Just two months ago I declined an offer from a known and well funded startup because of a one year cliff on equity.
The recruiter didn't seem to be able to discuss this matter and I asked them to make sure to bubble this sort of thing up their food chain. I never heard back afterwards.
As an "old timer" in the industry a one year cliff makes absolutely no sense to me. Its like working for credit, which seems very backwards.
I am so fascinated at how my grandfather would spend decades at a company, my Dad would spend a decade, and now people decline jobs over the expectation that they stay 1 year. And I was in my first job 51 weeks.
I don't think you are wrong in doing so as the market in tech moves fast while employers move like slugs, it is just such a shift from what I grew up to expect.
The problem isn't necessarily that the employee expects to want to leave in under a year, so much as they don't want the company to have an incentive to let them go in under a year.
Do companies really fire people at week 51 to save some stock?
Hiring is tough and you waste a lot of time onboarding people and getting them to a productive state, firing them just to save some stock after 50 weeks seems a bad idea, not to mention the morale implications.
It absolutely happens. I worked as an early employee at a company for its first 11 months … the founder was the main investor and a serial entrepreneur. He clashed with the CTO from the start and progress stalled … after a major disagreement, he decided he would rather sell the company to a competitor than continue to deal with the CTO. At the 11 month mark we were all told that we were fired, the company was shutting down, and and if we wanted severance, we’d have to sign away our rights to any claims from the sale.
Companies do let people go to avoid granting stock. Banks also do it to stiff employees on their bonus. For startups it’s a forcing function to decide if they want to keep someone. (I’m not saying this is right, just explaining why it happens)
That's fascinating reasoning. It makes sense, but that's the same sort of logic where employers will give hourly employees 39.5 hours a week because if you give them 40 they become "full time". Has that kind of short sighted thinking really invaded the software engineering industry? That's scary.
Why would avoiding paying employees benefits be short-sighted thinking? If anything it was short sighted of the US government to ban increased wages during WWII - leading to employers paying benefits which gums up the labor market.
It's short-sighted because employees are humans, which perform much better when healthy and excited to work. Stingy/hostile employers have high turnover and employees who treat work as a zero or negative sum game.
Toyota took one of GM's worst plants and turned it into one of its best by treating workers with respect. Hearing the workers talk about the transformation stunned me.
Employers are also human, and prone to the fallible traps of responsibility that befall many people managers and executives, including but not limited too:
* not trusting your team to do their work and by extension questioning whether they are working "hard enough" (or dreaming of ways to extract more blood from stones)
* some flavor of impostor syndrome, needing to prove your value by making sweeping changes to the team process even if inheriting a successful team
* not having either the back bone or clout to question status quo, including demoralizing cultural habits such as stack ranking
There is a reason the majority of employers (including managers) are generally bad and the good ones are few and far between - it's human nature.
I'm reminded of Microsoft Japan piloting a 4 day work week and announcing in 2019 that the trial ended up increasing productivity by 40%. They ended up not making the change permanent. One small company in New Zealand - Perpetual Guardian - did the same trial in 2018 and saw the same effect, they made it permanent.
Yes, because basically every retail chain a) can dump a lot of externalities on society at large, b) is or wants to be publicly traded and evaluated on very short-term metrics, and c) is run by believers in the managerialist ideology that dominates American business culture.
Something I don't see mentioned in the sibling comments is that this can also put the employee in a bad position when they don't like their job but are in the mid to late stages if their first year. You either tough it out the remaining _X_ months or quit and take a huge hit in income because you're leaving before the equity cliff.
I wrote "... when they *don't like their job* but are in the *mid to late stages* ..." so in this case, it'd be 3 to 6 months which isn't a long time to hold a job in general, but it is a long time when you hate your job.
Now they'd have an incentive to let them go in under a quarter, by that logic.
Not sure if that's really their concern here. Companies don't just ditch reasonably well performing employees because they want to avoid compensating them. That would already mean that each time RSUs vest the company would have an incentive to fire.
Sure, and they do. It’s best to avoid that incentive by having stock grants vest frequently and fractionally. It’s essentially treated as salary, it might as well be paid out fractionally at the same frequency as salary so that no perverse incentives exist.
Things are very different in a field with long product cycles. If it takes 5 years to get a product into the field then the company has a huge incentive to retain employees.
Sure, but if you're depending on the cliff for retention you're working against your own interests: Employees will leave the 53rd week, just after you've spent all that effort training them within your environment.
Long term retention hinges on long term adequate compensation and long term quality environments. There's no need for cliffs.
Sure, there is no need for a cliff, but if you are attracting the right talent with adequate compensation (that keeps up with market changes!) the cliff does not matter.
How can you attract the right talent when competing with companies, like Google, Amazon (with their cash bonus payment model to compensate their weird back weighted RSUs) or Netflix being able to hand out offers without any of these risks?
An engineer with family is unlikely to take such a risk and rather join Google or even Amazon where compensation is guaranteed.
I was in a meeting the other day where one of the attendees had been working at the company for 20 years and another for 15. By my guess, I reckon people work here for about 7 years on average before moving on.
In my experience, people tend to be either lifers and stay for 10+ years, or bounce between jobs every year or two. Lifers tend to accumulate in companies that cater towards them (good work/life balance and job security) due to low employee turnover, so if you're in the other group, it appears that everyone in the industry only works for a year.
I believe this is right. Also, bad companies with high attrition like eg. Amazon hire alot more (hires/FTE/year). So you have a higher chance ending up at such places then their share of all companies.
I mean, average tenure is probably the best indication of how good a employeer is (unless there are few companies at a location). I was pretty suprised to hear it was 2 years at Google.
There's shift of context too. In our grandparents' generation, companies also promised to keep the workers around and sometimes to give them pension. There would be a steady career path based on seniority as well. Something along the lines of that you take of the company and we will take care of you. None of such promises exists nowadays.
I thought the OP meant that since most of the time startups want you to sell you on taking less in salary in lieu of options it makes sense to start vesting those options immediately. I didn't take it to mean that they didn't intend to stay for at least a year. Looking at it that way I think it does make sense. The lower salary take place immediately.
"I declined an offer from a known and well funded startup because of a one year cliff on equity"
You might as well not bother interviewing at any startups if this is a deal-breaker for you. Whether you think it's fair or not this is an extremely standard term and no company is going to alter their employee stock grants on a one-off basis.
