I was a mid-tier engineer and was able to bargain them away because I was often recruited based on my open source contributions and community work. It's a pretty easy sell to say: "You found out about me because of this work, and it's going to continue, or you're going to pay X for me to stop it for Y years."
What does "open source contributions" and "community work" have to do with non-compete clauses?
Non-competes prevent you from working for your employer's commercial competitors. I.E. if you leave Uber, you can't go work for Lyft.
Also, it's naive to assume you can just "sell" an employer on a contractual change that goes against their goals.
Saying "I'm a software engineer, and I plan to continue being a software engineer after we part ways, instead of waiting tables" also sounds like a strong "sell", but it does not work based on my experience.
It's not about convincing anyone, it's about power and who has it.
Pardon the nerd-sniping: both Uber and Lyft employees in California can job hop, because non-competes are unenforceable for employment (in general) in California.
> It's not about convincing anyone, it's about power and who has it.
Yes, you have to be good at your job and hard to replace before you make demands. That part should be obvious. At any rate, I've had plenty of success striking all non-compete agreements before starting my own business permanently. Just be good enough and hard to replace.
> Yes, you have to be good at your job and hard to replace before you make demands.
You are required to sign a non-compete before accepting the job. You cannot be "hard to replace" because you haven't started that job yet.
They won't even "replace" you - they just won't hire you!
> At any rate, I've had plenty of success striking all non-compete agreements
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is possible if you are a very strong senior candidate negotiating with relatively small employers who are desperate to hire you and don't have many alternative candidates.
At larger corporations, I've been told straight up that the non-competes are policy and won't be waived for anyone.
If you check the history of non-compete lawsuits, you'll find some very senior employees being sued, so this statements seem true.
I have the opposite experience. I refused to sign non-competes for all past offers that included them, and in all cases the potential employer then walked away. That happened after lengthy interview processes that lasted multiple days and cost the employer many thousands of dollars.
Gives you an idea how important these non-competes are to them.
I should mention these were big, powerful employers. You might be able to negotiate them with small employers who suffer from lack of candidates.
The larger the employer, the more bureacracy is involved in the hiring process. Any non-conformance to the standardized process comes with a risk of complete process failure once a corporation reaches a certain size and begins to silo off certain functional groups. I've found myself in many situations where a customer or employee requested something perfectly reasonable to settle a dispute, only for me to find there is literally no way to resolve the issue as there is no mechanism with which to do so or the individual who can move the levers is seperated by so many layers of management/org chart spaghetti that no one has a clue who to reach out to. There's always the hope that someone close to the process is willing to put their neck on the line and break procedure in a way that risks reprimand or their career but that's a fleeting chance more often than not.
While this may all be true, the upshot is that as individual employees, we have zero leverage or bargaining power against these large employers.
Even now, with the great shortage of tech talent - while is repeatedly used as a justification to import an unlimited number of foreign workers - these very same large employers who complain about this shortage, do not hesitate to reject a qualified candidate who will not sign away their right to work with a "non compete".
> we have zero leverage or bargaining power against these large employers.
You have the leverage not to work there. They have the leverage not to hire you. If enough people choose to work there despite things they don’t like, your leverage is not lost because of the company being large, it’s lost because people choose to work there despite things you don’t like.
> In many areas where non-competes are legal, all employers slap them on their contracts.
As others have pointed out, it's not uncommon to get them (and other clauses) struck out of employment agreements during hiring. I've struck that one from all places I've worked, I've struck all patent and IP claims out that were broad enough to cover things I do outside of work, I've gotten copyrights assigned to me instead of the employer, and so on, even very early in my career.
>So your choice is to sign one, or remain unemployed.
If it's that onerous, sign one to get a job, and while getting paid, immediately look for a new job that doesn't violate it without one. Not a single state has one so broad as to prevent you from any reasonable work. Problem solved.
Employment is always a negotiation. If you enter thinking you have zero leverage and are unable or unwilling to find other work, then you do have zero leverage.
> As others have pointed out, it's not uncommon to get them (and other clauses) struck out of employment agreements during hiring. I've struck that one from all places I've worked, I've struck all patent and IP claims out that were broad enough to cover things I do outside of work, I've gotten copyrights assigned to me instead of the employer, and so on, even very early in my career.
I'll be polite and not accuse you of fabricating. Your experience is extremely, curiously atypical. I know from experience that these clauses are mandatory for several large employers. They are not waived for anyone. If you google, you'll find examples of senior vice presidents being sued for them.
The only way you can have them waived is if you negotiate with small employers who are starved for talent, and even then it won't be easy to do as a junior.
In fact I'm skeptical you even knew what a non-compete was as a recent grad.
> If it's that onerous, sign one to get a job, and while getting paid, immediately look for a new job that doesn't violate it without one.
So your solution is to act unethically, accept a permanent position just to get a paycheck while looking for a new job?
My impression of this comment is sinking by the sentence.
