On the contrary, the comments are far too kind. This sort of error is simply unconscionable and the person responsible for it deserves far worse. It's unfortunate that the poor sod responsible for working around it can't do any more than write a scathing comment, because at an absolute minimum the responsible party should never work again (in any industry or role).
The person responsible doesn't care in the slightest. They got paid, their product not only got sold but is still being sold, and so there's nothing to be bothered with. That's what firmware's about: toss it out the door and move on. Trust me, if the person who did this even knows about it, he surely does not care at all.
The good news is that presumably the introduction of this bug means that they needlessly rewrote the RTC for this generation of chips, which means they might meaninglessly rewrite it again and the bug will be fixed!
Really, or are you just saying that? They "missed it" because either (a) they didn't bother to test at all, or (b) they actually thought November has 31 days and didn't bother to do the 4 seconds of research required to get both the implementation and the test correct (since, of course, the people writing this are almost certainly Chinese and know as much about the Gregorian calendar as they know about McDonald's hamburgers, Norman Rockwell's art, or the present value of the euro).
> 150k guaranteed comp, 25k bonus, 75k vesting equity is low for the companies w/ equity run-ups in the past several years, in my opinion.
You're right, assuming that everything continues as it has. Nothing is guaranteed; that 150k can vanish in a puff of smoke through no fault of your own, and take all your unvested comp along with it.
> the bonus is basically guaranteed.
No, it is not. Many, many people will tell you of their time spent at BigCo when the economy is not booming, and after the free donuts, the first thing that goes is the bonus. You have to read the bonus plan very carefully to understand how it's computed. It's quite possible that your bonus at Facebook or whatever depends solely on your own rating, but at most companies that's just the final multiplier and all kinds of other things have to happen in order for the bonus pool to exist at all. In even mild headwinds, it's likely that only a part of the expected bonus will be paid, and not unusual for there to be none at all. Furthermore, the bonus plan is usually determined one year at a time, so the fact that whatever needed to happen this year for everyone to be paid at 100% did happen is no guarantee that the criteria in next year's plan will be satisfied.
Do not assume that the future looks exactly like the recent past. It is certainly possible that the near future will be even better than the recent past, but at least some kind of mean reversion is a hell of a lot more likely. I predict that very few people will end up receiving as much total cash for their work over the next 5 years as their simplistic and rosy-eyed calculations of today would indicate.
The rule of thumb if you work in California is that you'll take home half, assuming all your income is base + bonus + RSUs and not exotics like ISOs or deferred comp plans. The rest goes to the cost of non-cash compensation, various governments, and your tax-deferred retirement savings. It's usually slightly more than half, depending on the exact numbers, whether you're buying medical plans for a family, how much you save in a retirement plan, etc., but that's the safe first-order approximation if you're budgeting.
So someone starting at BigCo in California should expect to take home 100-125k a year for the first few years. That said, I would caution new entrants to the workforce about three things:
- Tax rates are likely to go up, and certainly will not be going down. It would not be shocking if you were taking home 10% less in a few years solely because of higher taxes. You can also expect your cost of living to grow much more quickly than the tax bracket boundaries will rise.
- Your RSUs are likely to be worth less than you're expecting, because market prices will decline in a bust (a major bust is all but certain at some point in your upcoming 4-year vesting period).
- In a bust, you will likely get a smaller bonus or none at all (even if the company is still making money), and are unlikely to get a raise, even a nominal cost of living adjustment. These conditions can last for several years, so even if you keep your job (hardly a given), your total compensation will likely be much less than you expected when you were hired. A few companies may be doing well enough that you will be exempt, but don't count on it.
All of these things need to be factored in when evaluating compensation. It's not as simple as adding X + Y + Z and assuming that all changes over the next 5 years will be either neutral or positive. That's not how life is.
In my BigCo experience, they do recalibrate pay scales at different locations, but not nearly to the extent that they should. For example, one of them had three US geo "zones" that were supposed to reflect the cost of living there. The bay area and perhaps Manhattan were the highest, I forget what was in the second, and the third was basically "everywhere else". The difference between the top and bottom was maybe 10-15%, considerably less than the width of the salary band for each grade.