The one year cliff is not that problematic to me since I would expect I am getting paid market, and the options are like a hiring bonus (which you often must return if you quit within a year). What am I missing? Is people really worried that a startup whose stock has risen will fire a productive employee?
That said, I have seen 5 year vesting (which seemed like a red flag to me), and have heard of Amazon's schedule where you mainly vest in later years. These were bigger red flags for me than a 1 year cliff.
Depends on the company. I joined Twitter in 2016. The stock, which was circa 1/3rd of my total comp, had a one year cliff. 7 months in, one executive got the upper hand in a power struggle, pushing out my boss and laying off the people he hired, me included. I don't think they did it because of the stock. But I'm sure it didn't hurt. I'm still mad about it.
Disclaimer: Ex-Amazonian, so discount as you see fit based on whatever brainwashing you might assume I’ve been subjected to ;)
The rear weighted AMZN approach made sense to me in terms of both optimising retention and some proxy for reward to contribution. I say this also as someone who left after 2 years and as a result left most of their stock unvested. It definitely made the choice to leave much harder so I’d expect it to skew more heavily toward retention benefits than a typical schedule. A typical schedule has a linear growth of what you’ve vested. I’d expect the value of contribution of a person to grow over time though. More context, more experience, more everything. Hopefully that means the you 3 years from now is making a more significant contribution than the you they hired. Typical schedules hope that the increase in valuation accounts for that compounding return. AMZN have shifted it to the vesting schedule.
That said they always talk about “total compensation”. So for the stock you’re not getting in the first two years you typically get as cash via a “hiring bonus” anyway. You could always just use that cash to go buy the equivalent amount in stock, no vesting required.
I was exposed to this while talking to an Amazon recruiter recently, while I also hear stories about how they seem to work people to a breaking point.
The median tenure at AMZN is also 1.5yrs, per linkedin. Their strategy seems to be to work their people extremely hard to earn their RSUs and pay them like plebs with hard caps on earning potential (base comp).
As the other reply said, vesting was 5% first year, 15% second year, then 20% per six months.
As for why: a rebalancing of priorities re work/life/travel balance and a better sense of connectedness to my actual work and the success of the company. Not gonna lie though, I look back at what I left on the table and the AMZN share price over the past 2 years and I still wonder if it was the right choice.
I feel like amazon-style vesting helps remove some perverse incentives.
It makes "stay 53 weeks and cash out" less appealing, it makes "stay 6 more months to hit the next cliff" less appealing, and it rewards long-haulers (who are underpaid almost everywhere else in tech).
Yes, that was my hope also. As it becomes more common to not have a cliff.
It was just strange that the recruiter couldnt discuss this further or at least give an offer with a nice cash compensation that would be paid out monthly (sort of like how Amazon does it) to compensate for cliff.
Really? I'm surprised. My employer just removed cliffs for new offers, it does seem to becoming more popular. But my assumption is the cliff is something I couldn't easily negotiate as an individual.
It’s happened multiple times for me, all with extremely well known VC backed companies. Once at later stage, but applying for a very senior role, and another at an early stage, where there was a good fit.
It can be a tough sell, and recruiters are trained to just say no, but persistence pays off. Same thing applies to getting jobs in general. If you aren’t persistent in your application process and aggressive in your negotiation process, you simply won’t have the best outcomes. It just becomes easy to turn you down.
They will if they want you enough. Even Google can be talked out of the 1-year cliff. Doordash doing this means other employers will have to in order to compete if an employee has a competing offer from Doordash.
No, most big companies don't have cliffs anymore (Google, Facebook, etc...). They pay out monthly or quaterly. At least if you already worked for a while elsewhere (because they have to buy you out basically).
Why would you otherwise take the risk?
I'm curious about Microsoft- anyone know if Microsoft has a cliff on RSUs?
My non-new-grad employment with Microsoft had a 1yr vesting cliff. As others have previously mentioned, as long as it’s an established company I see no issue with this since you get a solid signing bonus if continued cash flow is the concern.
It is the case, but it seems like it only persists because it is traditional. I'm not aware of any basis by which the employees should be willing to accept deferred comp for the first year. It sets up all kinds of bad incentives.
I'm right here with you — along with having standard very long exercise windows… 10 years or whatnot.
I've both chosen to exercise and not exercise on a short 30-day window but balancing FOMO vs future regret is hard with the volatility of a typical startup.
I totally agree with the above, and have commented on it many times before, but note the 90 day standard is because that is the maximum amount of time allowed for ISOs by the IRS. To allow for conversion after that time (e.g. 5-10 years seems to be what a lot of people are pushing for), the ISOs convert into non-qualified options. Still worth it in my opinion. Even better would be for the IRS to change the law (not sure if it's a law or a reg), because with companies staying private so much longer it's a different world.
Only worth it if you aren’t early. ISOs provide preferential tax treatment, and early on are usually very very cheap, so many companies (mine included) also offer early exercise with ISOs, which is an unbeatable tax win (afaik).
The issue occurs when options get expensive (aka the company is doing well) and then you have to do the math between ISOs or NSOs. The longer expiration may be better, but certainly not for every employee.
That said, as companies get bigger they stop being able to offer as many ISOs (there is a max cap), so at that point they should extend the timeline for expiration.
One thing companies do have to worry about though: a 10-year expiration means your cap table is in flux for 10 years, potentially, which makes calculations, acquisitions, etc, tougher.
Wouldn't that only be an issue if a company offers NSOs instead of ISOs? What I've seen in the past is "here's some ISOs, they automatically convert to NSOs 90 days after you leave." That way you get all the benefits of an ISO (tax on sale) while you work there, then all the benefits of an NSO (doesn't disappear in a puff of smoke at day 90). Seems like strictly a win, regardless of company phase.
> a 10-year expiration means your cap table is in flux for 10 years, potentially, which makes calculations, acquisitions, etc, tougher
I don't agree at all. The primary effect of a longer exercise window is in not returning expired options hastily to the pool. Otherwise what's the difference if the employee continues to be an employee and doesn't yet-- ceteris paribus--need to exercise or forfeit.
Why do you suggest unexercised options of any stripe muddy the waters? If the option is worth anything at all it will be exercised at a liquidity event.
Several startups have already amended their plans to allow expanded post-termination exercise windows. The impression I get, although I'm not a tax/legal/financial professional, is that the options remain ISOs all the way through the first 90 days of the exercise window and only then convert to non-qualified options.
This seems to be a very unpopular comment. But why--is the common case of losing (err, "returning to the employee option pool") unvested options at separation controversial, or have I done something offensive by pointing it out, or do y'all actually not agree with the accuracy of this?