Reality check: if everyone in your area requires a non-compete, and you couldn't get a NC-free offer months, why would you get one now, when you're looking to leave a job you literally just accepted?
To potential employers, you now look worse than before.
> Employment is always a negotiation. If you enter thinking you have zero leverage and are unable or unwilling to find other work, then you do have zero leverage.
Translation:
"I like to make boastful absolutist claims because I have very little actual experience in the job market."
I hate non-competes, non-disparagement,and IP assignment clauses. I've had two (smaller) companies that had them in their offer letter and in both cases I've had the non-competes and non-disparagements removed. I'm not sure I'd have as much luck with a larger company, however it definitely does happen on occasion.
First time was as a new grad. The non-compete literally prevented me from working within 200 miles of my home in the same industry. I noped out. Even when they removed it I wasn't interested because that's shady.
Second time was at a different company. I just let them know I wasn't comfortable giving up my 1st amendment rights just to work somewhere and they considered it and let me take it out. My HR person was awesome and the company treated it's employees well.
Not disputing your other points, just want people to know they should at the very least make sure to ask. It may end up with a no, but it could end up turning out alright.
>I'll be polite and not accuse you of fabricating.
Then why mention it? So you can say you mentioned it? You can look up my name - I've written a decent amount of material for pay, some of which is also on my website, precisely because I requested the copyrights. You can look over my employment and side project history to see I have gotten the ability to both work on commercial stuff at work and off work.
Instead of implying someone is lying with passive aggressive nonsense, simply do some legwork.
>In fact I'm skeptical you even knew what a non-compete was as a recent grad.
You seem to make a lot of claims about me. Maybe your experience is not what everyone has seen? I learned well before leaving undergrad that you can edit legal documents before signing them, and if they countersign, then they agreed to your document. If they don't like it, then you negotiate.
This I thought was common knowledge.
>Your experience is extremely, curiously atypical.
There's a lot of similar claims on this page.
>for several large employers
I've stayed away from them for the most part, since they're more inflexible, and for good reason: dealing with lots of employees is much easier with uniform rules.
>So your solution is to act unethically
This was opposed to simply breaking contracts or go unemployed. And a job is a business agreement - you work there as long as it suits you, they employ you as long as it suits them. If they're doing something you find so onerous, it's not unreasonable to find a new job.
>"I like to make boastful absolutist claims because I have very little actual experience in the job market."
You may want to look up my name. It's astounding you make so many claims about me without knowing me. What this shows, more than anything, is that you believe your own views, correct or not, over simply looking to check if something is true.
I apologize if I came across as overly harsh. I did look up your resume, and it does confirm my assertions. In fact, you are not directly contradicting any of them.
I made three assertions:
1. You will not be able to negotiate away non-compete clauses with large, powerful employers.
2. You may be able to negotiate them as a senior candidate for smaller companies.
3. Junior candidates will find it hard to negotiate their offers, including waiver of non-competes.
You agreed with my 1st assertion.
Your resume shows you to be a perfect example of the 2nd assertion. You are a senior engineer, an expert in his field, who worked in very senior technical roles in a series of small and very small companies. As such, you were in the best possible position to negotiate.
You seemed to dispute my 3rd assertion with your claim that you were able to negotiate non-competes away "early in your career", but your resume shows you took a Lead Programmer position in your very first year of full-time work. So you were never really a junior - you were a senior engineer working for small operations since the earliest stage of your career.
This is great for you, congratulations. It doesn't change the fact that your situation is unique, and doesn't generally apply. Not to most engineers, and certainly not to fast-food and similar unskilled workers mentioned in the article. These are people who don't have much money, really need the job, and often have limited choices in their area. They don't have the money to relocate, nor do they have leverage to negotiate.
So while I applaud you for being in the favorable position to negotiate away clauses since your first year of employment, I still caution against concluding that this is how it works for everyone else as well.
>Your experience is extremely, curiously atypical.
The majority of programmers don't work for large companies. Many of the biggest employers employ in California, further skewing the data towards programmers not having to worry. About half of all states don't even have non-compete laws for programmers.
As such, I suspect your losing jobs by refusing to sign them is the atypical experience, not mine.
>Your resume shows you to be a perfect example of the 2nd assertion. You are a senior engineer....
I was once junior, with the same results...
>but your resume shows you took a Lead Programmer position in your very first year of full-time work.
Yep, negotiation, not experience, which is exactly my point. And I didn't take any job thrown at me, I worked carefully to move to a situation I wanted to be in. One can move themselves up career ranks much faster by learning how to sell themselves and to take risks, than by trying to follow the company playbook.
If you do what most people do, you will get the outcome most people get. To do differently, make consistent, concentrated effort to do things differently in the proper manner and time.
I've found more developers over my career are not advancing to where they want or getting what they want through lack of learning how to deal with negotiation. They too often think the rules are fixed and rewards a solely a function of their technical skill, both of which are false.
I've taught many interns at companies I've been at how to negotiate better, and many of them were able to get significant contract changes made on their very first job.
