections, with expertise second, at best. They just view life and success as expected because of who they are, so why take risks? If you're a white, male, Ivy League graduate, you're going to succeed regardless. Just coast.
  - EddySchauHai 4y ago
    You think all 40,000 per year are going to be successful if they coast? And doesn't it require some tenacity to get into an Ivy school, meaning they're the type of person less likely to coast? This comment comes off as somewhat sour.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      > doesn't it require some tenacity to get into an Ivy school Ivy schools are famously cagey about the number of "legacy" admissions, but the best research suggest they weigh legacy many times more than any other criteria, and legacy admissions make up some %15 of the total. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-colleges-universities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-coll...
      - notimetorelax 4y ago
        Good, so 85% of students worked hard to get into the Ivy League. But because of the 15% you say that their accomplishments is nothing?
fmajid 4y ago
This still talks about relatively healthy company. I'll always remember an engineer from Palm telling me circa 2002 the hard-earned wisdom of Silicon Valley is "never be the last one left who has to turn the lights off" (because likely his last paycheck will bounce).
hintymad 4y ago
> If any given role can prioritize profit, pace, learning, prestige or people, then this is a good time to be focused on working with good people in a role where you’re learning Prestige comes from past endeavor therefore prestige can end up depreciating fast. I'd argue that one should always focus on learning, or more generally, on growth. FAANG companies do give their employees prestige, yet prestige alone does not carry too much weight, especially during an interview. It is the combination of the growing success of a company and an employee's contribution to the success that gives the true prestige and handsome reward to the employee. Case in point, a Googler 18 years ago would automatically get tons of respect because Google launched a slew of groundbreaking products and popularized a slew of amazing technologies. GFS, Big Table, MapReduce framework, draggable and zoomable Google Maps by AJAX (even though XMLHttpRequest was invented by MS), 1GB of Gmail storage, amazing search infrastructure that goes way beyond the classic methods in the book Managing Gigabytes, large-scale machine learning for both universal search and semantic understanding of Google search, large-scale Google Ads, and the list goes on. FB employees 15 years ago would likely (likely as there will always be exceptions) got a lot more prestige than today because FB scaled its business to hundreds of millions of users, invented a novel architecture for social networking especially for serving feeds, scaled MySQL along the way, invented technologies like Tao, Haystack, React, HVM, Scruba, large-scale memcached, and the list can also go on. Netflix grew its subscribers from a few million back in 2008 to 70 millions about 7 years ago. Along the way, they showed the world how to be productive with merely a few hundred engineers by building tools. They popularized the concept of circuit-breaking by giving the world Hystrix (yes, I know the concept was quite well known to readers of Release It! and Netflix mentioned that they learned that concept from that very book). They built Asgard and later Spinnaker. They built predictive autoscaling service years before AWS built the same feature. They built discovery service and fast loggers and RxJava and Iceberg and a long list of other systems. Along the way, the Netflix in that era enjoyed prestige. I'm sure people can come up with equal number of negative examples, like the dude who was L6 in Google but spent the last two years solely coordinating teams to using his team's user embedding, and therefore wondered why other companies kept down leveling him after interviews. Of course, I made this example up but you get the idea. So, chase growth and therefore prestige in the near future, even in the downturn.
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
code51 4y ago
> next year as the downturn ends and the upswing begins Who says the downturn ends next year? VCs act like it's all 2008: someone will come and bail them out. Yet, we are literally one Powerpoint away from a multi-year dumpster fire.
- dijit 4y ago