Probably because it was a non-sequitur to my comment. My point was that without a cliff, even employees who you terminated after three months will vest options that they can exercise for shares on your cap table. It’s irrelevant that they also have unvested options at that point. It’s the vested options that lead to the managerial overhead of a polluted cap table.
My employer (not yet reflected in my profile and I'm not speaking for them here) made this change last year for every employee with at least 2 years tenure. For such employees, the post-termination exercise window equals the years of service up to a maximum of 4 years. I've heard similar things at a handful of other well-known tech startups.
Naive question here. Given that there's a long-term cap gains consideration, if the company has a strong likelihood (call it greater than 50% chance) of IPO isn't it better to exercise ASAP so the shares are kept more than 12 months in time for the IPO+lockup event?
What's the real advantage of waiting to exercise, to make sure that the stock will be worth something versus wasting your call option costs? How high are these strike prices that people are holding out?
Again, I've some, but limited (but very different) experience here with equity grants and options.
Let's say you accept a lower salary from a startup, because they offer you 100,000 options with a standard 4-year vest/1-year cliff/90 days to exercise at a strike price (409a valuation) of $1 / share, and claim that an exit at $10 / share looks likely if growth stays on track.
You stay for three years. The exit hasn't come yet because the VCs want to see a higher valuation, but the company has grown and the 409(a) valuation is now $5 / share. You've now vested 60,000 options that would cost you $60,000 to exercise, plus you will have an AMT adjustment of $240,000 because of the difference between the strike price and the current 409(a) valuation. So, exercising those options will cost you $120,000 (ballpark, IANA accountant) in exercise cost and taxes.
Keep in mind you've accepted a lower salary for the past three years because of this stock, so you might not have that kind of cash lying around. And even if you do - are you willing to throw $120,000 into a bet that the company will one day have an exit? Keep in mind that the company may have debt, preferred stock, liquidation preferences, etc. and most companies won't share all their past financing terms with ordinary employees, so it may be hard to estimate what a realistic exit even looks like for your stock. And if you're leaving, maybe you're a little disillusioned with how things are going in the first place? You have 90 days to make this decision after leaving the company and then you lose the stock forever.
For many people, the answer at this point is that they don't want to take the bet - and they get screwed out of a large part of what was supposed to be their compensation.
It's a shitty and exploitative system. I worked at a startup where this exact thing happened to many people who contributed immense value to the company. We had a bumpy year, some management turmoil, etc. and many people left before the IPO and got nothing out of their years of hard work other than a shitty, uncompetitive salary. I will never work for another startup under these terms.
If the lockup is 180 days, you can wait for a pretty long time before exercising. It's usually halfway apparent when a startup beings IPO readiness.
What gets you with waiting, if you have ISOs, is how much AMT hits you. If you're at a >50% IPO company, it's somewhat common to exercise as many options as you can before the AMT hits you.
It's also worth remembering that your 50% startup could be Wework. It's worth $9B, but was valued at almost $47B.
the question is often do you have the means to acquire that pre ipo stock. except if you join very early, it's too expensive to buy your stock with the level of risk associated.
as an example, I joined an early stage startup as an exec (potential good deal!), but I would've had to shore 300k to exercise my stocks, pay taxes on it (minimal, that's the huge advantage here), and more than probably see it fail.
now let's play the opposite scenario: you join as an engineer late stage, each ISO might be valued at 10 dollars each. how do you exercise.
this game is skewed towards founders.
in my example, I had to quit for personal reasons and the company was later acquired. however I wan't able to afford, so I got got of $100ks at the time of acquisition.
removing these 90 days time would have let me gain what I was owed.
no hard feelings, because I knew the game, but it was the moment I decided no more startups that have this 90 days BS.
In this case they would be leaving with a smaller fraction of their stock grant and would allow the company to hire someone who would want the job sooner. Seems like a win-win.
> Because we see equity as part of total compensation, we believe employees should receive equity as it’s earned — every quarter.
This reads to me like someone looked at the data and discovered that almost everybody who stays employed for a quarter goes on to stay for a year. So they decided to try to juice some marketing value out of a policy change that makes no functional difference to anyone.
Why else would they choose to have equity vest quarterly instead of with each pay period? Or monthly, which is already typical after the cliff? If you believe equity is part of total compensation why does it need a different schedule at all?
> Why else would they choose to have equity vest quarterly instead of with each pay period?
This makes sense for reduced paperwork if the company is buying back 28% of the shares to pay taxes instead of selling it to the market to pay the taxes - the company can reduce the open market sale on vesting days, but keep it as a single event within the quarter (advance tax payment per quarter).
With Google doing front loading(33/33/22/11) and other companies also shifting away from conventional 25% per year vesting to make first few years more attractive, they gotta catch up to stay competitive. Uber recently did the same of removing cliff.
The Google front loading is because you'll get annual refresher grants after the first year (and no "big refresh" after four years), and it makes the total comp more even overall as a result.
I'm not convinced. A salary drop from a cliff isn't great, but cliffs are overall good for employees. A front loaded offer arrives at that even comp by baking future stock growth into the offer. A normal four year equity grant arrives at even comp with no movement on equity. I'd much rather have a normal grant and get a cliff if the company does really well.
I think you're misunderstanding something. The Google offer hasn't changed at all[1], in terms of overall dollars provided. The distribution of the same dollars has changed.
I'll illustrate with a relatively concrete example. A recent graduate joins Google on December 31[1] of this year, and gets a 100K initial grant ('22-'25). They then follow an above-average performance trajectory over the next few years, getting refresh grants of 40K ('23-'26), 60K ('24-'27), 80K ('25-'28) and 100K ('26-39').
So in 2022, they'll vest 25K. In 2023, they'll vest 25+10=35K, in 2024 they'll vest 25 + 10 + 15 = 50K. In 2025 they'll vest 25+10+15+20=70K. In 2026 they'll vest...also 70K. And that's assuming a feasible but above-average performance trajectory[2]. If performance is lower, even modeled stock compensation will actually take a dip in year 5.
If you instead take the same total numbers, but frontload the initial vest, you get something like
33, 43, 47, 57, 70 vs the original 25, 35, 50, 70, 70. Its 250K in stock over 5 years either way, but in the second case you don't ever feel like your compensation has flatlined.