I've also have many developers ask how to move up/over, and when I recommend they take on new or harder projects as they're presented, those programmers shy away from the unknown to do what they know. Those types, fear of risk, don't move as fast or as far. I don't begrudge them, they prefer safety, but when they complain later in their career that they didn't go as far as someone that did do scary, out of comfort things, it's mostly their own choices.
>I still caution against concluding that this is how it works for everyone else as well.
I never thought it works this way for everyone, but in many cases, it's not the systems fault; it's the employees fault for not working the process smarter, and for not developing skills useful for dealing with people as much as they develop their technical skills.
Interviews are a sales process. Learning to sell is a very useful skill, at every level. I find few developers that have learned this and do it well.
I walked away from a non-compete in Edinburgh, Scotland (startup). I'm not familiar with the law, but I suspect both parties rights had statutory protections anyway, and the clause wasn't legal, but the company was insistant that I sign the contract, even to the point of having lawyers call and explain them to me.
As a contractor it's not that uncommon to be presented contracts with clauses that fail disguised employment regulations. Usually with some negotiation I can get these changed, but on one occasion I recieved a lucrative offer from an intermediary that refused to change the offer. I ended up working for the same client (bank) via another intermediary.
Personally, I refuse to sign bullshit clauses, but many of these companies do refuse to budge, and I imagine it's much harder for junior people to leave the money on the table.
> I’ve found these non-competes often have no teeth. Unless you possess exceptional knowledge or secrets, companies will not waste the resources going after you.
You naively conflate "not biting" with "having no teeth".
Amazon forces all workers to sign non-competes. They only sue those who piss them off. Granted, a small minority. But that minority suffers a harrowing ordeal, typically losing their new job and their ability to work.
You better believe the rest are kept in line by the mere threat of such lawsuit, and the courts have enforced the non-compete in the cases Amazon did take legal action.
Didn't know that, also FUCK AMAZON from now on. But what are they going to do? Some sort of civil suit is not that big of a deal if you have your assets appropriately sheltered.
Although this makes me hate Jeff Bezos just a little bit more. Hope he loses it all in the divorce battle.
> But what are they going to do? Some sort of civil suit is not that big of a deal if you have your assets appropriately sheltered.
I think this statement minimizes the severity of being sued. The stress of a civil suit that threatens your long-term livelihood is a very big deal, daily uncertainty for prolonged period of times about important parts of your life can cause a lot of nasty health problems.
There's research that credits the fact that SV is in California and not, for example, near Cambridge MA, to the fact that non-competes aren't enforceable in California.
I've also heard a theory from a friend that one reason SV companies develop new technology so quickly is because the free movement of employees between companies is essentially the de facto transfer of technology between companies.
Of course things like trade secrets won't be transferred, but the general skills, ideas and know-how can quickly spread from company to company. In contrast, in regions with non-competes, companies are effectively more siloed.
Of course. It also encourages competition, especially from new startups.
Imagine Facebook had to wait for a couple of years to be able to hire any senior engineers with the knowledge and skills to scale their services.
They would lose momentum, and quite possibly fail as their service would be constrained by severe scaling and reliability issues.
The reason Facebook and other unicorns were able to thrive in SV is because they were able to poach dozens of experienced engineers from other companies, that are all arguably its competitors.
If you like startups, non-competes are some of your worst enemies.
Why would anyone expect higher taxes to increase growth?
> Under President Moon Jae-in, South Korea has raised taxes and the minimum wage in the name of economic growth. So far, it hasn’t worked out as planned.
That's not how that works at all. Whoever made this "plan" apparently skipped Macroeconomics 101.
> Growth has slowed, unemployment has risen and small-business owners like Moon Seung are complaining.
Any Economics undergrad would tell you that's exactly the expected outcome.
Raising taxes hurts growth and increases unemployment because you are reducing the profitability of all businesses.
Raising minimum wage increases unemployment because you are raising the cost of labor.
And small businesses often pay the highest price for these policies.
When I took Economics 101 I was told that there was one school that says "taking people's money away will make the economy worse because they know how to spend it best," and another school that says, "the economy is powered by money changing hands, so if you take away money that would otherwise have sat around and use it to buy random items, you will force the economy to be more active than it would otherwise have been."
The economy is powered by creation and exchange of value. Money changing hands is mistaking the incentive for the act itself.
Most economic schools of thought advocate stimulus during recessions to stop a slowdown of money changing hands, but this is a short-term measure. Money isn't the economy and there's no reason to believe making money fly around willy-nilly will help the economy in a permanent way.
Exactly. The key factor in growth is the production of goods an services.
To easily demonstrate: imagine everyone stopped producing goods and services tomorrow in the US.
Everyone would still have the exact same amount of money, but you will not be able to use it to buy a fresh loaf of bread (since none are being baked) or have your car serviced.
The value of money will drop to zero. It won't matter at all if it changes hands; indeed, it won't, since there won't be anything to buy.
Thinking "money changing hands" powers the economy is thus mistaking effect for a cause.
