Thanks for your detailed explanation. It’s so horrible. I wonder how long it will take for the US system to realize what a big mistake mistreating highly trained stem workers is.
Best of luck.
55 karma · joined August 19, 2014
Best of luck.
Would you mind giving more details about what happened exactly? Why did you have to go back? What was the reason why they didn't renew your visa (I'm assuming it's a renewal problem since you mentioned 3 years)? And is there something that is being done by your company or yourself to get your US life back, or you just "gave up"?
I mean why the hell would a person with a 250k+ offer be kicked out, assuming you didn't commit any crime? Isn't the offer itself a proof that you're desperately wanted here and it should invalidate any RFE?
After a couple months, the gratuitous (or what felt like gratuitous to me at least) verbosity of the language and all sort of abstractions and intricate relationship of classes/interfaces in libraries (the typical Java programmer mindset) drove me insane. Icing on the cake was the atrocity of frameworks (had to work with a legacy Spring codebase) and the need for using an extremely complicated IDE with a billion options and knobs in order to write any sort of code.
I was incredibly happy when I finished and deeply regretted taking on that work. I didn't think it would have been that bad.
I think if Java was my only option, I'd probably switch to a different non-programming career.
To put things in perspective, I am a C (kernel development)/C++ (system programming)/Go (backend development) programmer usually, working with tmux+vim and respective plugins for lightweight code completion and navigation.
I heard good things about Authy but I've been a bit cautious to add yet another service (which sounds ironic considering the 430 accounts I originally mentioned) just for what it seems like a simple TOTP client, and I don't need any other fancy feature such as cross-device sharing because of the above mentioned recovery procedure always being available in extreme cases.
Plus I was under the assumption that Authenticator data was backed up via iOS backups or iOS keyring, but I admit I've never tried it so I'm just speculating.
Yes, with Lastpass you can export all your data to a csv that is generated at runtime using your master password. Although, to be honest, why would I need that? Assuming every important service in that list has some sort of MFA via Google authenticator/gmail/google voice number and a recovery option via the gmail address, what would a backup be useful for?
Essentially, the only passwords I really need to memorize in my head are the lastpass and google ones.
The biggest point of failure to me seems some bank account that I tried to recover in incognito mode which apparently just asks social security number plus some other idiotic information instead of relying on sending a recovery email. And there doesn't seem to be any way to change that, beside changing bank that is.
That is a possibility, I might be naive but I consider it on the very unlikely side. What I would imagine in that case is that I would reset the important other accounts such as the bank ones by showing up in some physical office with my passport, or something similar, while waiting to solve the situation with Google.
What alternatives would you suggest? Spreading the accounts over different email addresses? Letting aside the privacy issue, to be honest I don't think there is another mail provider that I'd trust better than Google from a security point of view.
- Absolutely 1X liquidation preference
- strike price between 0.1X and 0,3X the preferred
- No accelerated vesting :)
- Significant retention plans are given upon liquidation to the the productive engineering team members, regardless of how many options they owned (I personally know folks who made little fortunes even if their options were completely worthless on liquidation day)
That being said I agree with your salary discount thing. I worked in other startups and I had been victim of that, and I'd never take a significant haircut again for some Monopoly money, all it takes is some education.
That is a fair point. Although, can you compare this situation to other businesses where the treatments towards the workers are more fair? For example, I invest in real estate partnerships (syndications) where the sponsor does all the work (i.e. puts in time) and investors provide the capital to the sponsor to buy the deal and execute. in 100% of the cases, upon liquidation investors receive all their money back plus a preferred return (usually enough to make a 5-10% IRR). After that, if anything is left, the profits are split between sponsors and investors depending on the agreement. The sponsors also get a monthly fee (usually a % of the gross monthly revenues) to justify their time investment. In this case, the situation is quite similar to a startup, where employees get a monthly salary and have the option to participate in the upside, if they execute well. These kind of arrangements are quite customary in all industries where private equity is a way to bring capital.
> Advantage relative to what?
I interpreted your original statement as if you were implying that the strike price of the common options is typically equal to the current price of the preferred shares (quote: "the company may justify the strike price based on the valuation of the company at the last funding round"), and I was pointing out that's not the case, so the pricing has a slight advantage with respect to the price of the preferred shares, so if the company were to be sold today at the exact last round valuation (e.g. X), the employees would still net X - Y per every option they have (where Y is the strike price), as opposed to 0, even if those options were granted while the company had the same exact valuation. Maybe I just misinterpreted.
Of course it would definitely be better if startups granted shares rather than options, but I am not aware of any company at early-medium stages doing that.
First: Is it correct to assume that in normal conditions you should run away from any company with shady liquidation preferences?
I've been in a few "high quality" startups, and in most cases if the company was liquidated for a price larger or equal than the last valuation, essentially the preferred shares would convert to common, since the preferred status didn't give any advantage to them from that point on.
If the company sells for less than the last valuation then yes, common holders will be progressively wiped out since investors (preferred shareholders) need to recoup the money they invested, but at that point you really just placed a bet on the wrong startup, nobody has been "screwed".
Second: on strike price, from what I've personally seen one "advantage" of common options is that the strike price is usually a fraction of the actual preferred share price (let's say from 1/10th up to 1/3rd) so, even if the company valuation doesn't increase much, the employee can still gain some benefits (and this is assuming that my first consideration holds, since if there are aggressive liquidation preferences you're going to be screwed, and that there won't be too many dilutions down the road).
Mind to share your opinion? You seem very knowleadgeable
No house, all liquid.
- I joined as a senior software engineer among the first 3 employees (seed round) and got 1.8%. Junior engineers got ~0.5%
- At series A (30 employees), senior engineers got ~0.5% and junior ~0.1%
- At series B (70 employees), senior engineers got ~0.2% and junior ~0.05%
- At series C (100 employees), senior got ~0.1% and junior ~0.01%
I would never, ever, do it again unless I was a cofounder, in which case the stake would make it more worthwhile. I would have looked at Google to begin with.
But now that I got "lucky" (and I put it in quote because it's all on paper, all it takes is a little bump in the road and my equity gets washed away by unfavorable dilution terms, especially if I leave), I am in this conundrum of leaving vs staying.
I didn't specialize in school, I like to have a very broad set of CS skills, I found it immensely useful being able to know a bit of everything.
At the same time, in the startup I've been able to specialize in particular aspects of modern cloud infrastructures, and that's what got me in the door with these funds.
In your shoes, I don't know what I would choose, I don't know what to expect from the financial world. Money surely sounds nice.
As a further data point: if the interviews at Google/FB/... were not so crazy, and if I were given some sort of choice on the area to work on at those companies, I would have definitely tried the interview with them as well, but what I liked about these hedge funds is that I was interviewing for a specific role and so the interview process was pretty much focused around that, without anyone asking me to code an rb tree on a whiteboard.
From the interviews it seems like these companies are actually looking for people with distributed systems experience (think of SV's devops + architect skills), and willing to pay well for it (I've heard of several people leaving Google/FB/Netflix/... to join these groups).
I find useful in these cases to compare monthly_income / monthly_rent to get a relative index that is more comparable across countries.