[1]: Ok this isn't precisely true, it's gone down, but it went down a few years ago when Google removed the cliff, not when they changed the vesting schedule. For this example, I'll use the trick of assuming they join in December 31, because this ignores the decrease in comp that came as a result of not getting first-year equity refreshes.
[2]: Also note that take-home pay will be lower in 2026 than in 2025, because the 2025 shares are plurality from 2021's vest, with 4 years of growth, while the 2026 shares are plurality from 2026's vest, so less growth.
I'm not saying Google makes horrible offers, but I'm not sure how their recruiters marketing matches up with their internal calculations of target comp. I have read complaints on blind that Google is using it to show higher first year offers or to compete with other offers.
100k with frontloaded vesting at (33/33/22/11) is much better than 100k vesting at 25% a year. But 100k frontloaded wouldn't equal 132k vesting at 25%, only the first year would be equal.
So that answer would not be sufficient if I had a competing grant at 132k, and was worried a second year comp drop. It may be true that Google gives really good refreshers and my above average performance will increase my comp. But I think of that like depending on a percent bonus, it's less reliable than base and my initial equity grant. And if I start using refreshers, raises, and stock growth with Google, I should also use it when looking at competing offers.
> you don't ever feel like your compensation has flatlined.
Emotionally that may feel bad, but I think it's caused by employees getting lucky. I don't think it's a problem that needs to be solved.
1) It's objectively bad if I have a cliff because my employer hasn't increased my comp as my market value increases. I should probably look for a new job.
2) It's objectively good if my cliff is because the value of my initial grant exploded. The drop will be bad. But if it's such a noticeable difference I'm probably sitting on hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in profit from my initial grant.
> I'm not saying Google makes horrible offers, but I'm not sure how their recruiters marketing matches up with their internal calculations of target comp. I have read complaints on blind that Google is using it to show higher first year offers or to compete with other offers.
I can certainly believe this, lots of companies play games to make first-year comp look higher, I certainly don't put it past my employer.
What I'm describing however, isn't anything to do with external hiring, its a common complaint made by existing google employees about how they feel comp drops in year 5. I agree with you that its not totally rational, but people aren't totally rational, and it wouldn't at all surprise me if doing something like this improved retention past the 4 year mark (but it also wouldn't surprise me if the better year 1 comp makes Google appear more competitive with Facebook. Two birds or something).
And yes, you should absolutely compare stock refreshes (if you can get data) when comparing offers! FWIW, I have no clue if Google's are particularly good or not.
I think it's common in the industry to see RSU grants shown as say, "$50k" - but that's $50k in stock as of the grant time. Once the grant is finalized, the value of the RSU grant grows with the stock. ie, if the stock is $100, then it's the same as 500 share grant.
This Blind post is saying that Instacart/Stripe says you only get $50k no matter the price of stock? How would you even structure that kind of grant? Why not just make it a bonus?
I work at a smaller company, and here we convert the $ price to a number of shares by taking the 100 day VWAP of the stock from the date of the board meeting where your grant is approved.
Either we work at the same place or that’s very common.
When I joined I got a random email that said “your rsu $ to shares conversion was X shares and here’s your schedule” and my schedule is all in # of shares not $
This is very common. It's basically the point of paying in RSUs and not in fixed dollars, to give employees incentive to care about the company/stock performance.
Yes, but then they take that calculation to grant you a set number of shares (ISOs, RSUs, etc.) that doesn't change. The value of your award grows with the growth of the company.
ESPP-like programs, on the other hand, are always dollar denominated and exchanged at a set rate at the end of the offering period.
all of my friends at google say the grant is in dollars and stays in dollars at google. at the end of the quarter you get a variable number of shares based on current stock price. While this reduces upside, it also reduces downside.
Wasn't true when I was (re-)hired a year ago. Grant is in dollars, it's converted to shares based on the share price when you start, and then you that fixed number of shares divided by the number of vesting periods over the term of the grant. The vesting period depends on how big the grant is; low-level employees will likely vest quarterly, mid/high-level monthly. No cliff; they removed it a couple years ago.
I've been at Google fairly recently, that's not how it works.
Your offer states that you will get $X of shares, vesting over 4 years. The $X is converted to a number of shares shortly after joining, based on market price, and is locked in from that point forward.
This is correct. I believe the share-price they pick is something like the average daily share price for the next full month after you join. So if you join Jan 28, the $$ value of your stock grant will be evaluated around March 1 to determine your grant-price, and then you'll get your first vested shares monthly (around the 25th, I think?).
I believe they used to due quarterly vesting for folks who didn't get much equity, but now that you can have vesting of fractional shares, ~everybody should be on a monthly vesting schedule.
Googler here. dabfiend19 is correct, around ~2019 I believe new L3 hires were switched to this new grant schedule. Prior to that, it was based on a fixed number of shares.
Fwiw, I asked around and couldn't find a hire where this was the case. The schedules are different but the conversion to shares happens once just after your are hired.
This is a bit of a change from e.x. when I was hired and my offer letter said N shares, and so when I joined 6 months later my grant had increased in value significantly. But it's still not the situation in these other companies, where you vest 6.25% of the dollar value each quarter, converted to shares or whatever.
Actually that wouldn't really be compatible with googles vesting schedule, now that I think about it.
Your friends might be getting mixed up with annual refresher grants. Except for some rounding of fractional shares, your initial grant will vest the same # of shares every month for 48 months
Not surprised. I'm probably a fair bit older than the average HN reader (finished undergrad in 1995). This is the hottest job market I've seen since the height of the dotcom bubble (mid 1999 to early 2000), and if it continues along it's current trajectory it will pass that by year end.
Browsing /r/cscareerquestions it looks like entry level folks are having a hard time breaking into the industry. Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems.
Yes unfortunately almost all US and likely other computer science degrees are geared largely at making you a good researcher. I was lucky in that i loved playing with some home servers and with that led to figuring out how to build my own software before finishing school. I think college does a very bad job of preparing you for the real world use such as most having people turn in zip files and not even using git (maybe this has changed).
I wrote all the code for group projects because I didn’t want to leave my grade up to the apathetic do nothings types in the cs dept where I went to university.
I've seen these people get a job in testing and never leave... Or they move to a program management position.
On the flip side, self taught coders can do pretty much anything with bad form. Although even at my job I find myself doing things with bad form unless the task requires it to be written well.
I have never really had the opportunity to work with experienced developers for a long period of time (at least not experienced with the work I was doing) so for all I knew I am doing all sorts of things with bad form.
I would be satisfied with anything approaching a forum, with wide flexibility in specific features.