> Money changing hands is mistaking the incentive for the act itself.
I think there's more to it than that. There is no particular reason to think that money changing hands benefits the economy, or society, but there is at least one party that does benefit: the government. Every time money changes hands the government takes a share in the form of income and/or sales taxes. Ergo, there is reason for the idea that higher monetary velocity is better to be popular among both politicians and the economists who advise them.
I reject the idea that money is sitting around idle. Very little is - most people keep a little idle cash in their wallet and a few coins in a jar: the rest is in banks and other investments were the money is not idle it is working. When you take the money away you don't remove it from changing hands, you just remove me from the changing hand.
It it good or bad to remove someone from their money? That depends a lot and is subject to lots of complex debate.
The latter makes intuitive sense. If you give money to the poor and needy, they will spend it on things they need (food, cars, etc..) so the money will end up back in corporations' hands anyway.
You are assuming any of that money will end up with the "poor and needy", instead of hiring more bureaucrats whose function is often to hinder economic activity and growth by numerous rules and regulations.
Econ undergrads might say that raising taxes hurts growth, as might highschool students. Policy experts and professional economists are very much divided on the issue. There is plenty of evidence where raising taxes appears to produce economic growth, where it doesn't make any difference, and where it appears to hinder growth.
Raising the minimum wage also redistributes money to low wage earners, who tend to spend their all money, as opposed to richer people who save. Increases to the velocity of money results in economic growth. That's one of the counterarguments to the minimum wage argument. Society is complex and when you change the minimum wage it has rippling effects on employment, housing, consumer spending, investment and so forth. On top of that you have psychological effects and signalling issues. Predicting the consequences of a minimum wage hike is hard.
The real world is not Macro 101, and pretending policy questions like these are trivial is very very silly.
> There is plenty of evidence where raising taxes appears to produce economic growth
Please cite such evidence.
> Raising the minimum wage also redistributes money to low wage earners, who tend to spend their all money, as opposed to richer people who save.
Raising minimum wage increases the cost of labor, which will reduce hiring and trigger layoffs. Minimum-wage earners are the most vulnerable class of employees, the most easily dismissed and replaceable. As such, they will be the first to be laid off as profits decline, especially when these profits are declining as a direct result of the cost of employing them
Rising cost of labor also hurts growth directly, especially when its due to government intervention and not voluntary free-market forces.
> The real world is not Macro 101, and pretending policy questions like these are trivial is very very silly.
Except in this case all these "policy experts" and "professional economists" were apparently wrong, and instead of increasing growth, these changes hurt it substantially, just as Macro 101 would predict.
So score one for basic economic good sense versus the "policy experts".
>Rising cost of labor also hurts growth directly, especially when its due to government intervention and not voluntary free-market forces.
Fine by me. A nation that does not have either strong (and not hindered by law) unions or a minimum wage to support the most vulnerable (your mention of which in the context of your comment comes across as libertarian concern trolling) does not deserve to "grow".
>Raising minimum wage increases the cost of labor, which will reduce hiring and trigger layoffs.
My solution to this is simple - abolish the wage. But I'm interested to hear to what extent this is true where minimum wages have increased so far, and whether it must necessarily happen. Taking the argument to its extreme, we ought not to pay anyone at all, since any amount >0 is a rising cost of labour and since growth is important, we out to minimize the cost of labour to zero or even lower.
I'm thankful for the fact that the eight hour work day and humane conditions, thanks to the socialists and social democrats of the 19th and 20th c. have prevailed over your "voluntary free market forces".
> A nation that does not have either strong (and not hindered by law) unions or a minimum wage to support the most vulnerable (your mention of which in the context of your comment comes across as libertarian concern trolling) does not deserve to "grow".
Increasing minimum wage is liable to cause a host of well-known unintended and paradoxical adverse consequences:
To you it seems like a simple way to benefit the poor, but in reality it raises unemployment - a far graver problem - among these very poor you are ostensibly trying to protect.
You can flame that as "concern trolling", but these are not just very real concerns - they are real consequences that have been observed numerous times across history, including in this very case in Korea, where unemployment has risen substantially as a result of the recent minimum wage raises.
> My solution to this is simple - abolish the wage.
Truly an excellent practical suggestion for the modern growth economy.
Your comment offers zero practical solutions, or anything but empty moral posturing and inciting inflammatory language.
On paper, if you increase wages and taxes to subsidize demand, you encourage consumption. And it actually works ... provided consumers a) aren't over their ears in debt (which they are) and b) are buying from locals (which they aren't, at least for industrial goods).
The French learned this the hard way during a short period in the early 1980s. They did exactly that, and it drove consumption up as expected, but this actually ended up helping more competitive manufacturers from their trading partners.
Exactly. Such a policy should work, on paper at least, in places like China or some SE Asian countries. It won't in places like South Korea or other places where consumers are mostly indebted (in which case they repay them instead of consuming more) or buying cheap goods from China or SE Asia (in which case manufacturers from those countries benefit most).
