Thank you for saying this. I’m currently an engineering manager at a “fun” and “interesting” company in SV, and I absolutely hate it. It took me a while to figure out why - but in retrospect, it’s pretty obvious. Writing Jira epics and doing code reviews for someone else’s vision is, for me at least, deeply unfulfilling, no matter how ambitious that vision is.
We're working the wrong way across the industry, developers are being cut-off from the processes they are instrumental in. None of it makes any sense and it's soul destroying.
It goes both ways too, like companies that try to keep business analysts and strategists completely separate from the database and data generation specifics.
I do have some RSUs, but no real way of knowing how much they’ll be worth, if anything. I don’t get to see a cap table, nor am I privy to the investors’ term sheet to know what their overhang is.
Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed.
But all of that is beside the point. When I (and presumably the original poster) are talking about ownership, we mean the sense of originating and creating the thing we’re building, not just owning the material benefit from it.
Not sure if you’re not in the Bay Area, but for a counter point many (maybe most?) of friends I know have had large payoffs (though not always with options, sometimes RSUs) - it does require some risk taking (holding onto them longer, not just immediately liquidating them, sometimes exercising options and floating that cost/tax until exit).
These payoffs range between 500k and $20M for people I know well with more clustered in the 500k-2M range. Higher level people I don’t know super well easily clear 50M+, this isn’t just one company exit event either *.
Equity should not be underrated.
* FB, Snap, Google (RSUs), Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Tesla etc.
You are listing companies that in several cases have been around for decades.
I was really thinking about the startups I have been involved with.
I have never worked for a FAANG and have never had desire to.
Also, the odds of 95% of HN readers actually getting a half a million dollar payout are probably extremely low.
My guess is most will have my experience. If you like working at Facebook you also don't have to give up compensation for equity, so you will get a decent salary, not give up market value comp for equity and then never be made whole.
:)
I value equity a lot. Where I work I have 100% of the equity.
Thanks again for sharing your experience and perspectives on all this. It’s emboldening me to go indie and start my own company rather than chase the mirage of stock options.
Ownership is one thing. If the company believes in a cause and everybody in the company is truly working towards that cause, it may be equally, if not more, fulfilling. Does your company work on a problem or cause that you believe in?
At any sufficiently large company, the connection between my work and the stock price is loose at best. If you're an executive, it might be more direct. But in the public companies I have been an employee of, I have never felt a shred of motivation from this stock-based "ownership" in the sense of a true belief that doing better work will make that stock be worth more. In the aggregate, yes, but individually, no.
