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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

The ones who are good salesman do get takers. I don't really know why or how but they get them. Not the greatest engineers but also not bottom feeders. It's surreal. Granted it's usually people who don't realize their own worth or are naive about how much equity is actually going to be worth.

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Hey, uh. So, I'm going to be graduating with a B.Eng soon. Any tips on how to realize my own worth? I have a tendency to let myself be taken advantage of... I mean, I'm currently doing a research internship at a computer vision lab at my uni for very little compensation (grant + departmental top-up). I told myself I was doing it "for the experience." I... I feel like I might be a candidate for the behavior you describe, so I'd like to snap myself out of that if possible. Any resources you could point me to would be stellar, please and thank you.

That's different. Academia pays less at all levels.

The unhappiest people I know are the golddiggers. They cannot escape the feeling that they’re being taken advantage of. That the pie is so big anyways, and they deserve a little more, you know? And oh look, here comes somebody offering just a little more. What kind of sucker wouldn’t want to get paid what they’re really worth?

They’re unhappy because they let other people control their sense of self-worth.

The best way is to interview at good companies and get offers from them. That means the usual Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. and also up-and-coming ones (Uber, Lyft, etc.). You don't even need to want to work for the company but getting an offer will tell you your worth for the future. You will need to study hard for those interviews but it's well documented online what you need to study specifically (read Cracking the Coding Interview, practice Hackerrank, LeetCode, etc.).

There's generally threads online where recent grads say what offers they've gotten from companies and websites like www.paysa.com that try to aggregate them but those are all biased.

Equity is a gamble not in your favor, read up on how many startups fail outright, how many sell for basically nothing, and how much you're going to get diluted in funding rounds. Founders will say otherwise but it's their job to sell you so don't trust them. So if you do want to gamble on a startup make sure to heavily discount the value of equity when negotiating.

Equity is literally a scam at this point because there's the stock options that they give you, the private stock they give themselves, and the stock the VCs get. You're literally last on the list to get paid and first on the list to get shafted. It's not like it used to be where stock meant everyone shared risk and reward.

> You're literally last on the list to get paid and first on the list to get shafted

Isn't that a given with equity? You're literally saying that you're a residual claimant in the enterprise. Yes, with stock options and such things you might be even "more" residual than others in the capital structure, but it's not a "scam".

https://www.levels.fyi/

I've been doing this for a while.

I just measure positives and negatives and once exceeds the other, I'm done.

Brush up on Cracking the Coding Interview, interview at the top N companies wherever you can face living, research salaries for that area (levels.fyi is good if you're in the bay area, I'm told)

If the company is pre-ipo then look for top 10 venture capitalists as investors (Kleiner Perkins etc). This signals a company with good prospects! You do research - if you have to, pay the money to join CrunchBase - and figure out what each share is worth in the last funding round in dollars. Sometimes it's published in news articles and sometimes in Delaware Corp filings ($$$ to retrieve; crunchbase is easier). Their offer should be market if the (stock grant) x (last funding round price/share) + your base and bonus is average for a person at your level. Check levels.fyi. check Glassdoor salaries. If it's a unicorn check the university of bc unicorn report to see if there are ratchets or preferred shares (bad for you, a common stock grantee) in previous funding rounds. Then make a guess if they can IPO. 95% of silicon valley companies cannot. I picked one that was already getting ready to file an s-1 (IPO disclosure).

My biggest mistake as a new grad PhD was local cost of living. I wanted the prestige of working at a well known university. Turns out I didn't have the safety net or family wealth to work there.

Use an online calculator to estimate after-tax take home pay. Look at home price per square foot. A good offer nationally will pay 300 sq ft of real estate (take home pay) per year. My salary has varied from 110 to 1800 sq ft per year. I quit the 110 sq ft job after 2 years I just couldn't afford it; that is unsustainable! The 1800 sq ft job was in Phoenix; one house (new) per year! My current salary is ~250 sq ft a year which sucks nationally but is good for one of the most expensive cities in silicon valley (400+ sq ft just a few blocks away in a lesser school district); I am very Senior with 30 YOE.

+1 I like your metric, $ as sq ft / yr.

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