hkarthik

Sounds like you're on the fence about leaving, first step is decide if you want to leave or not. Then plan how to exit and retain some value in the equity (if it's worth it). Be open about your plans to exit the company and if the founders trust you, they'll work it out with you.

You should try to negotiate a conversion of your ISO shares to NSO shares, and extend the exercise window by 7 years. This will change the tax profile a bit for the shares, but allow you to keep your equity and still leave to do something else. It's a common option, but not given as an option to every employee, only those who are well vested. But it's way better than losing your shares with a 90 day exercise window.

If they won't go for that, you should ensure that you know what the current 409a value is for the company. Ask one of the finance folks to help you answer that question. If it is lower than the strike price on your ISOs, you are underwater on the options and you should not exercise and instead let them expire. You'd be better off investing the $25K on something else with better returns.

Unfortunately most EVs are way heavier and cause more wear on roads, so we'd be paying an even higher green tax to reduce emissions and fossil fuel usage.

I wonder if the POS companies take a share of the tip as part of the total transactions flowing through their systems.

Then they'd be incentivized to show the tip screen by default, and maybe jack up the default amount to 20-25%.

I've seen the Wolf in a few companies and they are given some special treatment for sure. The corporate equivalent of the babe and the sports car.

Years ago, one of them had a Macbook Pro while the rest of us were dealing with garbage Dell laptops that barely worked due to aggressive security scanners. He got his turned off by IT.

Agree this is a key skill and necessary archetype in large orgs.

But I'd call this person The Wolf (named after the Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction.

On small, focused code bases, yes. Anything built in the last 5 years or so can probably be made to work with .NET core and on a non-windows machine.

On large monolithic .NET codebases originally built from the 2000s era, absolutely not. You need to either rewrite or stick to Windows. Porting doesn't seem to be worth the effort.

Yeah the big downside is the exponential explosion in e-waste with all the LCDs that went obsolete within a few years, with no real resale market since everyone is one click away from getting a brand new one on Amazon.

I'm still running a 13 year old LCD TV in a guest bedroom. Just the thought of trying to either sell or see it end up in a landfill upsets me.

Manufacturing costs and margins on LED-LCDs were far better for manufacturers and likely what killed Plasma.

Exploiting this aggressively helped Samsung win market share and become a top TV manufacturer, causing Panasonic and Pioneer to exit the business, and nearly kill off Sony. Their only real competition is on the low end with Vizio, HiSense, TCL, etc.

OLED still can’t match these margins, which is why only LG really makes them in large quantities. Others, including Samsung are dipping into OLED to capture the videophile market but not selling the sheer volume or making huge profits on them.

I played with RedwoodJS over the holidays and there is a lot to like. However it does paper over a lot of complex things with fairly leaky abstractions currently. Expect to have to understand how GraphQL, Prisma, and React work whenever you encounter something that doesn't quite work.

This is not uncommon with most frameworks in the early days. I used Ruby on Rails since just before 2.0 and it was similar back then.

But the team behind RedwoodJS is great, and there's a nice community on Github, Discourse, and Discord. So I'm expecting great things.

Plus it's nice to have an omakase approach to learning all of the new frontend tech and getting something working quickly.

Yup, definitely industries (like web3/crypto/defi) where this can be done in the short term, but it still constitutes a lot of risk for the long term.

Even if you are getting $1M in cash today, who knows if you'll get it the following year when the underlying token they're liquidating to pay you in cash loses value and the founders are getting rekt. In some cases, you may only get the cash for a few months.

I agree that HN loves to hate it on crypto, but as this community ages you have to expect somewhat of a more risk-averse mindset to set in. Even YC funding is so high, I don't consider it as risky as it was 10 years ago.

Unless you're in the upper levels of management (VP equivalent or higher) at FAANG, it's difficult to get this salary at a market rate. For the vast majority of mere mortals, you need to get an above-market rate to achieve this. And this requires taking on more risk.

The least risky way is to join a pre-IPO, VC funded company after it's at least past Series D round, and get a significant equity package that is equivalent to at least 2-3x the same pay at a FAANG company.

Then be patient, wait for an IPO or acquisition. Note this could be years. And during that time you won't get any liquidity (like a FAANG employee would).

Depending on length of time, this could result in several years of above market pay (through stock which continues to vest post exit), or a one time big payout that averages to more than $1MM/year. Note that depending on tax treatment (ISO versus RSU), that could reduce your after tax payout.

Other options would include starting a company or joining even earlier stage (before the Series C). But then the time horizon for an exit can go up, and the risk also increases as many times the equity gets heavily diluted or the cap table is adjusted significantly to make room for later stage investors.

If you've primarily worked on B2B/enterprise software where the company makes a lot of money with a smaller user base, try working in consumer software where the company makes a lot less money across a lot more users.

If you've primarily worked on consumer software, do a stint working on B2B software.

The way you work as an engineer changes a lot among these two customer types, and there are valuable lessons you can learn and apply from working on each one. The systems design and scaling challenges can also be quite different.

Your versatility as an engineer who can recognize a wider variety of problems and define different solutions also improves.

There a lot of B2B-like problems lurking inside of big consumer tech companies. And a lot of things that can go faster and provide massive technical improvements if you deploy B2C thinking and tech inside a B2B company.

DevTools companies usually have to move to a model where they're starting to pull in Enterprise accounts with licensing priced in the $40K-$100K/year range.

The $30/month subscription is just to entice in startups. If the startups grow into larger companies, the strategy is to upgrade their pricing. Inevitability, this creates a weird situation where one day a company goes from paying a few hundred dollars per year to several thousands of dollars per year for the software they're already using and rely upon.

That's about the time that someone internally will say "we can just build this ourselves." That's where it can be exceedingly hard for devtools companies to convert if their initial target market was mostly startups. They have to up their sales game and tackle big companies with Enterprise features. That can be a real struggle and many never quite figure that out.

I think this misses the mark on the fact that we now have an aging population in the USA, and an aging population has different needs when it comes to raising families that the urban lifestyle simply hasn't evolved fast enough to support. Urban areas in the USA like NYC are still the playground of the young and unattached. I think European and Asian cities have done a much better job at this.

With two kids aged 10 and 12, I need access to a sports park for practices and games. I need space to park a car and roads wide enough to support them because I have a lot of things to haul. I need good public schools that don't break the bank to provide my kids the support and community they need.

Everything smooth and convenient about living as a single person in an urban area quickly turns into living life on Hard Mode for families. As our working adult population ages, cities need to evolve to meet these needs, or expect people to move out as they outgrow the lifestyle.

I'm sure there are folks who live in places like SF with families and ride around in heavy urban traffic with 2 kids on an electric cargo bike, but that's just not for many of us. We're happier and way more stress free in the suburbs or even in the rural areas working remotely.