If you know enough about a web framework to get it going, use it to complete a specific set of tasks, and get it deployed with a database, it would put you ahead of a heck of a lot of grads that I know.
I wasn't suggesting this as an interview question, but more a self check for juniors. Can you actually bring something end to end? Yours works better in an interview setting, although it seems fairly trivial.
fn put_string(array: &mut Vec<String>, input: String) {
array.push(input)
}
fn find_string(array: &[String], input: &str) -> Option<usize> {
for i in 0..array.len() {
if &array[i] == input {
return Some(i);
}
}
None
// or perhaps more idiomatically:
// array.iter().position(|s| s.as_str() == input)
}
#[test]
fn test_find_string() {
let mut array = vec![];
put_string(&mut array, “foo”.to_string());
put_string(&mut array, “bar”.to_string());
assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “foo”), Some(0));
assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “bar”), Some(1));
assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “quux”), None);
}
If our array is sorted, the performance of the function should improve due to better branch prediction. But we’d be better of rewriting it as binary search in that case.
We’re not a big tech company, so comp isn’t quite what it is at Amazon, FB, etc. but, it’s solid. 100k+ salary, annual grant of restricted stock units, good health and other benefits etc.
Having said that, there’s a contradiction in claiming that college grads can’t find jobs while suggesting that a company offering six figures can’t find people because of comp.
> while suggesting that a company offering six figures can’t find people because of comp.
Never said that - but if you had answered $50k, I probably would have!
I'm surprised you are having trouble hiring people - but perhaps if you are in the Bay and hiring new grads, they might be surprised when it is in the low $100ks.
We do, but that’s not the point. Someone suggested that new comp sci grads are having a very hard time finding work.
I don’t believe that given how hot the market is right now. If anyone is having real trouble, then they are either being selective (won’t move to a big city, have high demands, etc), OR something is wrong. Maybe their resume is terrible, maybe they are bad at interviews, etc.
There are many companies where I don't get past the resume screen as a new grad, meanwhile the companies I do get interviews with will come back with an offer >$200k.
But I have to apply to 20-30 companies to get 1 interview, so there is clearly a problem at the resume-screening stage for new grads.
That’s because a recruiter or HR person screens resumes at most big companies. I always tell them to send me all the resumes so I can screen them myself.
Have to find a way to get past the HR screen until you have experience. Somethings that work: go to meetups. Often times the hiring manager or a tech team member is there and you can meet them directly. Apply at startups that don’t have a recruiting department yet. Email the tech team directly if you can figure out who they are.
Have you adjusted your pay for inflation? The rent prices have nearly doubled in ten years, so if you offer 100k today, it's like offering 60k in 2011.
Starting salaries were around 75-80k ten years ago. Again, there’s a contradiction in the claim that college grads in comp sci can’t find jobs, and the suggestion you are making.
Is it? Most folks seem to have like 6-7. Only 2 of mine were "real" from full time interviews, other two were from internships. I had a really low hit rate and didn't get into any top companies.
Stop comparing yourself to other people and focus on your self. I'm sure you can achieve what you desire.
I for example didn't graduate for hs and college, and yet, I managed to get to a place in life which my younger self would have classified as "wild ly successful."
However, everyone (including me) always wants more, and massively takes for granted their current situation. So I get it, but keep your head down and keep on climbing!
I know many new college grads who got offers from multiple tier-1 and tier-2 silicon valley software companies in the same range as what I got as a senior engineer with 8 years of experience a few years ago. I'm talking base salary $160K-$180K, $300K equity grant, 10% annual bonus, sign on bonus, relocation...the works.
Not to say that everyone can simply walk in to these jobs (and they shouldn't!), but if a graduating CS major cannot find any decent software job today I'd be more inclined to suspect their skills than the industry itself.
Bay area is expensive for sure but such salary comparisons are always exaggerated. Housing is the only thing that makes a significant difference to the annual budget for a ~22 year old, and even a $20K salary bump is more than enough to cover the difference in rent and other basic monthly expenses. It will almost always be worth it career-wise and financially to work in silicon valley for a few years, especially at the start of your career.
> Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems.
Because no one is going to hire a junior developer to work remote. The job market isn't especially hot, it's just temporarily distorted in a way that favors more experienced developers.
Not sure sure this "distortion" is temporary though. There's going to continue to be a shortage of more senior engineers for years to come because of their relative scarcity. Fact is... if you're senior/staff/principal now assuming you stay competitive you're in luck.
Eh, even as someone with 1.8 years experience (at least I still feel very junior) I get a steady flood of recruiters and can easily get a pile of interviews.
I think it’s that if you have zero experience, you are a huge unknown. Anything more and work abounds.
I think this is a problem across the industry. Companies don't want to give engineers adequate raises so they get trained as juniors and walk out and get 20-30k raises. So then everyone is only interested in seniors.
Senior has all but lost its meaning too... It describes how long you've been in the industry, not if you have the skills to be a technical leader, etc.
At larger corps when a senior leaves, you're often given budget to re-hire a senior, so there is no incentive to hire a junior/entry level. A lot of companies don't even have pathways from internships to entry-level positions. They just let them finish their internship and say "good luck"
This is a problem for diversity as well. Look at the makeup of the seniors in the industry. Now look at the junior/entry level folks coming out of master programs, colleges and boot camps.
> A lot of companies don't even have pathways from internships to entry-level positions. They just let them finish their internship and say "good luck"
This is so crazy to me. IME if you break even on an intern, not including pay, you’re very lucky. In other words if the code or whatever you get out of an intern equals in value the amount of time your regular staff invests in the intern. In most cases it’s negative and you have to pay them on top of that—-plus events and so on.
If you aren’t using internships as a recruiting tool I have no idea why you’d bother.
I don’t think it’s a question of raises, more like they’re just not willing to invest the time.
Most non giant companies don’t have good processes for on boarding engineers so it’s mostly yolo. They want engineers to be productive very quickly. Someone just out of college will likely not have the skills required to drive projects on their own to completion without help/supervision.
Bigger companies have pretty great onboarding tools and processes and dev tools that abstract most complex things away, allowing developers to become productive rapidly. I think of them as factories that can extract the most value out of new grads.
I say this as someone who was a junior not that long ago, but of course my experience is anecdotal so take it with a pinch of salt.
Yeah I always see this expressed as a criticism, like "oh these small companies just hate junior devs! Everyone wants to hire a senior dev, no one wants to hire a junior dev and train them!"