Except much of it is spent hiring more bureaucrats whose function is often to hinder economic activity and growth by numerous rules and regulations.
These very same people would be contributing to growth if they worked in the private sector and produced goods and service. Instead, they create either zero or negative growth.
You take a person that could be producing goods and services in the private sector, and pay him to work in the public sector, where he produces no such goods or services, and often is tasked with creating and enforcing regulations that limit economic freedom.
Clearly you're going to end up with lower economic growth.
The fact he would spend his salary on purchases is small comfort, especially when he'd likely earn a larger salary to spend in the private sector.
It's a false premise that taxation does not produce a good or service. E.g. USPS, defense contracts, farm subsidies, etc.
It's not clear that you're going to end up with lower economic growth. For example, taxing some level of income that would otherwise not be spent on economic activity (e.g. savings or equity investments) and spending it on things that do result in economic active results in higher economic growth.
The government is generally bad at spending money efficiently, since they are a local monopoly and have few incentives to do so...which is why markets work better at this.
Let's say you want to build a road that connects 12 houses. You can do that without the government. You just need everyone to agree on who contributes what, who you hire to do the work, what happens if something goes wrong, who else is allowed to drive on the road, how maintenance happens, who polices the rules, and so on, and so forth.
This does occasionally work out in real life, but mostly people bitterly argue over the whole thing and it never happens. Having a government set some sort of policy and doing the planning is usually far more effective, even if it pays more than is necessary for the actual work that gets done. The government may pay more per mile of road, but the road has a higher odds of getting built.
This is a BS statement that doesn't actually say anything beyond expressing this trite idea that government is always bad.
"The government" is not a singular entity, it's a collection of tens of thousands of smaller entities, all of which operate mostly independent of one another and whose relative "efficiency" is based almost entirely on the people working there. One town may have a school or fire department which operates extremely well under a very tight budget, while the town over might poor money into a corrupt and expensive institution which fails to provide more than basic services.
In this respect, it's no different than any other business. Some Walmarts are clean, tidy, and well run, others are a mess. But you wouldn't go around claiming that "The retail" is inefficient because of this fact.
Also, not every government department should be efficient. The military is often held up as the hallmark of an inefficient bureaucracy, but the fact is, we don't want a military that's cost-effective, we want a military that's combat-effective, no matter the cost. But we also have a post office that can mail a letter to the middle of Alaska for less than a dollar.
Your comment about the market working better at "this" (whatever this is, anyway) is equally as lazy.
The difference (and it makes all the difference in the world) is that as a consumer of Walmart, you can simply choose to shop elsewhere (Amazon, Target, CVS, mom and pop, etc). Wal-Mart cannot survive if it performs under consumer expectations for too long (see Sears, KMart, etc).
Governments are monopolies. The only incentive they have to be efficient is the leadership changes that possibly occur with each election cycle. Given the wide range of services and issues that governments must tackle, it's likely that voters have only a few key issues in mind when they go to the ballot box. With each change in leadership, a different set of priorities takes precedence. Sometimes long standing, mediocre services, continue unabated and unimproved for decades at a time with little to no innovation.
You're right but also wrong - people generalise about "the government" even though it's a large collection of entities because on average their performance is characterisable as worse than "the market" would be. Whilst you can have incredibly efficient and well run government departments, there's no particular incentive for people to run their departments well, doing so is difficult and so the noticeable trend is that they aren't.
The evidence that this stereotype is true is overwhelmingly strong, so, it's perfectly legitimate to set policy around it.
> It's not like money paid as taxes just evaporates. It's spent, i.e. put right back into the economy.
That's not how taxes work. It actually does evaporate. Money is an IOU from the government that it guarantees it will accept as payment. The government doesn't actually need to give itself an IOU (it doesn't make sense except as a way to keep track of internal accounting obligations); it burns the IOUs it gets back in order to preserve the value of its still circulating IOUs.
It's always important to remember that governments print money, they don't discover it. The government doesn't need it from you, it needs you not to have it in order to keep it somewhat scarce.
Ultimately the purpose of taxes is to force citizens to use the currency the government produces, which in turn, makes their currency valuable to citizens.
> Raising minimum wage increases unemployment because you are raising the cost of labor.
You have no evidence of this.
And, even if true, it would only be true if the cost of labor was a significant input to cost of production.
In fact, most of the minimum wage increases in the US are currently resulting in "effect, if any, is so small as to be unmeasurable."
Obviously, you can raise the minimum wage to the point where it is 99% of the cost of production and that would be severely detrimental. However, given the stagnation of the minimum wage over the last decades in the US, apparently the minimum wage has quite a bit of room to increase before its contribution to the cost of production becomes an issue.
Conversely, if you can get hired to a unicorn in a position that's senior enough to have any hope of coming anywhere near top tech pay, then you are likely talented enough to work at top tech instead.
Not necessarily, as talents at that level which are valued in top tech may be different than talents at that level that are valued at growing startups.
There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies. That doesn't mean it's easy to get those jobs. It does mean that you should apply your talents where it fits.