So to make it concrete, a new hire at a particular grade might have gotten $120k in SF or $105k in Little Rock (base). Considering the high taxes and housing costs in SF, the new hire in Little Rock would have had a much higher standard of living.
Of course, working at a non-HQ site is a major career-limiter, so 10 years down the road you might have been better off relocating anyway. Depends on where you are in life and what you want to achieve.
By contrast, non-US salaries are dramatically lower independent of the cost of living at a particular location. So if you're working for a US BigCo outside the US, you had better be in Chiang Mai or Belize, not Berlin or Hong Kong. As the author of this post notes, no one seems to know why this is so, only that it is.
They are also overestimating the likelihood of hitting the jackpot at a startup. The d100 rule of thumb guidance is insanely optimistic; there is not anywhere close to a 5% chance that your lottery ticket will be worth life-changing money; it's probably 1% at best (and later discussion suggests that 0.5% might be about right). Nor is there a 30% chance your ticket will be worth anything; 10% is more realistic (ignoring all the ways that your ticket in particular may end up being worthless), and the "anything" is likely to be so small as to be noise relative to a BigCo base salary. Remember, a general rule of thumb across all industries is that 90% of new ventures fail within 5 years.
Of course, given today's stock market prices, it's likely that any options you get at BigCo will be out of the money when they finally vest, and there's a good chance your RSUs will be worth less than you're valuing them today. But the effects of these things are still much smaller than the vastly overstated likelihood of ending up with a winning lottery ticket.
Obviously, it matters very much what the market price of the stock is. Your grant will be for a certain number of shares on some vesting schedule, not for a certain cash value.
Remember kids, stock prices don't always go up. Some stock prices go down, and sometimes all stock prices go down together. Those RSUs that, if fully vested, would have a market price of $400k at time of hire, may well be worth anything from $0 to $millions at the time they actually vest.
When talking about companies as well established as these the risk is a lot lower. In some cases since the goal is to give you a set number in compensation they will factor in a poor stock performance and give you an adjustment to make up for it.
Do you mean companies as well established as Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, and Netscape? Or companies as well established as Woolworth, Kodak, MCI, and Sears? Or perhaps you had in mind the New York Central Railroad, LTV, and Pan American Airlines?
Yes, it is possible that you will be given additional grants or options repricing if your company's stock price declines. Usually not, unless you're a key employee or top performer, but maybe. But that doesn't mean the price won't just keep going down anyway. To say nothing of the bonuses and raises you won't get, or the mandatory across-the-board 10% pay cuts, or the elimination of all the miscellaneous perks. At least, unlike the employees of many of the companies I named above, you won't have a pension you can lose too.
I know it's hard to believe. Intellectually, you can look at history and accept, know very well, that most of these companies will fail someday, and many of them probably in the very near future. But viscerally, you can't get it, because they feel invincible right now. But they aren't. Believe it[0].
It is, in fact, possible that some aspect of a negotiation can be beneficial to both parties, but not for the reasons the parent suggested.
If we assume that your minimum bid is in fact below their maximum offer, then the market should clear: you should get hired. Under such circumstances, anything preventing a successful conclusion to the negotiations is harmful to both parties, since there exists a price at which both sides would be satisfied that they're getting more value than they're giving. Therefore, anything eliminating or preventing such an obstacle from arising is beneficial to both parties.
The corollary is that employers who insist on "social proof" place themselves at a disadvantage; they're less able to hire, and the people they do hire will likely be inferior. They are giving up value every time they enter negotiations, not by overpaying but by failing to engage in beneficial transactions. Those hidden costs can be, and often are, far greater than overpaying by some small percentage on the transactions in which they do engage.
> Under such circumstances, anything preventing a successful conclusion to the negotiations is harmful to both parties, since there exists a price at which both sides would be satisfied that they're getting more value than they're giving.
I am afraid, reality is more complicated than that. There are opportunity costs, and there are threats. (Read up about the latter in "The Strategy of Conflict".)
Threatening to do both parties damage, can give you a better deal.
