hkarthik

Sounds like you're on the fence about leaving, first step is decide if you want to leave or not. Then plan how to exit and retain some value in the equity (if it's worth it). Be open about your plans to exit the company and if the founders trust you, they'll work it out with you.

You should try to negotiate a conversion of your ISO shares to NSO shares, and extend the exercise window by 7 years. This will change the tax profile a bit for the shares, but allow you to keep your equity and still leave to do something else. It's a common option, but not given as an option to every employee, only those who are well vested. But it's way better than losing your shares with a 90 day exercise window.

If they won't go for that, you should ensure that you know what the current 409a value is for the company. Ask one of the finance folks to help you answer that question. If it is lower than the strike price on your ISOs, you are underwater on the options and you should not exercise and instead let them expire. You'd be better off investing the $25K on something else with better returns.

Unfortunately most EVs are way heavier and cause more wear on roads, so we'd be paying an even higher green tax to reduce emissions and fossil fuel usage.

I wonder if the POS companies take a share of the tip as part of the total transactions flowing through their systems.

Then they'd be incentivized to show the tip screen by default, and maybe jack up the default amount to 20-25%.

I've seen the Wolf in a few companies and they are given some special treatment for sure. The corporate equivalent of the babe and the sports car.

Years ago, one of them had a Macbook Pro while the rest of us were dealing with garbage Dell laptops that barely worked due to aggressive security scanners. He got his turned off by IT.

Agree this is a key skill and necessary archetype in large orgs.

But I'd call this person The Wolf (named after the Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction.

On small, focused code bases, yes. Anything built in the last 5 years or so can probably be made to work with .NET core and on a non-windows machine.

On large monolithic .NET codebases originally built from the 2000s era, absolutely not. You need to either rewrite or stick to Windows. Porting doesn't seem to be worth the effort.

Yeah the big downside is the exponential explosion in e-waste with all the LCDs that went obsolete within a few years, with no real resale market since everyone is one click away from getting a brand new one on Amazon.

I'm still running a 13 year old LCD TV in a guest bedroom. Just the thought of trying to either sell or see it end up in a landfill upsets me.

Manufacturing costs and margins on LED-LCDs were far better for manufacturers and likely what killed Plasma.

Exploiting this aggressively helped Samsung win market share and become a top TV manufacturer, causing Panasonic and Pioneer to exit the business, and nearly kill off Sony. Their only real competition is on the low end with Vizio, HiSense, TCL, etc.

OLED still can’t match these margins, which is why only LG really makes them in large quantities. Others, including Samsung are dipping into OLED to capture the videophile market but not selling the sheer volume or making huge profits on them.

I played with RedwoodJS over the holidays and there is a lot to like. However it does paper over a lot of complex things with fairly leaky abstractions currently. Expect to have to understand how GraphQL, Prisma, and React work whenever you encounter something that doesn't quite work.

This is not uncommon with most frameworks in the early days. I used Ruby on Rails since just before 2.0 and it was similar back then.

But the team behind RedwoodJS is great, and there's a nice community on Github, Discourse, and Discord. So I'm expecting great things.

Plus it's nice to have an omakase approach to learning all of the new frontend tech and getting something working quickly.

Yup, definitely industries (like web3/crypto/defi) where this can be done in the short term, but it still constitutes a lot of risk for the long term.

Even if you are getting $1M in cash today, who knows if you'll get it the following year when the underlying token they're liquidating to pay you in cash loses value and the founders are getting rekt. In some cases, you may only get the cash for a few months.

I agree that HN loves to hate it on crypto, but as this community ages you have to expect somewhat of a more risk-averse mindset to set in. Even YC funding is so high, I don't consider it as risky as it was 10 years ago.

I have 3 machines: 1 work MBP, 1 personal MBP, and a windows desktop for gaming.

I tried several solutions but recently purchased a LevelOne Tech KVM. Best solution I've found thus far (albeit a little pricey).

https://store.level1techs.com/?category=Hardware

Find the 4 port option which works best for you (single or dual display). This thing has been bulletproof so far.

Unless you're in the upper levels of management (VP equivalent or higher) at FAANG, it's difficult to get this salary at a market rate. For the vast majority of mere mortals, you need to get an above-market rate to achieve this. And this requires taking on more risk.

