
I took the $300K - geekfactor
http://boundary.com/blog/2013/05/26/i-took-the-300k/
======
aaronbrethorst

        [T]he bonus was a life raft against personal
        debts racked up while living in San Francisco
        at a below market salary
    

Never accept a below market salary unless you have serious skin in the game
(i.e. founder-level equity). I probably sound like a broken record about this,
but you have to assume that your equity in the company will never be worth
anything, and—even if you are part of a 'successful' acquisition—you are
liable to get an amount that brings you up to parity with the market...if
you're willing to accept the golden handcuffs.

Think of your options (or RSUs, or whatever) in a company as being a lottery
ticket. Odds are, it won't pay out. If it does, it's likely to be a trivial
amount. For the rare cases where things really work out well (early employee
at Facebook/Google), please try to remember that you were _really_ lucky.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Is this advice really on a broken record? I recently saw a pitch from a bank
marketing an LP stake in a prominent VC firm, and one of the first slides
highlighted the willingness of Silicon Valley engineers to work for below-
market rates in exchange for psychological benefits.

~~~
tlogan
How do you know if someone at a party is working for YCombinator startup?
Don't worry, he/she will tell you.

The advice is "broken record" and it will be ignored by majority of young
engineers. Working for a cool startup is very very cool. Working for big
corporation is not cool (and considered evil if that corporation is Microsoft
or Oracle).

And that is actually good for economy, for startups, for VCs, and for
engineers (not in monetary sense but they will become wiser).

~~~
YPetrov
Opinions like this make me happy that I accepted a graduate job at an
investment bank (with the hope that I will be able to develop something on the
side) instead of going for a startup after finishing university.

~~~
NamTaf
There's a 'the side' when working at an investment bank? I thought you guys
pulled silly-nuts hours and had no spare time. The IB guys I read about
constantly lament forgetting that they can't have a social life on weeknights
when they get called in at crazy hours to fix up some higher-up's whim.

~~~
kenshiro_o
I think it depends on the division you work in. Some guy working in the
networks/infra team may get better work/life balance than someone else in the
front-office development team. I work in the latter and I must say the hours
do suck and you tend to be drained when you get back home after work. But I
believe that if you have a strong will and good work ethics you can still
manage to work on side projects in the evenings and week-ends. Hard but
feasible.

------
jcampbell1
Microsoft's unwillingness to bump people to market is short sighted. I'd take
the offer, then shift my hours to the bare minimum. I'd spend all the new free
time learning or working on side projects. I damn sure wouldn't be all that
committed to helping Microsoft beat google at search. This seems like the
obvious thing to do, and not far from what the author did.

~~~
SurfScore
This is why big companies get slow and bloated. Behavior like this only
happens when people are in it for the money and don't really care about what
they're building.

~~~
jcampbell1
From what I have read, Google doesn't operate this way. My understanding is
they don't keep everyone from an acquisition. While this seems a bit rude fire
someone or make talented engineers re-apply for their own job, it does mean
the people they do keep become Google engineers rather than 2 year indentured
servants who have no incentive to join the company culture.

All strategies are problematic.

~~~
taude
Back in the day (circa 1996 with my experience), MSFT made employees from
acquisitions re-apply for their jobs and go through the full interview
process.

------
brendano
It was great working with Cliff and many other folks at Powerset. I think I
got cynical a little earlier than some of the other folks and left before the
acquisition, so I might be less justified in my opinion, but anyway,

On the below-market wages issue: I think Powerset's really crazy
marketing/hype allowed it to hire stronger engineers than would have been
justified given its product and technology. All the startup spinoffs he
mentions (Serious Business, Crowdflower, Github... and later some more I can't
even keep track of...) I think are an indication of that. I guess that's how
you hire using equity. You could say it's taking advantage of the psychology
of overvaluing low-probability, high-impact outcomes. Or you could say, those
people were duped.

I'm just glad for all the folks who, like Cliff, were able to take the bonuses
to help support families or later business ventures.

------
austenallred
This goes to show that what may be right for one person may not be right for
another, despite the terms being the same; all too often we fail to take
external circumstances into account.

Yet, at the same time, if you hustle and are scrappy you can always find a way
to make something come about.

------
zedpm
Could someone explain what he means when he writes "...the payout breakdown
was 30, 50, 20, meaning that Microsoft will probably get a 20% discount on
your bonus if you were planning on leaving"?