  To be perfectly fair; when it comes to the economy, belief somehow follows reality. If “the economy” believes there will be a recession, there almost certainly will be one. Even if it wasn’t going to happen by itself. VCs dumping money into the “bottom point” of the market will also stimulate the economy a lot, leading to a recovery.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    > If “the economy” believes there will be a recession, there almost certainly will be one. Even if it wasn’t going to happen by itself. There have been beliefs there will be a recession from the end of the 2008 recession to date. There has been beliefs that things are great and there will never ever ever be a recession ever again. People who believe a recession is coming are like broken clocks, many of whom have prediced 45 out of the last 3 recessions.
    - rco8786 4y ago
      In a world of billions of individuals you can always find some that believes in whatever it is you're looking for people to believe. OP's point as I read it is that once those beliefs hit a critical mass amongst the general population they tend to come true via self fulfilling prophecy. Correlation/causation aside - the point is not "if my uncle thinks a recession is coming, there is", it's "if 100mm American adults think a recession is coming, there is"
- rco8786 4y ago
  > Who says the downturn ends next year? That's just the premise of the article base on a historical observation that recessions last around 15 months...this was explained clearly. If your personal outlook is that we're walking into a multi-year dumpster fire then the advice in the article should be adjusted accordingly.
Havoc 4y ago
> If you’re an executive or senior leader, this is asking for the company’s P&L statement and someone on the finance team to walk you through it. Companies are onboard with this? Sharing pl data with someone that isn’t even an employee yet seems improbable to me.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  As a former CRO and regional GM, financial statements are not that secret. Public companies disclose that every quarter. Private companies need to disclose this if they want to get financing.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    In some countries even private companies' annual financial statements are in the public record. This is the case in Sweden and Finland, at least. Surprisingly few people seem to look up these records when joining a start-up though. But it's definitely useful for business journalists and presumably competitors.
- tristor 4y ago
  I’ve asked for PL statements during interviews for every PM job I’ve taken. PMs are generally responsible for PL for their line of business, and it’s foolish to not find out what you’re walking into. PL statements have “smells” just like code and stack choices do that you’d ask about in an SWE. A company refusing to share this during executive interviews is a huge red flag.
treis 4y ago
>It’s a rough time to prioritize profit, because much of tech compensation is grounded in equity valuations. The prevailing wisdom has been that FAANG companies are the easy path to outsized compensation, but Netflix has dropped from $691 to $179 in the past 8 months, and Google has dropped from $2,965 to $2,181. This is, arguably, backwards. Your package is salary + equity and the amount of equity is based off of current valuation. As an example, Google going from ~3k to ~2k means you get 50% more stock for the same dollar amount equity package. It's probably the best time to join a FAANG. Certainly much better than those that joined this time last year and have taken a hefty haircut on their equity.
- 11101010001100 4y ago
  Yes, it is the n-best time to join after a long list of times that start with Employee #1.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Considering most of the market will only hold stock for under 4 months, one may find the idea of a long-term investment hard to justify. In general, shifting your equity into index funds, and keeping 7% in high-risk markets is a good balance. If you are a family with young children, than that risk-exposure ratio should drop to under 2.5%. Depending where you live, additional community programs can offer substantially higher than normal returns with tax resistant programs like Education funds for your kids, Disability savings accounts, and First-time home-owner grants. As a side note, it has been my observation that few people ever see an actual return on in-house stock options in startup tech-companies. Additionally, a purge of senior-staff often happens before a firm transitions into the markets. It turns out, that more often than not these contractual incentives are just a tool to help drive down salaries, or even work for free with the truly audacious cons. Some have found utility in copying those who can break Market restrictions. ;) Congress member holdings report: http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx Senate member holdings report: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/
greysonhaile8 4y ago