BTW, you don't need to be at a unicorn to earn top EV. 1% of a 100M exit is 1M, which is more than the vast majority of equity grants I've heard of from FANG. Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
> Not necessarily, as talents at that level which are valued in top tech may be different than talents at that level that are valued at growing startups.
I worked at both. Talent overlap is quite high, far higher than is commonly assumed.
> There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies.
I worked in startups for many years, and most of my friends still in the field are either founders or C-level execs. They are fully aware of the top compensation for top engineers in startups presently. Startups don't match top tech comp currently. Unless you factor in the options as a sure thing, and the startup ends up exiting at unicorn levels.
> Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
This is a reflection of how many people have spent precious years of their career working for startups, and generally seeing 0 return on these options.
It's also a reflection of the perceived lack of control over this sort of deferred compensation, and various nasty dynamics that often snatch value away from rank-and-file employees, even at the last minute or past it. See the LinkedIn exit and their infamous clawback policy.
Startup options have earned this reputation for 0 value over a decade of overhype and underperformance. Far too many talented people were promised the sky and ended up with nothing after years of hard work.
Precisely. A senior engineer can certainly hope to make $400k or more per year for good performance. Not just in FAANG either - plenty of other profitable businesses are competing for the same grade of talent and thus pay in the same range.
Only a handful of almost surefire unicorns can reasonably come anywhere near matching that, and that only in the eventuality that they don't pull a Zenefits and leave you hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars short and in need of a new job.
Anecdotally, last year I was contacted by such a surefire unicorn for a role that was actually very interesting. We crunched the numbers together, and the best case scenario was them effectively matching my current comp. Which was actually a great proposition for startup comp, the best I've seen. Still, nowhere near compelling enough to upend my life for a higher risk position without any financial upside.
I worked in startups for the early part of my career, including a fairly well known one that exited. Neither me, nor any of my colleagues in that startup, nor any of the many other startup employees in my network, ever made more than a few hundred thousands on our options. Many very talented engineers made nothing at all on large quantities of options granted by several promising startups.
It's no wonder that none of the recent graduates I interview nowadays is at all interested in startups. When I ask where else they are interviewing, it's always FAANG and other high-flying profitable businesses. Even more so for senior engineers, whose opportunity cost is even higher, typically in the hundreds of thousands per year.
Even with 10-20 years of experience in the bay area at small, medium, large size software companies, I've never ever made anything close to that amount.
What was your equity compensation at these companies? Given that many (most?) companies refresh equity grants, it's very possible that after a full vesting period (usually 4 years) that you would then have multiple RSU grants vesting every year. With ~150k annually in RSUs, 150-200k base salary and 15-25% bonus is how lots and lots of people attain compensation this high.
It was always worthless Options that could never be sold. One company's options I worked for 6 years, was worth about 4K after taxes, fully vested. Our typical bonuses were 1-2%. A 10% bonus was considered very high.
> It was always worthless Options that could never be sold. One company's options I worked for 6 years, was worth about 4K after taxes, fully vested.
There's your problem.
Getting paid in options is the exact mistake I've warned about repeatedly in comments throughout this thread.
Yours is a fairly common case in SV: worked in a series of startups that "paid" you in illiquid options that ended up being totally worthless.
I'm willing to bet these very same startups encouraged you to value these options very highly: high 6 and even 7 figures, right?
These places don't pay well, because why should they? Talent is apparently willing to work their ass off for these "worthless options" that are sold to them as vouchers for surefire multi-million-dollar jackpots.
You are not alone. I have 20+ years, and I am in a senior position with a fortune 100. I don’t get paid that much. I know most of my colleagues don’t either. I think 400k+ is more common at FAANGs. 200k and below is common for a lot of experienced developers in the Bay Area.
GP has replied elsewhere that all his employers were startups that paid him in "worthless options".
Indeed, you won't ever see $400k or even $300k working for startups that "pay" you in illiquid 0.001% stakes in what will surely become a multi-billion dollar runaway success (in which unlikely case your share will be diluted to nothing anyway).
You can certainly stick your fingers in your ears and sing LALALA while the rest of us make real money,. Your life, your choice.
Aside from it being fun to work on a small team early on in your career a startup is a great place to gain experience if you come from a non traditional background or didn’t go to a top tier university.
Experience and fast career progression shouldn’t be overlooked when looking at startups.
Zenefits was a highly touted workplace benefits startup that got into huge trouble when a Buzzfeed investigation (of all things), found that one of its execs had gamed a state insurance agent exam (I think that's what it was), so their staff could essentially cheat and obtain certifications faster.
The exec in charge was fired, and a lot of their key staff had already jumped ship by then.
Zenefits is an example of a surefire unicorn that made too many mistakes and lost most of its value very quickly.
The key points are:
1. Startup valuations are highly volatile. There were plenty of startups that were valued above the billion dollar levels, then sold for 8 or even 7 figures.