The least risky way is to join a pre-IPO, VC funded company after it's at least past Series D round, and get a significant equity package that is equivalent to at least 2-3x the same pay at a FAANG company.

Then be patient, wait for an IPO or acquisition. Note this could be years. And during that time you won't get any liquidity (like a FAANG employee would).

Depending on length of time, this could result in several years of above market pay (through stock which continues to vest post exit), or a one time big payout that averages to more than $1MM/year. Note that depending on tax treatment (ISO versus RSU), that could reduce your after tax payout.

Other options would include starting a company or joining even earlier stage (before the Series C). But then the time horizon for an exit can go up, and the risk also increases as many times the equity gets heavily diluted or the cap table is adjusted significantly to make room for later stage investors.

If you've primarily worked on B2B/enterprise software where the company makes a lot of money with a smaller user base, try working in consumer software where the company makes a lot less money across a lot more users.

If you've primarily worked on consumer software, do a stint working on B2B software.

The way you work as an engineer changes a lot among these two customer types, and there are valuable lessons you can learn and apply from working on each one. The systems design and scaling challenges can also be quite different.

Your versatility as an engineer who can recognize a wider variety of problems and define different solutions also improves.

There a lot of B2B-like problems lurking inside of big consumer tech companies. And a lot of things that can go faster and provide massive technical improvements if you deploy B2C thinking and tech inside a B2B company.

DevTools companies usually have to move to a model where they're starting to pull in Enterprise accounts with licensing priced in the $40K-$100K/year range.

The $30/month subscription is just to entice in startups. If the startups grow into larger companies, the strategy is to upgrade their pricing. Inevitability, this creates a weird situation where one day a company goes from paying a few hundred dollars per year to several thousands of dollars per year for the software they're already using and rely upon.

That's about the time that someone internally will say "we can just build this ourselves." That's where it can be exceedingly hard for devtools companies to convert if their initial target market was mostly startups. They have to up their sales game and tackle big companies with Enterprise features. That can be a real struggle and many never quite figure that out.

I think this misses the mark on the fact that we now have an aging population in the USA, and an aging population has different needs when it comes to raising families that the urban lifestyle simply hasn't evolved fast enough to support. Urban areas in the USA like NYC are still the playground of the young and unattached. I think European and Asian cities have done a much better job at this.

With two kids aged 10 and 12, I need access to a sports park for practices and games. I need space to park a car and roads wide enough to support them because I have a lot of things to haul. I need good public schools that don't break the bank to provide my kids the support and community they need.

Everything smooth and convenient about living as a single person in an urban area quickly turns into living life on Hard Mode for families. As our working adult population ages, cities need to evolve to meet these needs, or expect people to move out as they outgrow the lifestyle.

I'm sure there are folks who live in places like SF with families and ride around in heavy urban traffic with 2 kids on an electric cargo bike, but that's just not for many of us. We're happier and way more stress free in the suburbs or even in the rural areas working remotely.

It's unclear if hydrogen had serious R&D problems, or just the go to market approach for hydrogen cars was flawed.

Hydrogen needed a Tesla-like company to strip away everything that made a car a car, and rip away all the legacy at once.

Getting away from ICE requires starting from the ground up, and avoiding picking up too much legacy auto baggage along the way. This is exceedingly hard to do.

Toyota branding their vehicles as hydrogen with the Toyota logo and trying to go it alone was sort of doomed to failure. They had no opportunity to build a buggy v0 of these vehicles with something novel and exciting to entire new customers because they had to convert the average Toyota consumer. They had to utilize the existing dealer network (and get them to buy in), and simultaneously work with governments to build up the infrastructure and work through government approvals.

I see a few of these Mirai's hanging around in California but nothing compared to the number of Model S, Model Y, and Model 3 that I see at every 4 way stop.

Probably butter isn't as common where you're from, but ghee is. Ghee really made butter more viable by increasing it's shelf life, and was a bit of a technological achievement of food science.

It's unfortunate, but walkouts and other employee activism around social justice can achieve the opposite effect. The marginalized leave because they don't feel heard, and potential new hires who might represent change stop applying or responding to recruiting attempts because of the company's tarnished reputation.

Over time this leads to increased marginalization and concentration of the vary behavior that provoked the activist response in the first place.