276 points by vincentchau 4y ago

Some key bits of advice I found useful. If you were in the job market in 2008-9 or 2001-3 you may view this article as very pessimistic. I don't think it is. "If any given role can prioritize profit, pace, learning, prestige or people, then this is a good time to be focused on working with good people in a role where you’re learning. There’s a lot to learn right now as many companies are abruptly shifting from long-term growth-oriented goals to short-term, profitability orientation" See https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/ https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/ for more." "it’s a tricky time to chase prestige as many companies that were prestigious a year ago like Netflix are in an awkward place or going through a hiring freeze like Meta. Although FAANG will remain prestigious, the most prestigious companies of 2025 are far less obvious than they were twelve months ago" See https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125571/meta-hiring-freeze-commerce-messenger-kids-facebook-gaming https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125571/meta-hiring-free... Related https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/07/19/apple-slow-hiring.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/07/19/apple-sl... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/09/21/heres-how-meta-google-are-shrinking-workforces.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/09/21/heres-ho...

cratermoon 4y ago
> many companies are abruptly shifting from long-term growth-oriented goals to short-term, profitability orientation Pull the other leg. Companies haven't care about anything but the next quarter's results since the 80s.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  But what is important in the next quarter's results has shifted. A company that might have prioritized reporting strong user acquisition might now prioritize cash.
- rco8786 4y ago
  This treats it as too binary IMO. Maybe the 80s marked a shift where companies started caring more about next Q than they did in the decades prior - but there is still plenty of long term execution happening at larger companies that can be reined in for more short term focus.

hackitup7 4y ago

"I have personally seen friends get filtered out of senior and executive opportunities for having “too many” short stints in their resume" I think this is great advice, and it runs counter to advice from sites like Blind that essentially encourage you to treat your career as a graph search algorithm optimized for any incremental increase in compensation. Hopping around is fine in small amounts and can work for increasing comp. But if you establish a pattern people notice, and they won't want to be the next stop on what they perceive to be a hot potato adventure (whether that's fair or not doesn't matter in practice). Also a good callout that this is extra true for senior roles where it will be more complicated to replace a short-tenured leader.

metadat 4y ago
This is a shortsighted hot take. If it's a bad or average situation, the rational person abandons ship at the first available incremental improvement, or even for an orthogonal move to a less toxic environment. When the situation is good or at least reasonable, the rational person will stick around and see it through. There are endless shitty places to work. You don't owe anything to a bad situation which treats you, the individual, poorly. Hiring managers who choose to judge a person in this fashion, solely based on their resumé and how long a person put up with a mediocre or poor work environment in the past, have nothing of real value to offer and don't deserve the good employees. They don't take good care of them.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  The author agrees with you. From the article: "You can absolutely explain those stints, and a reasonable interviewer won’t penalize you, but my lived experience is that landing a senior role requires passing multiple somewhat arbitrary process gates"
  - hackitup7 4y ago
    Yeah, and in my experience it's also about the pattern. There isn't a rule or anything. 1-2 short stints, totally fine. 3-4 short stints but with one or more 5+ year stints, probably also fine. 5 jobs, never for more than 9 months? Whatever is going on, it doesn't seem crazy to expect that it's going to manifest at job #6 as well.

emptysea 4y ago

I found the option repricing history fascinating. "what about me", cries the person with a $300 RSU price while the stock is trading at $100 -- it always seems like the first thing that comes up in company chat when the company stock tanks. Part of the deal I suppose. Other option is to jump ship, but that's scarier in a bear market. Also jibed with: > my general advice to folks would be to stay where you are as long as you’re reasonably happy day to day and feel like you’re learning at a good rate. Even if your effective compensation has declined a bit, it’s very hard to determine if the compensation at any other company will hold up either.

tharkun__ 4y ago
What about it? Someone with an option actually paid money to exercise it. They actually loose some of their own money based on their own decision. Someone with an RSU they thought was worth $300 when they negotiated and thought it would be at $600 by the time it vested and they could sell it now only get $100 per RSU they actually sell. My answer to "What about me"? Well boo hoo! Random internet search yields and example on blind: FB offer $185k base + $200k RSU/year = $385k total comp Let's apply your 300/100 example. So the poor guy "only" makes $185k base + ~66k RSUs. IFF he actually sells.
- menage 4y ago
  > Someone with an option actually paid money to exercise it. If you still have the option, then you haven't paid to exercise it. Once you exercise it, you have a stock (or the sale proceeds in the case of an exercise-and-sell transaction).
ip26 4y ago
RSUs are a very different story from options. That $300 RSU still has 33% of its value left; the option is worthless. This is one of the reasons the industry is moving toward RSUs. No repricing drama.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Well, there were also accounting rule changes.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