But it's not always that easy. If you're a small company still looking for product-market fit or doing a fair bit of greenfield development, there's just not much work for a junior dev to do. These companies aren't all stupid or lazy or discriminating against new grads for some reason.
It's the same reason estimates are hard - we're building brand new things that we've never built before and a lot of the work is in the design. Junior devs need to be told what to do. The architects/senior devs become a huge bottleneck because they can only design so much stuff at once, so until you can find more of them you can't hire more junior devs because there's not going to be anything for them to do. Until you get to a point where you're doing repeatable work or your design/architecture is solidified enough to keep people on the guard rails, there's just not a ton of work for a junior dev to do.
Finally, you also have the issue that a lot of devs don't want to get into any kind of management but they want to be managed by technical people. You end up with a shortage of decent managers (where "decent" means both someone who's ok at the job of management and is acceptable to the team).
If we had more work to give to junior devs we'd happily hire them - they are so much cheaper!
And one other contributing factor is a lack of unions. Say what you will about seniority-based comp/perks, they do make people stay in one job for longer, which makes it more worthwhile to invest in a junior dev.
I'm curious why you find engineering more rewarding than software. I studied engineering for a couple of years at university and dislike it a lot compared to software.
I suspect that is no more the case than it has always been. While the overall job market demand might be very high now, I doubt that the proportions of demand for entry-level and senior roles has changed significantly.
I live in EU and there are a few things that have changed:
- tons of remote offers, even with technologies like Java where in the past very few offers were remote
- salaries significantly up compared to 1-2y ago (getting 90-100k eur for a remote position in EU was rare, now it's not surprising to see such numbers)
- companies shorten interview processes, both in terms of numbers of rounds but also the time the whole process takes. In the past companies could reply to your application after a week, now I saw a few cases where a week after applying they send an offer
Are you seeing more offers from US companies? I've been assuming that SV-based engineers are sort of shooting themselves in the foot by demanding their companies go remote, because there are so many good engineers in the EU making a small fraction of what an SV engineer makes (even at 100k EUR).
I do (though this is anecdotal data, nothing I dug into).
I have some LinkedIn job searches saved for Amsterdam, NL and I started noticing jobs from companies like Twitter, Github or Stripe where now they allow working remotely from EU countries. It's different than it was 2y ago.
It effectively gave the company a discount on employees who stayed only 364 days - or to look at it another way, a 'trial period' of 1 year where the pay was substantially less.
Am I the only one that doesn't see that as unreasonable? It's not like you aren't accruing equity during that time; you still get the full year's worth of options at the 365 day mark. And the ramp-up time with new engineers can be so long that the first year isn't nearly as productive as consecutive ones.
A buddy of mine who worked at a giant company (not strictly tech but you'd recognize it) said he heard from his boss that the company effectively considers the first year of a software engineer's employment a wash as far as cost/benefit. I can't imagine they're the only ones. In that case, why would you reward people who jump ship before your break-even point?
I think the larger the company the longer it takes to ramp up, but at a small startup you can have a big impact in month one.
I've always found the one year cliff funny, since investors don't have a cliff.
I've been hoping startups would start doing this for a while, and think DD is really a pioneer here and think this will become a trend. I know personally I turned down a few opportunities at promising startups simply because I was young, in my twenties, and a year felt like a long time. I found the probability of a life changing event that would require me to move and leave a company too high, and didn't want to bust my butt for 10 months with a salary cut, then have to leave and get no equity. So I said "no" to a few opportunities that otherwise would have been great.
Currently incentives first your first year are to focus on not getting fired. Now it can be on making an impact.
> I know personally I turned down a few opportunities at promising startups simply because I was young, in my twenties, and a year felt like a long time. I found the probability of a life changing event that would require me to move and leave a company too high, and didn't want to bust my butt for 10 months with a salary cut, then have to leave and get no equity. So I said "no" to a few opportunities that otherwise would have been great.
I'm curious: Did you try to negotiate? I have had luck negotiating the terms of equity in the past, but I'm not sure if my experience generalizes.
> Currently incentives first your first year are to focus on not getting fired. Now it can be on making an impact.
If someone is so unmotivated at a job that they're not making an impact, I don't know if removing the cliff would help; they likely shouldn't have taken the job in the first place. If you join a new place and realize that it's a poor fit, it's usually best to cut your losses and move elsewhere immediately, even if your equity hasn't vested. The presence of a cliff doesn't significantly change that math.
I agree about missing out on hires because of the cliff, I just don't think it's that unreasonable to have one.
Not back then. Was not bright enough. That would have been smart. I think if I had phrased it as "I'm very excited about your potential, but I'm young and black swan events may happen and I might have to leave early, how about a 6 month cliff?". Probably would have worked.
> If someone is so unmotivated at a job that they're not making an impact
I didn't phrase it well. What I'm getting at is that risk taking is disincentivized your first year. You might have an idea that could have an upside of 100, but might also lead to a loss of -10, and in year one it's best to sit on that idea because if it were to fail you'd take a big personal loss. I think you have misaligned incentives that first year where the number one goal is not to risk rocking the boat, and number two goal is impact.
> What I'm getting at is that risk taking is disincentivized your first year.
Ah yeah, that makes sense and I didn't think of it that way. I guess I personally don't look at it like that, but I can definitely see and appreciate the thought process.
I think we need to consider each company separately.
Smaller firms may have smaller codebase and less complex infrastructure and processes to get familiar with. Learning all of that wouldn’t take more than a week or a month, tops.
Larger, public companies like FAANGS will often have completely custom stacks, specialized developer tools and a ton of checks before anything you write hits production. Learning to navigate this will take a lot longer. IIRC Facebook has a bootcamp of several weeks (months?) just to get new engineers familiar with their shit.
In either case, I personally don’t think it’s a “wash” since even at the bigger company it’s not like you’re not doing anything and once you get familiar with the stack you can be productive af.
You're completely right—to be fair, the company I was referring to is giant and likely has several months' worth of things to learn, which is very different than joining a startup. But even if a one-year cliff seems excessive for most companies, I still don't think there's anything wrong with a cliff of some sort. Maybe 6 months makes more sense for a medium-sized company, but there's still a breakeven point for new hires, and unless you're one of the first 5 or so employees, that point is probably somewhere between 3 and 9 months. I don't think it's unreasonable for companies to want to pay less during that "trial" period; if you don't like it, join a different company, or just hold out until your equity vests.
