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doktorhladnjak commented on Open guide to equity compensation   github.com/jlevy/og-equit... · Posted by u/mooreds
kccqzy · 8 months ago
My personal preference only: I'm glad my current employer has no equity compensation altogether; just base salary and bonus. My former employer did have RSUs, but they have an auto-sell program that I utilized every year.

In college the computer science department had an extracurricular talk about finances for a software engineer; the invited speaker was very adamant that holding most of your net worth in a company that employs you was an unacceptable concentration risk. I remembered that to this day.

doktorhladnjak · 8 months ago
A lot of employers who only pay cash have salaries similar to companies that pay cash salary plus equity. Perhaps the equity won't be worth anything, but often times it's extra on top of what's being offered. Those accepting cash only are often leaving potential expected value on the table.
doktorhladnjak commented on Open guide to equity compensation   github.com/jlevy/og-equit... · Posted by u/mooreds
paxys · 8 months ago
You don't have to pay tax if your RSUs aren't liquid.
doktorhladnjak · 8 months ago
This is not true at all. It only has to do with if you have "substantial risk of forfeiture". If they are your shares to own forever, the IRS considers receiving them taxable. This is why double trigger RSUs have expiration dates. It's possible they never become liquid. Therefore they're not your property yet. Therefore you don't owe tax until they are. Or they expire worthless someday, and you don't owe anything.
doktorhladnjak commented on Microsoft's 1986 IPO   dfarq.homeip.net/microsof... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
> Today’s entrepreneurs would do well to note that Microsoft made minimal use of venture capital. Microsoft’s only VC only owned 6.2 percent of the company. Gates didn’t trust them.

While the article touches on it here, Microsoft was able to avoid venture capital because it was highly profitable from its very early days. They turned their first profit in 1975, the same year they were founded.

It seems like more companies spend longer amounts of time being unprofitable and growing. How much of that is a zero interest rate phenomenon or the new normal?

doktorhladnjak commented on “QWERTY wasn't designed to solve type bar jamming” [pdf]   repository.kulib.kyoto-u.... · Posted by u/vishnuharidas
ajsnigrutin · 9 months ago
I'm more interested why some of us have qwertZ instead of Y there :D

(Z an Y are swapped... mostly a non issues, except with some games, where Z and X are some gameplay controls, and we have a Y down there)

doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
Isn't this based on letter frequency? In languages like German, Z is a fairly common letter. Y not so much. Whereas in English it's the opposite. They put the more commonly used letter in the center.
doktorhladnjak commented on In S3 simplicity is table stakes   allthingsdistributed.com/... · Posted by u/riv991
doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
Is there a more Amazon word than "table stakes"?
doktorhladnjak commented on Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg   sfgate.com/tech/article/e... · Posted by u/AntiRush
wisty · 9 months ago
> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies.

Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time.

Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong.

Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.

Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.

doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
I know several people that worked there back in the growth days of the company. They had all drunk the kool aid hard on the work connecting people and making the world a better place. Several of them became very disenchanted when scandals like Cambridge Analytica or the manipulation of the public during 2016 election occurred.

Zuck and the leadership there had really spun a positive, world changing narrative to employees.

doktorhladnjak commented on Layoffs Don't Work   thehustle.co/originals/wh... · Posted by u/indigoabstract
hibikir · 9 months ago
What is really crazy about this though is that sometimes it really is the interview setting, as people unused to interviews can, at times, emotionally collapse. I have seen people who are actually good programmers get wrecked by simple questions because of their inability to handle stress, and how the lack of interview practice turns a simple exercise into a hellscape.

It's not as if testing for performance under stress is useless: Tough on call rotations happen, and you might need someone that does well under pressure at 3 am in the morning. But the picture you get on a screening isn't as clear as it appears.

doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
Leetcode performance isn’t going to be representative of 3am incident response though. If that matters, you’re probably better off asking a classic “tell me about a time you responded to a page in the middle of the night” type question.
doktorhladnjak commented on Layoffs Don't Work   thehustle.co/originals/wh... · Posted by u/indigoabstract
russellbeattie · 9 months ago
A couple weeks ago Google announced more layoffs in their HR and cloud divisions. They have $100 billion cash on hand, literally more than any other tech company, and much more in longer term investments.

In round numbers, that's enough money to cover roughly 10,000 employees for 25 to 50 years (depending on how much you think the salary averages out to).

Regardless, the CFO said one of her priorities this year was more cost cutting.

doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
It's a business, not a jobs program
doktorhladnjak commented on Layoffs Don't Work   thehustle.co/originals/wh... · Posted by u/indigoabstract
ctb_mg · 9 months ago
> one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world

Off topic, but I'd like some more specific thoughts regarding what you are aware of for specific automotive technologies that GM has innovated over the past decades, to make this statement.

Intuitively, GM cars do not do well internationally, have been known to have creaky interior build quality, have silly features like turning the reverse lights on when you unlock the car in a parking lot, and are not competitive on a scale of luxury compared to their European and Japanese counterparts.

doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
I agree with you that most American cars are junk. I hate all these same features plus others like the weird headlight controls, parking break on the floor in non-trucks, not to mention the loose feeling brakes and steering.

Traditionally, GM sold other models overseas through brands like Holden or Opel, but these have all been sold off or shut down over the past decade or so except in China. GM now has a much heavier reliance on trucks and SUVs in the North American market. They sell some of those same product overseas still, but in much smaller quantities than before.

doktorhladnjak commented on H3: For indexing geographies into a hexagonal grid, by Uber   h3geo.org/... · Posted by u/wiradikusuma
crazygringo · 9 months ago
I've read all the comments here and still don't understand the rationale for hexagons as opposed to squares.

In every sense, squares seem to be much easier to reason about and easier to hierarchically partition than hexagons are.

There are certain advantages to hexagons in certain contexts, like six degrees of movement instead of four in board games, but I don't see how any of those advantages translate here for geographical indexing.

I'd love to understand why hexagons as opposed to squares in this context are a superior solution rather than unnecessary complexity?

doktorhladnjak · 9 months ago
You can more smoothly interpolate a function for points on a surface using hexagons than with squares. For Uber, think about things like surge pricing. If you compute a surge % for each hexagon, you can interpolate it for each rider location.

u/doktorhladnjak

KarmaCake day850August 2, 2020View Original