Hacker News Reader

Comment by smitelli | Hacker News Reader

> I don't want my career and life to evolve by happenstance.

and

> I'm not willing to leave the company because its stock 6x'ed last year.

Those two things, right there, are at complete odds with each other. You're artificially limiting your options because of some magic numbers you can't control look good right now. (Magic numbers which, by the way, have vesting periods and other fixed-time rules precisely to trap people into cycles where they feel they can't leave.)

It's a perfectly valid thing to stay for financial reasons, but that must come with acceptance that sometimes you'll have to roll over and take whatever they decide to dish out. It's also perfectly valid to accept that the ground shifted under your feet and the only reasonable thing is to move to greener pastures. But you can't do both.

View on HN

This is fantastic advice. For senior engineers, its common for stock to be up to 1/3rd of compensatation. If the stock goes up by 6x - then you’ll be making 3x your original negotiated compensation. Being able to save multiple years worth of take-home salary every year is life changing.

After 4 years of this, you may not have your original career - but 8-15 years of pay saved provides lots of optionality.

100% - quote from parent fits perfectly: "It's a perfectly valid thing to stay for financial reasons, but that must come with acceptance that sometimes you'll have to roll over and take whatever they decide to dish out."

Not an engineer but in tech. My career has stalled out but I'm making better money then I would in a different place with more upward trajectory. It's been wild (and blessed) being able to save 1+ years worth of expenses each year (after taxes, retirement contributions, expenses, etc).

Nothing special happens at 15 years expenses in savings. It's way past what you need for security, but not nearly enough to retire on (that's more like 25x). It's way past what you need to rent, but it won't buy you a home you want in the region where you earned it, unless in combination with a PITI that commits you to earning at the same level for another 30 years. It could set you up nicely in a different region, but that would probably have to be combined with a career change, or else you're gambling that you can sustain full-remote employment.

If you're telling yourself to hang on until you reach this point... just realize that you may reach it and find you're still stuck.

This doesn't seem responsive to GP's comment. GP didn't discuss 15 years' expenses.

>but 8-15 years of pay saved provides lots of optionality.

I guess that depends how you're defining "pay" in relation to taxes and deductions.

It’s income, as opposed to expenses.

Throw 15 years of savings into the stock market and it will almost certainly double in value in 7 years.

It is most certainly transformative if you pretend you don’t have it for what amounts to a pretty short period of time.

If you're saying "I'll just hang on in this job I don't like until I'm in this 8-15 range" you may find that it's not reasonable to make any big life changes from that position either; you still need to "pretend you don't have it" and keep going for another while.

Holding on to your job you don’t like for not that long to retire easily is an amazing privilege that most don’t have.

"it will almost certainly double in value in 7 years" implies 10% is an almost certain long term return. It is not.

10 years is a common rule of thumb to double your investment, this is a good guess since after adjusting for inflation, the real return of S&P 500 is about 6.8%. Which is about 10.5 years to double your investment.

(give or take S&P 500 being one of the best returns you will find historically)

10% is almost certain but yes I wasn’t adjusting for inflation.

> For senior engineers, its common for stock to be up to 1/3rd of compensatation.

Relatively common to be significantly higher than 1/3, too.

Assuming the company stock has an upward trajectory the correct ratio to cite here depends on whether you're looking at the original grant or the value upon vesting. You could plausibly have grants that are 1/3 of your compensation at award but integer multiples of your salary upon vesting.

E.g., my signing offer was >1/3 stock at grant and with refreshers (at grant) my pay is significantly >1/3 stock, even if you model the stock price as flat. (Refreshers were 4-5x the size of salary bumps.) And I'm not especially senior.

^ This.

But to elaborate more, do you ever play a single player game like Skyrim, finish every quest, lead every guild?

Life is unfortunately not like that, you can't "win" every path. It's multiplayer, and everything comes with a tradeoff.

If you want to win at "career success", it's there, lots of people would love to be in your place. But people will sometimes tell you what to do.

If you want to win at "agency" it's also available, but you lose money and progress, take a big risk.

That's not really true. It sounds like the OP is in a big public tech company. In such a company there's usually a third option that preserves your salary and equity grants but also lets you do something else: transfer.

OP should look around for other roles and other directors within the company. There's a good chance that there's something available, particularly for a high performer with a dedicated track record. It does require leaving behind some of the skills and relationships that got him to this point, though.

If it was a generic role at a generic company I'd agree, but in the original post the transfer happened without OPs having any saying in it. He also feels like his career is subject to the whims of the company (he used happenstance to describe it).

It's not unreasonable to imagine transfer not being a possibility for him in the near future, so your comment feels a bit out of place.

Which public BigTech company has increased 6x in the last few years? Maybe Nvidia?

this is literally the entire point of golden handcuffs.

But those are only as tight as he lets them be. He can choose to be happy with where he is, or make a change.

Yeah, the fact that they're at odds is what makes this a difficult situation.

Right now I'm leaning towards: this other domain is close enough to my old domain that given work's context in my overall life, the pay makes it worthwhile to compromise on my work goals, as long as I'm able to "leave the door open" to re-enter my old domain. That probably won't happen at this company until the other, more experienced engineer who took over my old domain leaves, and maybe not even then.

But the magnitude of the pay difference is great enough that a couple, few years of the dot product between what I'm doing and what I'd like to be doing in my career is ~0.8 rather than 1.0 is worth it in my life right now, given that I want to eventually buy a home in my high COL city.

I think having been in the situation where I felt I was basically in my dream-job and knew I was, makes it harder to have lost it, even though I am in a really good spot in my career overall.

You can't do both but they feed into the same "OKR" if you like:

A. Get rich (how rich? How likely?), so I can do what I like absolutely.

B. Do what I like now, so am guaranteed to have done what I like, but still be at the mercy of corporate/academic tides.

Both are fine choices. Need to do the decisioning to find out which has more "do what I like" ness to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com