You understand that other people aside from Eng. work in tech companies, yeah? Lots of folks in Ops. roles and other non-Eng. roles get really fucked over by these cliffs and don't take a year to ramp and be impactful in their roles.
But it's not like the one year cliff is a hidden detail that you don't find out until you join; employees have all the information up front. If you choose to take the job anyway, you know that your compensation will be lower if you leave within the first 365 days, so if you still choose to leave, that's on you.
A cliff forces one to consider decisions with a different time horizon and tends to avoid short-term thinking (e.g. attempt to tune financial results ahead of a certain quarterly report).
Sometimes, companies include in their annual reports the conditions of employee shareholding plans. In Europe, for management, plans with 1 year vesting and 1-3 years blocking period is a practice. This means that you cannot exercise the options until 2-4 years in. Further, all unexercised options are forfeited if the employee moves to the competition within a defined timeframe.
Having been fired once at the 10-month mark early in my career, not for misconduct and not after any prior performance warnings, the 1-year cliff can be heavily abused by employers. Your argument assumes the employee has the control over when they leave, which isn't always true.
(In actual fact I was then a pretty underperforming employee who misunderstood the situation, but the apparent trigger for me getting fired was my own request for help addressing the situation since I realized something was wrong. The startup founders were as early-career as me and didn't really know how to give me the feedback I needed. My next employer did give me the necessary constructive criticism, after which I made the necessary changes, got subsequent positive feedback from that same employer, and have been a decent to good employee everywhere I've been since then.)
Not only that, Door Dash might still have an effective 1 year cliff anyway.
Usually signing bonuses have a 1 year paypack period. So sure, you may get stock even if you leave before a year, but you still have to pay back the signon bonus you received (and you don't get the taxes you paid on the sign-on bonus back either)
It helps keep the cap table small. After more than 2000 shareholders the company must register with and report information to the SEC. This is both a costly and time-consuming process.
If it's clear to both parties a new hire isn't going to work out, it's in the company's best interest (as well as the employee's) for the employee to move on ASAP rather than sticking around for a one year cliff.
and if you don't like the statutory result, you can incorporate in at least one of 55+ other sovereign jurisdictions within the United States
People that really think they need a state-level business court system for their multinational unicorn, in a place they never physically will be, can just keep using Delaware for no reason, and their employees will subsequently have better earned securities laws.
I believe you meant to say "of course, they are not extremely smart at computers like me, so they do not deserve to live". Don't worry, everyone posting here agrees with you!
Note: DoorDash employs the labor of approximately 104,000 people. Of those, about 4,000 are classified as employees. Of those, only a portion (of unknown size) are "equity-eligible."
Only equity-eligible roles classified as employees get equity. For everyone else employed by DoorDash, and on whose backs DoorDash is built, let them eat cake.
That is ultimately the result of minimum wage. Because minimum wage is above the market equilibrium (since these jobs are unskilled and there is a surplus of unskilled labor in the U.S. due to illegal immigration and deindustrialization) and the market moves faster than legislation, there will always be loopholes through which the standard of pay (or associated benefits) is lowered below what nominally would be minimum wage.
If you ban DoorDash someone else will pop up to exploit the system. Or someone like Kiwibot or Serve Robotics will come along and automate the whole thing and remove the jobs from the market entirely.
Legislators should stop fixating on minimum wage and fix the root causes behind low pay rather than trying to legislate band aids.
My company also does not have a 1 year cliff and it's wonderful.
I switched a few months ago from a company that did. It was a farce how my old company, at the end of the year, would say your compensation for next year is $X but part of X was paid out over the next 4 years with a 1 year cliff each year. Just one of many reasons why I left.
My current company pays out equity every 3 months and it's incredible.
The only good thing my old company did was pay every week instead of every 2 weeks. I know most companies do every 2 weeks; I was surprised at how large a difference getting paid every week vs every 2 weeks makes. Not sure why the extra week between is so impactful but it really is.
I would think, psychologically, it feels more of a two way relationship, rather than one way (i.e. you working constantly for the company with them only occasionally reciprocating)
While this isn't much of a company relationship thing: If you're getting paid every 2 weeks, sometimes you'll get paid the first/third week of the month and sometimes the second/fourth, which can be a pain if you're trying to keep a consistent amount in a checking account while also having bill pay and auto-transfers to savings/investment accounts.
Or, tl;dr, it makes it easier to automate money without leaving a large buffer of cash in a checking account.
I think what you want in checking -- if your circumstances allow for this kind of money-shuffling, at the least -- is more along the lines of 4 weeks of expenses, not 4 weeks of income, which would (hopefully!) be considerably higher. I'm not sure I'd call it a "large buffer," but even if you're not in the "shove absolutely everything you can into index funds and live like a pauper despite the fact that you're making $250K+ a year so you can retire at 35" camp, the more money you have in higher-return places, the better, so you probably don't want it in the checking account. (And probably don't want a lot in a low-interest savings account.)
Great move. Joining a new company always involves a leap of faith, and this reduces the risk somewhat of the fit not being satisfactory. I hope that all companies that offer equity will do the same as DoorDash.
Depending on how you look at it. This is good for employees who dont have to wait till the cliff. But on the other hand, if your RSUs are based on a fixed amount (which I believe is the case for all the new hires in DD) and not no of units, then you're missing out on stock growth. Since the compensation is capping the upside of stock.
Overall, this is not bad for a company that has already IPOed. I hope the startups that are on the verge of the IPO dont use this as a way to cap out giving RSUs to employees.
> if your RSUs are based on a fixed amount (which I believe is the case for all the new hires in DD) and not no of units
That's quite surprising. Generally RSU comp is based on a particular monetary amount, but converted to no. of units upon issuance based on market prices (usually at/close to start date). Is this not the case with DoorDash?
If that's the case that seems... awful? That's a cash bonus with a downside.
What I've seen is generally the conversion happens once for the whole package, when you sign. So if the stock grows during your vesting period, the value increases (goes both way obviously).
I think here they are mentioning value based, which means that instead of being given X amount of shares/rsu over 4 years, you're given "the equivalent of $X" at the begining of each years. So after 1 year, of the stock doubled in price, you will effectively receive half the amount of stocks (still the same $ value tho).
That's typical, but I've heard of a move away from it, to a plan where you get a set dollar amount every month(?) and it's converted to employee shares at the market rate then. Sounds like DoorDash just moved to it, and someone has linked a Blind thread where apparently Stripe/Instacart have, and I heard from a friend that Lyft just moved to that as well.