2. While profitable established companies can also go south, such companies pay you in cash and liquid RSUs, so if they spiral down you just switch to a better performing company. Getting most of your pay in illiquid options means you risk losing multiple years of earnings in the best part of your career.
Specifically, tons of talented people took a job in Zenefits based on the assumption that their illiquid shares will be worth six-seven figures, and likely will never see anything close to that in real money. Same thing wouldn't happen for those paid in liquid assets.
I don't see how this "incumbency advantage" would help Intel, exactly. The server market is highly competitive. If AMD puts out superior product at an attractive price, nobody is going to say "but we've used Intel for a decade, how can we suddenly switch to AMD?!".
Thats exactly what they would say. Reliability track record, existing software/project restraints and enterprise relationships matter more than the price tag. That's why Intel can still charge rediculous amounts for enterprise chips for some time.
I remember a time when Opteron had a very large part of the server market. It's about lack of competition, not about how businesses love Intel charging a fortune for their product.
Who's making chips to compete with Intel? AMD, IBM, and nobody else (ARM isn't high-performance yet). IBM's lock-in with POWER is scary to businesses. AMD wasn't competitive for most server needs. That left Intel to charge whatever they wanted (and they did).
With EPYC, there was finally a competitive offering at a great price (not to mention a better track record with meltdown and the constant stream of spectre variants). All the same software runs on the AMD chips too.
>nobody is going to say "but we've used Intel for a decade, how can we suddenly switch to AMD?!".
Maybe not those exact words, but people will say "We are adding a server to our VMWare ESXi cluster, so if want it to be compatible with our existing hardware we better stick with Intel."
VMWare's high availability feature (a highly desired feature for any data center) won't work across different CPU architectures, so unless you are replacing your entire stack and not just adding server(s) then you have to stick with the architecture you already have in place.
Indeed, AMD's best in would be at the larger scale end, where someone might add whole sites at a time and choose AMD for a new datacenter, since inter-site live vMotion is pretty unusual.
I have been a Sys Admin for 7 years. It is a problem, vmotion won't work going from AMD to Intel or vice versa (at least not in any official way). In fact it is highly suggested when building ESXi stacks that you get the exact same model CPU for each server.
No, Intel FlexMigration and AMD-V Extended Migration architectures are different, and vMotion isn't supported across them.
EVC does not allow for migration with vMotion between Intel and AMD processors.[1]
This isn't really that surprising. x86-64 is standard, but extensions aren't. Eg, here's some of the new extrnsion in Zen vs Steamroller: Compared to the AMD Opteron™ "Steamroller" EVC mode, this EVC mode exposes additional CPU features including RDRAND, SMEP, AVX2, BMI2, MOVBE, ADX, RDSEED, SMAP, CLFLUSHOPT, XSAVES, XSAVEC, SHA, and CLZERO [1]
A project that I currently work on procured new hardware and one of the constraints for the selection was that pretty much exactly the same hardware must be available in three years. So this one will be buying intel for the foreseeable future.
> nobody is going to say "but we've used Intel for a decade, how can we suddenly switch to AMD?!".
Actually, that is the case, it will take about 1-2 hardware generations of customers _asking_ for AMD before it's featured prominently by any vendor (except the extreme ones like SuperMicro)
If nobody is actually calling their HP/Dell reps asking for it then it will never happen.
Market perception matters though, and I know many people -- IT admins included -- who think that Intel is just higher quality. Those people will be hard to capture quickly, and AMD will need to hold a lead for a while to change that perception
Things aren't always that simple. For example AMD may be cheaper per core, but if you're running AVX heavy code then intel has a throughput advantage. At least it did with Zen, Zen2 has some improvements in that area, so we'll have to measure again.
Moving to the next intel generation is usually simple, incremental change. Moving between vendors means a lot of re-evaluating if you're crunching numbers.
If your workload needs a lot of PCIe lanes for IO or you need cheap systems with ECC ram then the story changes quite a bit.
I skimmed some of these links. The main argument appears to be that the sanctions created economic hardship, and that in turns caused suffering and death.
That's a natural result of any sanctions. You may decide to oppose any sanctions to avoid this result, but when the alternative is violent military, there's a good argument to why this is the lesser evil.
You seem a bit disingenuous here. Upthread you needed "a source" for the obvious fact that hospitals are part of a national economy. Now the deaths of children are "a natural result". Which is it, really? Maybe it's just good for USA policy to kill kids, by one way or another? Anyway, sanctions are usually just a pretext for war. (Every military disaster USA has perpetrated during my parents' lifetimes has been preceded by sanctions.) The military-industrial-media complex tells us over and over that sanctions are some sort of peaceful option, but a cursory examination of history proves that is a damnable lie.
"The alternative" is what every president from Washington through Arthur would have advocated: stay on our own continent and mind our own business.
We voters don't make either decision; our rulers in the military-industrial-media complex decide when to drag us into war. It's still the case that sanctions are usually just pretexts for war. If sanctions themselves were neutral policies, that might be acceptable. However as documented upthread they kill lots of innocent children directly. Most humans would consider that to be a bad thing.