~~~
furtivefelon
He may have meant, if you quit after first year, you get 30% of the bonus,
quit after second year, you get 30%+50% = 80%. If you are going to quit, you
will probably quit after second year. So for most people who are quitting, MS
would not have to hand out the last 20%.

------
yekko
This is why you should NEVER work for below market salaries, you loose all
leverage.

~~~
cgopalan
I worked for below-market salary for a year and a half just so that I could
get out of .NET development and start working on Python. Now after a year and
half, armed with more Python experience, I have switched to another Python job
at what I estimate to be at least market, if not above-market salary.

Bottomline, never say never. You may have to take a temporary hit so that you
get to do what you want.

~~~
yekko
You should NOT have gotten yourself into that situation in the first place.
ALWAYS be looking.

~~~
cgopalan
Not clear about what you are saying - what situation? I had a choice - keep
working on .NET or take another job at a below market salary to work on
Python. So I did the latter because I loved Python. This was with the goal
that I would gain enough experience in Python to jump ship and work in a
Python-based environment, back at market-salary.

------
nedwin
I'm surprised that they kept you on below market salaries after the
acquisition. But I'm guessing that the bonuses more than made up for it?

~~~
enjo
I'm _more_ surprised folks fell for the "take it or leave it" gambit.

~~~
pdenya
What's the third option?

~~~
anon345345
(anon to protect the innocents)

I have been through the exact same scenario: acquisition, take it or leave it
offer of employement to join the employer.

You know what? Go to your boss, in a non-confrontational way, tell them that
you are underpaid, the market (meaning other companies) are making you offers
left and right at much higher salary. It's not you who is greedy, it's the
market telling you what you are worth. Then say you very much want to stay.

The deadline they give you about signing the original offer? Let it expire.
Until you do that, they don't take you seriously. You're just a whiny
engineer. Once their deadline is gone, see who calls first. They will call you
in a panic and find out what it is you want (you already told them by the
way). Then they'll move real fast to make a counter-offer that is at least
half-decent. Done.

~~~
yekko
Helps if you all do it together, eg, a union.

~~~
bconway
Some of us pride ourselves on not sinking to the lowest common denominator
(i.e. breeding grounds for mediocrity).

~~~
msellout
I'd imagine that the power imbalance of corporation vs employee creates a
"lowest common denominator" situation more often than corporation vs union.

------
basway
It is all too easy to celebrate wild success as the "right" plan but we have
to remember that success happens only to a very small minority and not
everyone has the luxury to throw caution to the wind. For every wild success
there are thousands of failures but of course we never talk about those.

Glad it worked out for both parties in this case even though they took very
different paths

------
nhebb
Completely off topic, but the boundary logo is one of the coolest I've ever
seen. Just wanted to give a public kudos to the designer.

------
taude
Seems like there's a lot of upset people commenting abou the realities of a
good startup exit explicitly pointing out the realities of a non-founder.
Probably why startup culture targets youthful employees.

------
obviouslygreen
Thanks for the counterpoint. It's definitely great that it worked out for both
of you, but it's also nice to have a more balanced/grounded view of what
happened to others coming out of the same situation.

------
cad
sometimes optimizely's cdn doesn't seem responding from Turkey or it goes just
haywire. fyi

------
ndesaulniers
I like the picture, $8 on a cat. <http://stuffonmycat.com/>
<http://stuffonmymutt.com/> <http://stuffonmyrabbit.net/>

~~~
ZirconCode
How does one make a ban happen?

edit: Did I miss something, all the other comments are good? =/

~~~
gus_massa
Perhaps it was only one stupid comment. He saw the cat with the bills and
remembered the cat's photo site. It's not a very relevant comment and it
breaks the "no cat's photos" rule. But it's not extremely offensive or plain
spam or tinfoil hat talk, and the older comments from the user look good. So
IMHO I think it deserves only a few downvotes (maybe 0 or -1?), banning the
user for this is too much.

~~~
jimmaswell
I don't see anything in the rules (
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> ) about cats.