I can see the importance of this from the company end - with tech company shares skyrocketing, a fixed share amount gives them potentially unlimited stock compensation liabilities which could drag on earnings. But from an employee perspective, it sucks. You get none of the upside of company stock appreciation but all of the downside of being forced to purchase company stock with a portion of your compensation. You're much better off taking higher cash compensation and using that to purchase the stock of hot tech companies on the open market.
> I can see the importance of this from the company end - with tech company shares skyrocketing, a fixed share amount gives them potentially unlimited stock compensation liabilities which could drag on earnings.
AFAIK that is not how stock works in this context. The company issues the shares ex nihilo. That dilutes existing shareholders (if not offset with buybacks) but otherwise doesn't cost the company anything. The shares are not vested so if you leave they return to the comp pool. The company doesn't magically issue new shares on your vesting date so any rise in share price doesn't affect the company anyway. The whole point from a company POV is they can pay you in paper (shares) they manufactured out of nothing rather than cash.
They are doing it this way to reduce the total number of shares they need to issue (aka cut compensation). There is basically no upside for an employee, the changes to vesting schedules or cliff are a sop to avoid having to tell their employees that they're cutting compensation. Employees can already borrow against those RSUs if they need money.
The idea that missing out on a 10%-200% rise in the share price over the next four years in exchange for a bit more flexibility in vesting is a joke. If the company actually cared about the flexibility they could just switch to 6 month vesting or monthly vesting without removing the upside. There is no benefit to removing the upside beyond reducing dilution. They sure as hell aren't going to apply that same policy to their executives.
Agreed, this seems deeply negative for the employee. It's not semantically different than just being paid a cash bonus, except you are forced to buy company stock with said cash bonus.
Which I suppose you can just immediately sell and get back the cash - which begs the question of why not just model this as cash bonus compensation entirely?
The entire attraction of equity is that it can appreciate as it vests - that your (presumed) contribution to the company's market cap during your tenure is rewarded.
If I was looking at offers I would just not accept this nonsense. Not only are you compensating employees less, you remove the feeling of shared ownership that comes with stock grants, which is a powerful motivator.
yes, have been lucky enough to exit 2 IPOs including DD. When there are hockey stick growths during pre-IPOs, you miss out on a lot of $$ on the table.
I have a tangential question. What is most people's experience with additional options being awarded to employees beyond the initial grant?
Is there generally also a separate cliff for those additional option grants?
I ask because I interviewed with a startup recently and the recruiter told me that the company had just awarded everyone in the company additional options. I asked them if there was a cliff attached to those but they couldn't answer that.
No, a longer grant period means you benefit more from stock appreciation. If you get a 4 year grant and the stock goes up 5x in a year you get that for four years. If you’re on an annual grant I really doubt your employer will keep paying 5x your starting comp after a year.
I am late to the response here but one of us is wrong about how grants work, and I think it might be you :)
An equity grant is an allocation of shares/options offered to you when you start. eg: join our company and get 40K shares. Vesting just controls how long it takes you to get those shares. In a 4 year vesting you get 10K each year. In a 1-year you'd get them all at once in 12 months.
This is independent of the share price, it's your equity that's the whole point. So in no universe is it better to get 40K after 4 years than it is to get 40k in one year.
The article seems to intentionally obscure whether the previous vesting period was quarterly or not.
My cynical read of this is that they are changing the vesting schedule to quarterly (instead of monthly, which is more typical), and burying the lede on that by painting this as a benefit to employees (when it really only impacts new employees).
Typically, there's a "cliff" after the first year, at which point it switches to quarterly.
So you get nothing the first three quarters, but after quarter 4 (your first year at the company), 25% of your 4-year grant is immediately vested. Every quarter after that is another 6.25% of your initial grant.
I believe the point they were trying to make in the article is that, instead of quarterly grants following the pattern of:
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.
In NYC my experience is that the equity vests in four years, with one year "cliffs" for four years. The three-year, the "monthly", the other stuff I hear about is fantastical to me. And the equity isn't ever really life-altering.
Standard vesting schedule with 1-year cliff... but you would be prevented from selling any stock grant for the first year after it vests. Love it, thank you but no!
> Furthermore, we want the reward to reflect the work that our team does to realize DoorDash’s mission and empower the communities we serve.
What is the mission here? Is Doordash at all sustainable without continually funneling VC money into subsidizing services that no one would pay for at their breakeven cost?
I think they do this to keep bad hires from sticking around until the cliff.
It takes a lot to fire someone legally - oftentimes you have to document ~6 months of poor performance, put them on a PIP, give them a chance to remediate, etc. Combine that with normal long ramp-up times in a tech company, and by the time you know it's not working out and can fire them, they're pretty close or past the 1 year vesting point anyway. It's much more efficient if the employee decides to leave on the their own, if they know it's a mutual bad fit.
This removes the incentive to stick around for the windfall - if you're not enjoying your workplace, go leave and find a better one, and you get paid fully for time served. It's a lot like the buyout offers at places like Zappos or Coinbase, designed to make sure that everyone is on-board with the existing company culture.
I get the point about unhappy employees sticking around just for their cliff to vest, but what about attracting a new breed of employees looking for short term employment?
That's already a risk in tech, because wages are so high but ramp-up times are pretty long.
They get weeded out relatively quickly and usually run out of desirable employers, though. That's why employers are skeptical of employees with multiple short-duration stints or gaps on their resume.
People who are only staying because of vesting tend not to be the most productive. Better for everyone to have someone who's not working out or doesn't want to be there leave after a quarter instead of dragging it out for a year.
People who find out the company is a bad fit. It is very common within the valley for people to leave just after they're 1-yr vest because it was a bad fit. If you can get this bad fit employee out faster, the better.
Facebook has had the same policy for a while and didn't run into that problem. It's more about getting talent in the door and keeping current with market.
TBH I'd feel jittery working at door dash. COVID is going to end completely soon and the boom in deliveries is going to drop with it, probably along with their stock price. If was to go work there, I could start selling every month.
But they also don't give you units of RSUs as stock comp, just cash equivalents, so that is another major downside working there.
Just two months ago I declined an offer from a known and well funded startup because of a one year cliff on equity.
The recruiter didn't seem to be able to discuss this matter and I asked them to make sure to bubble this sort of thing up their food chain. I never heard back afterwards.
As an "old timer" in the industry a one year cliff makes absolutely no sense to me. Its like working for credit, which seems very backwards.