> If you find my following perspective to be overly conservative, I’d gently push back with the observation that most folks I know in or pursuing executive roles view my career decisions as moderately risk-seeking I wonder if this reflects the demographics of people in executive roles more than anything else. People who need to take risks to end up in an executive role are naturally filtered out due to risky behaviour, whereas people who have better 'pedigree' (You know what I mean) don't have to take many risks.

cratermoon 4y ago
People end up in executive positions largely do so because of connections, with expertise second, at best. They just view life and success as expected because of who they are, so why take risks? If you're a white, male, Ivy League graduate, you're going to succeed regardless. Just coast.
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  You think all 40,000 per year are going to be successful if they coast? And doesn't it require some tenacity to get into an Ivy school, meaning they're the type of person less likely to coast? This comment comes off as somewhat sour.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    > doesn't it require some tenacity to get into an Ivy school Ivy schools are famously cagey about the number of "legacy" admissions, but the best research suggest they weigh legacy many times more than any other criteria, and legacy admissions make up some %15 of the total. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-colleges-universities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-coll...
    - notimetorelax 4y ago
      Good, so 85% of students worked hard to get into the Ivy League. But because of the 15% you say that their accomplishments is nothing?

fmajid 4y ago

This still talks about relatively healthy company. I'll always remember an engineer from Palm telling me circa 2002 the hard-earned wisdom of Silicon Valley is "never be the last one left who has to turn the lights off" (because likely his last paycheck will bounce).

hintymad 4y ago

> If any given role can prioritize profit, pace, learning, prestige or people, then this is a good time to be focused on working with good people in a role where you’re learning Prestige comes from past endeavor therefore prestige can end up depreciating fast. I'd argue that one should always focus on learning, or more generally, on growth. FAANG companies do give their employees prestige, yet prestige alone does not carry too much weight, especially during an interview. It is the combination of the growing success of a company and an employee's contribution to the success that gives the true prestige and handsome reward to the employee. Case in point, a Googler 18 years ago would automatically get tons of respect because Google launched a slew of groundbreaking products and popularized a slew of amazing technologies. GFS, Big Table, MapReduce framework, draggable and zoomable Google Maps by AJAX (even though XMLHttpRequest was invented by MS), 1GB of Gmail storage, amazing search infrastructure that goes way beyond the classic methods in the book Managing Gigabytes, large-scale machine learning for both universal search and semantic understanding of Google search, large-scale Google Ads, and the list goes on. FB employees 15 years ago would likely (likely as there will always be exceptions) got a lot more prestige than today because FB scaled its business to hundreds of millions of users, invented a novel architecture for social networking especially for serving feeds, scaled MySQL along the way, invented technologies like Tao, Haystack, React, HVM, Scruba, large-scale memcached, and the list can also go on. Netflix grew its subscribers from a few million back in 2008 to 70 millions about 7 years ago. Along the way, they showed the world how to be productive with merely a few hundred engineers by building tools. They popularized the concept of circuit-breaking by giving the world Hystrix (yes, I know the concept was quite well known to readers of Release It! and Netflix mentioned that they learned that concept from that very book). They built Asgard and later Spinnaker. They built predictive autoscaling service years before AWS built the same feature. They built discovery service and fast loggers and RxJava and Iceberg and a long list of other systems. Along the way, the Netflix in that era enjoyed prestige. I'm sure people can come up with equal number of negative examples, like the dude who was L6 in Google but spent the last two years solely coordinating teams to using his team's user embedding, and therefore wondered why other companies kept down leveling him after interviews. Of course, I made this example up but you get the idea. So, chase growth and therefore prestige in the near future, even in the downturn.

