Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

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I think startups have become too much of an industry unto themselves, and they are developing their own versions of many of the same issues that the big companies of the past inflicted on themselves. They are living on the (fading) memory of how well startup employees did 15-30 years ago.

When I saw a really positive reaction to YC posting a template sales agreement the other day, that's a signal that it has jumped the shark. Venture companies are supposed to be taking big risks, but it's a big deal to have a "best practices" based sales form? Sounds like when my big enterprise CIO looks for validation from Gartner, etc for any decision making.

I worked at a late stage startup in the dotbomb days and walked away with a decent equity position that based on the "best practices" discussed today would have been somewhere between 75-90% lower. If you look at total lifetime compensation, my decision to work for the government is financially much smarter than one of these startups. Salary is the midpoint between startup and a bank, but benefits are very rich. Add in the future value of pension & benefits, and it is a bad deal to leave unless I was a co-founder.

It's pretty funny because everyone told me that big companies like Google are bureaucratic and slow, while the startups are fast and nimble. In reality, I was interviewing for 8 weeks and places were asking me to come back for second and third on-sites. Google was the last company that I on-sited with, the only company that let me skip a phone screen, had incredibly professional and responsive recruiters, and told me they were preparing an offer a week after the on-site and had the offer a week after that. The interview was interesting and had creative questions. Even though I had no competing offers to show them, they still crushed the offers I was asking for and didn't get. When I expressed interest in Product (even though I was interviewing for an engineering role), other companies told me that engineers are not involved in product decisions, Google told me the opposite and had a few interviews questions where we talked about product. Yet the VC startups are still complaining that we go to Google for the free lunch.

How much do you get paid now ? Thanks for your insightfull post.

Also were you asked about linked lists / trees during your google interview? Did you have to write code on a white board?

Not comfortable sharing specific numbers, but check out Glassdoor for a range. The key to Google offers is realizing the value of target bonuses and restricted stock units. Typically a startup will offer you Common Incentive Stock Options. When they vest, you have to buy the shares out of pocket and pay capital gains on the difference in valuation, even though you have no means of selling them unless the company exits. The company can also exit via a sale, in which case if the sale is too low common stockholders get screwed (and they might do it intentionally to screw over ex-employees and grant retention bonuses to current employees instead). The reason for this is because "investors are putting up money" and therefore deserve preferred stock, even though they are asking you to take a significant salary cut for those common stock and that salary cut represents a far bigger portion of your income than the investment represents the VC's portfolio. Look up Liquidation Preference for more information on this.

Google gives you restricted stock units which you can sell immediately upon vesting (or hold onto one of the hottest stocks of the last decade). No need to pay any money out of pocket and risk getting burned, you can only make money.

As far as the Google interview, there is a massive amount of information about it which the Google recruiter will provide, but check out Glassdoor interview questions, Cracking the Coding Interview, and Steve Yegge's "Get that job at Google" post.

Linked-lists/trees are absolutely fundamental data structures so of course you should know them. Every single engineering interview at Google _requires_ a coding question, so yes there was whiteboard coding in every interview. I would highly recommend buying a whiteboard and practicing at home because things like space management and hand-writing matter.

A lot of the industry has copied the Google interview one way or the other so you might as well study for it even if you don't get the job.

> Google gives you restricted stock units which you can sell immediately upon vesting

But you have to pay taxes on those RSUs at the moment of grant (if you do an 83(c) election), or at the moment of vest (if you didn't). How does Google or anyone else work around that? Do they also give a tax-covering bonus with the vesting?

There is no 83(c) election. At the moment of vesting the amount is considered regular income (no RSU * market price on that day) and you pay taxes on that. A portion of shares is withheld and sold to cover taxes but you may owe more. When you sell you pay capital gains tax on the difference, short or long depending on how long you kept it. There is no work around, you just keep in mind taxes when calculating your grant worth.

So, it's just a bonus denominated in shares instead of USD. Is there any difference whatsoever to getting it in USD and buying it on the open market at the same day?

From your description, sounds like the only difference would be fees (instead of Google issuing shares, selling them, getting money, giving money to employee, who then buys Google shares) - but surely there's some other advantage?

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