Sanctions are often an attempt to curb aggression and prevent war.
Take the sanctions against Russia or Iran. Sure, we can be against those sanctions. Then Russia will invade the rest of Ukraine, killing many thousands.
It's the easiest thing in the world to say "I'm just against any sort of killing". Makes you seem benevolent. However, in reality we must choose between alternatives that are often all bad, some just a bit more so.
You keep repeating that (probably because you've heard it repeated a lot), but it isn't true. Sanctions at most times and in most places have been pretexts for future wars. Sanctions are certainly not what have kept Russia from invading Ukraine: Ukrainians with guns and tanks have done that. Sanctions certainly have not caused Russia to give back the Crimea to Ukraine. It's like any disputed territory inhabited by mostly-sane people. The residents who wanted Russian rule are happy, many of those who didn't have moved back to Ukraine, and it's not as though any of the civic institutions really work differently anyway.
I am not "against any sort of killing". If I have a good enough reason to kill I will do it. I have killed lots of animals while hunting and dealing with livestock. I am not "benevolent". However, I am also not evil. It is for that reason that I don't want my tax dollars used to kill innocent children in foreign lands. The killing done by Assad, Qaddafi, Saddam, and the Taliban is on their own heads. (The killing done by ISIS is on ours, because we created and sustained ISIS.) In my parents' lifetimes, we have never improved a situation overseas by invading. By that measure I suppose sanctions are a little better, because it's arguable that e.g. South Africa was improved by sanctions...
It is largely because of the previous Soviet invasion that Ukrainians would today fight to the last to prevent a future Russian invasion. They themselves didn't feel the same about Crimea, because of course historically it only became a part of Ukraine in 1954, a "gift" of USSR. Russia is today surrounded by nations it theoretically (well, it might depend on the current oil price: yay fracking!) could defeat militarily. Are sanctions protecting all of those? If we assume that's possible, how could we ramp up sanctions from their already absurd levels if Russia started threatening e.g. Azerbaijan or Mongolia? Please, let's live in the real world: USA sanctions against Russia are not sustaining Ukrainian independence. As is always the case, the Ukrainians themselves are doing that.
Conspiracy theory.
AQI developed in Iraq after we had completely destroyed civil society there and created a vacuum of law and order. AQI developed into ISIS after we further disrupted both Iraq and Syria, in those regions of both nations where no one (including armies of USA, Iraq, Syria, Russia...) dared venture. For many years, most of their arms and ammunition came from American-supplied caches "stolen" from the apocryphal "good rebels" that we were repeatedly told actually existed and would kick out Assad real soon now. This is basic recent international history. How is it that you haven't kept up with this?
> It is largely because of the previous Soviet invasion that Ukrainians would today fight to the last to prevent a future Russian invasion.
Read some history of the cold war. USSR was happy to invade and subdue its weak neighbors in the past, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, all the way up to the 70s. It won't do the same today because of international retaliation, part of which are sanctions.
Russia had no right to invade Crimea. They just did because they had the military might to do so. If your argument is that they should be allowed to do so without consequences, then I strongly disagree. Your position makes you feel morally superior, but in reality it will pave the way to WWIII with Russia increasingly emboldened to extend militarily until an inevitable clash.
> AQI developed in Iraq after we had completely destroyed civil society there and created a vacuum of law and order.
By that logic, UK and France are responsible for the Nazi regime and all the evils it has done because they defeated Germany in WWI and created the conditions for the rise of the Nazi party.
There's a fashionable trend to blame the US as "directly responsible" for everything bad that goes on the world, by applying preposterous liability standards that nobody has ever applied to any other nation in history.
You assume a great deal about my moral feelings. I am practical, and I perceive our real enemies. There is no moral component to that. Like Iran, Russia's time as a major world player is limited. It has burned through all its human resources, and now its oil is worth less and less every day. They're not going to take over Europe, and if they were it's not as if USA could stop that with either sanctions or force of arms. The drunken walk of sanctions and other threats we've employed have not served the interests of USA citizens any more than they've served the interests of Russian citizens. They have served someone's interests.
USA get the tiny amount of international criticism we receive because we keep doing the same awful misguided things while claiming that we expect different results. We aren't all crazy, so at least some of us are liars. Indeed those are the same liars who came up with the ridiculous "world police" canard of preposterous liability in the first place. Who kills whom in other hemispheres really doesn't affect us enough that we should waste our wealth and soldiers' lives pretending to do something about it.
At least in military conflict, there is some lip-service paid to avoiding civilian casualties (Geneva Convention, etc.). But sanctions are not allowed even this little fig leaf.
A study by Lancet - briefly, that hundreds of thousands of 'excess deaths' were caused by sanctions.
It's not something our intellectual culture is particularly comfortable with - drawing lines between death, and the policies that cause death, perhaps because we don't take statistics as seriously as we do causal stories.
Even with a smaller employer, you will need some bargaining power.