4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

code51 4y ago

> next year as the downturn ends and the upswing begins Who says the downturn ends next year? VCs act like it's all 2008: someone will come and bail them out. Yet, we are literally one Powerpoint away from a multi-year dumpster fire.

dijit 4y ago
To be perfectly fair; when it comes to the economy, belief somehow follows reality. If “the economy” believes there will be a recession, there almost certainly will be one. Even if it wasn’t going to happen by itself. VCs dumping money into the “bottom point” of the market will also stimulate the economy a lot, leading to a recovery.
- blitzar 4y ago
  > If “the economy” believes there will be a recession, there almost certainly will be one. Even if it wasn’t going to happen by itself. There have been beliefs there will be a recession from the end of the 2008 recession to date. There has been beliefs that things are great and there will never ever ever be a recession ever again. People who believe a recession is coming are like broken clocks, many of whom have prediced 45 out of the last 3 recessions.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    In a world of billions of individuals you can always find some that believes in whatever it is you're looking for people to believe. OP's point as I read it is that once those beliefs hit a critical mass amongst the general population they tend to come true via self fulfilling prophecy. Correlation/causation aside - the point is not "if my uncle thinks a recession is coming, there is", it's "if 100mm American adults think a recession is coming, there is"
rco8786 4y ago
> Who says the downturn ends next year? That's just the premise of the article base on a historical observation that recessions last around 15 months...this was explained clearly. If your personal outlook is that we're walking into a multi-year dumpster fire then the advice in the article should be adjusted accordingly.

Havoc 4y ago

> If you’re an executive or senior leader, this is asking for the company’s P&L statement and someone on the finance team to walk you through it. Companies are onboard with this? Sharing pl data with someone that isn’t even an employee yet seems improbable to me.

jsemrau 4y ago
As a former CRO and regional GM, financial statements are not that secret. Public companies disclose that every quarter. Private companies need to disclose this if they want to get financing.
- pavlov 4y ago
  In some countries even private companies' annual financial statements are in the public record. This is the case in Sweden and Finland, at least. Surprisingly few people seem to look up these records when joining a start-up though. But it's definitely useful for business journalists and presumably competitors.
tristor 4y ago
I’ve asked for PL statements during interviews for every PM job I’ve taken. PMs are generally responsible for PL for their line of business, and it’s foolish to not find out what you’re walking into. PL statements have “smells” just like code and stack choices do that you’d ask about in an SWE. A company refusing to share this during executive interviews is a huge red flag.

treis 4y ago

>It’s a rough time to prioritize profit, because much of tech compensation is grounded in equity valuations. The prevailing wisdom has been that FAANG companies are the easy path to outsized compensation, but Netflix has dropped from $691 to $179 in the past 8 months, and Google has dropped from $2,965 to $2,181. This is, arguably, backwards. Your package is salary + equity and the amount of equity is based off of current valuation. As an example, Google going from ~3k to ~2k means you get 50% more stock for the same dollar amount equity package. It's probably the best time to join a FAANG. Certainly much better than those that joined this time last year and have taken a hefty haircut on their equity.

11101010001100 4y ago
Yes, it is the n-best time to join after a long list of times that start with Employee #1.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

Considering most of the market will only hold stock for under 4 months, one may find the idea of a long-term investment hard to justify. In general, shifting your equity into index funds, and keeping 7% in high-risk markets is a good balance. If you are a family with young children, than that risk-exposure ratio should drop to under 2.5%. Depending where you live, additional community programs can offer substantially higher than normal returns with tax resistant programs like Education funds for your kids, Disability savings accounts, and First-time home-owner grants. As a side note, it has been my observation that few people ever see an actual return on in-house stock options in startup tech-companies. Additionally, a purge of senior-staff often happens before a firm transitions into the markets. It turns out, that more often than not these contractual incentives are just a tool to help drive down salaries, or even work for free with the truly audacious cons. Some have found utility in copying those who can break Market restrictions. ;) Congress member holdings report: http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx Senate member holdings report: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/

greysonhaile8 4y ago