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Comment by brootstrap | Hacker News Reader

This is cool... I was first employee at startup who sold about 5 years later. My original stock options sheet said my shares would be worth a cool 1.2mil. Turns out the shares were only worth about 60k. Pretty solid , but not fuck you money. more like pay off some of wife's student debt and kickstart retirement saving money haha.

I will have to say though getting a check worth 5 figures and cashing that bitch felt great!

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A 5 figure check is standard sign-on bonus at most medium-large companies - you don't have to wait 5 years to get that.

Really? The most I've ever had was $10k with a one year clawback clause, and the 45% bonus tax left me feeling like I had trapped myself in a job I didn't like for a measly $5k.

In my experience (which includes my circle of friends in the bay) FAANG companies routinely give sign-on bonuses in the $50k-$100k range for standard software engineers with a few years of experience.

The largest sign-on bonus I've personally seen was one that I myself received in an offer from an hedge fund in NYC: $150k (I didn't take the job anyway since I hate the cold weather, very stupid of me).

This seems like it would make the insane cost of living most of these companies are in much more manageable, no? I've never considered leaving my low cost of living area because I figured my standard of living would go down on the average software engineer salary.

Do these companies exist outside of major cities? I don't think there is a single company in Utah that does sign on bonuses. At least none that i've ever heard of.

Probably not. I don’t have any direct knowledge about the job markets outside top tech cities, but what you say isn’t surprising.

glad to see you have a positive attitude about it! just curious - did the company just not end up being worth much, too much dilution, or was your original options sheet was misleading?

my second startup i've worked at just got acquired and my options are about enough to buy a new iphone :)

curious what your equity was?

I'm not entirely sure on the details. Some similar companies were getting bought for hundreds of millions, ours was only an 8 figure deal, not 9 figures haha.

we went through multiple rounds of funding so shares got diluted...However we fucking made it , which is nuts.

This is a great example of the maths though.

Intuitively, I would imagine being #2 in a company that ends up being worth 8 digits would at least be a solid start towards real wealth, far above the $60k range.

Cool though it always surprised me how poorly treated USA employees are when it comes to stock when compared to the UK

I have a friend who made about 3x that in a FTSE 100 company over the same timeframe a 5 year share save (paid a lot less tax as well)

I did enjoy at one point in the first dot com boom being a dollar millionaire along with the rest of the poptel coop.

Good for you! Scrappy young me fresh out of college was willing to do anything. I wasnt a CS student, self taught coder. I grinded HARD for a couple years. But hey you are a 23 year old smelly dude with long hair. Nobody likes you anyways. Might as well work a lot on things you love!

Now at 28, I would still say experience was worth it. However again im' not the CS degree 4.0 straight to FAANG guy who can make 100/yr (or whatever it is) straight from college. I had to hustle a bit to gain the codebro skillz & then find a job. I didnt have FAANG kissing my ass to pay me out the wazoo to 'change the world' with 'machine learning and AI'. News flash, yall are just selling shit , you aint changing the world. You just make really large paychecks and get pampered :p

That’s 12000 per year so in the big picture it’s really not much.

If it's additionally to their regular compensation?

Not if they took a 13k/year pay cut to get it. Options are usually "instead of" not "in addition to" salary.

I started off as a wee-lad fresh out of college (degree in science not computer programming) so was on a 50k/yr salary and i got options too.

We actually got a bigger bonus as part of the acquisition, just not technically stock options. My total comp after the take-over is roughly 120k (pretax).

For my situation , it was pretty amazing. I'm not on the standard path of CS degree + working at FAANG. I'm a DIY-er , self taught. Given where I am now, 23 year old self would be fucking amazed. We built and sold a digital company from nothing to some mega corporate suit bros worth billions of dollars!

Jesus, a 98% cutout.

Glad you have a good head on your shoulders. Still, that must have been tough.

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