The only thing that actually works is board level action and commitment to following through on the change. Boards can hold execs accountable.

React will fail under a few possible conditions:

* Browser tech evolves to not need it (WebASM and similar tech becomes mainstream)

* Browsers and the open web fail in favor of some other cross-platform standard emerging

* Browsers and the open web fail because an existing platform (like MacOS/iOS) reach 70% or greater marketshare with lower costs of development than the web.

Right now, none of these seems feasible, so I believe React will endure. I can't see any of the other JS frameworks having a strong and compelling reason to take it down. The only risks are more of a fundamental change.

I've had both monthly and quarterly vesting at both startups and big companies. No rhyme or reason for why either one since the companies were in different sectors/segments. Probably just an accounting quirk.

10 bucks says you could meet some of these folks on the street and you'd think they were European.

Just so you know, Middle Eastern folks from Lebanon and Egypt fall under the race of "White" in the US census. Source: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...

I think it's better to segment in terms of percentiles.

Biles, Musk, and Phelps are in the top 1% of their professions. They stand out a lot.

The folks in the top 10% are often way more comparable and differences between them are negligible. It takes something special/extra to stand out in this crowd, and for many of them, it's not about working any harder to make it to the top 1%.

It takes a lot of luck/opportunity, and extraordinary natural talent to become part of this 1% group. Which is why their success is not easy to replicate. And it can come from anywhere. None of these people had parents or families in the top 10% of the same profession.

There's nothing stopping you from buying it with financing, and then immediately paying it off before you incur too many interest charges. My parents do that with every car purchase. It makes the deal making process and all negotiations way smoother, while ensuring they don't incur any unwanted debt.

It really depends on the financing rate. At below 3.0%, it doesn't make sense to put too much cash into a depreciating asset like a car when your money could be put toward other investments that can probably net more than 4% return.

I still feel better paying off a car in 3 years rather than 5, so I usually suggest making a few extra payments to make that happen.

You will get a better deal with more incentives with dealer purchased cars if you finance. They may give you more for a trade and negotiate more on the final price. Perhaps even give you a few extra options for free.

Hit up former coworkers in tech who have hit it big financially and are looking for a place to park their money other than the stock market or crypto.

A few conversations should help you get a friends and family round going with 5-10 people, each writing small checks.

I've written one angel check and this is how I went about doing it. I'll write checks for people I've worked with who are striking it out on their own.

Not sure how anyone is surprised by this.

It's been proven that Russian influence peddling is well funded and active, even if its effect is hotly debated since Republicans pretend its negligible, while Democrats act like it's the only reason Trump won 2016.

It was just a matter of time before other foreign actors saw what's possible and decided it's a better use of their funds to influence American politics rather than expensive arms races or insurgencies.

Why spend a few billion on nuclear programs and arming militias when you can instead spend a few million on troll farms and push your agenda forward more effectively?

I have the same toothbrush that my dentist recommended.

I just use it as an electric toothbrush. I briefly looked up some details on the app, realized it made zero sense to install it, and now I just use it as a toothbrush.

I'm sure my dentist made a commission on that toothbrush I puchased through her, and billed my insurance for it, as well as gets some kind of kickback from Phillips to hawk their products. I guess she needs to pay for her dental school tuition loans somehow. Either way, I haven't gone back to her since.

He stated 5% without accounting for the 100% price appreciation in the actual real estate. So the real rate of return is actually much better!

There's no standard for this yet. We're probably a few years away of remote working becoming more common before that changes.

Compensation at big tech companies is determined by benchmarking compensation across several companies in several geographies to determine what pay scale the company should pay at. The benchmarking usually happens a few times a year. Radford is the gold standard source of data that large companies pay for access to.

This fidelity of this data relies on submissions. So its fairly easy for them to benchmark within a location where a lot of companies submit their data and build effective compensation bands.

The issue with going outside of the Bay Area for comp benchmarking, is that the data fidelity from the usual sources goes down dramatically, so HR and compensation teams usually apply a general heuristic like 50% of Bay Area or 80% of Bay Area just to make the math simple.

Startups can be all over the map on this. The good ones have access to Radford (or a filtered version of it) through their investors and they use it to benchmark. But their data fidelity will also take a hit if a different location is used, and they often benchmark less often than they should, or against the wrong companies based on their size.