It takes a lot to fire someone legally - oftentimes you have to document ~6 months of poor performance, put them on a PIP, give them a chance to remediate, etc. Combine that with normal long ramp-up times in a tech company, and by the time you know it's not working out and can fire them, they're pretty close or past the 1 year vesting point anyway. It's much more efficient if the employee decides to leave on the their own, if they know it's a mutual bad fit.

This removes the incentive to stick around for the windfall - if you're not enjoying your workplace, go leave and find a better one, and you get paid fully for time served. It's a lot like the buyout offers at places like Zappos or Coinbase, designed to make sure that everyone is on-board with the existing company culture.

This is simply increasing the risk of hiring short term employees in addition to existing risks including the high cost of ramp-up times.

In the current system a lot of options get clawed back to the company's benefit from an inability or unwillingness to take the risk of exercising.

It is no coincidence that this very simple modification is not too widespread.

But it's not always that easy. If you're a small company still looking for product-market fit or doing a fair bit of greenfield development, there's just not much work for a junior dev to do. These companies aren't all stupid or lazy or discriminating against new grads for some reason.

It's the same reason estimates are hard - we're building brand new things that we've never built before and a lot of the work is in the design. Junior devs need to be told what to do. The architects/senior devs become a huge bottleneck because they can only design so much stuff at once, so until you can find more of them you can't hire more junior devs because there's not going to be anything for them to do. Until you get to a point where you're doing repeatable work or your design/architecture is solidified enough to keep people on the guard rails, there's just not a ton of work for a junior dev to do.

Finally, you also have the issue that a lot of devs don't want to get into any kind of management but they want to be managed by technical people. You end up with a shortage of decent managers (where "decent" means both someone who's ok at the job of management and is acceptable to the team).

If we had more work to give to junior devs we'd happily hire them - they are so much cheaper!

And one other contributing factor is a lack of unions. Say what you will about seniority-based comp/perks, they do make people stay in one job for longer, which makes it more worthwhile to invest in a junior dev.

AFAIK that is not how stock works in this context. The company issues the shares ex nihilo. That dilutes existing shareholders (if not offset with buybacks) but otherwise doesn't cost the company anything. The shares are not vested so if you leave they return to the comp pool. The company doesn't magically issue new shares on your vesting date so any rise in share price doesn't affect the company anyway. The whole point from a company POV is they can pay you in paper (shares) they manufactured out of nothing rather than cash.

They are doing it this way to reduce the total number of shares they need to issue (aka cut compensation). There is basically no upside for an employee, the changes to vesting schedules or cliff are a sop to avoid having to tell their employees that they're cutting compensation. Employees can already borrow against those RSUs if they need money.

The idea that missing out on a 10%-200% rise in the share price over the next four years in exchange for a bit more flexibility in vesting is a joke. If the company actually cared about the flexibility they could just switch to 6 month vesting or monthly vesting without removing the upside. There is no benefit to removing the upside beyond reducing dilution. They sure as hell aren't going to apply that same policy to their executives.

Which I suppose you can just immediately sell and get back the cash - which begs the question of why not just model this as cash bonus compensation entirely?

The entire attraction of equity is that it can appreciate as it vests - that your (presumed) contribution to the company's market cap during your tenure is rewarded.

The first way makes employees lose out on an average of 2 years of stock growth.

100k with frontloaded vesting at (33/33/22/11) is much better than 100k vesting at 25% a year. But 100k frontloaded wouldn't equal 132k vesting at 25%, only the first year would be equal.

So that answer would not be sufficient if I had a competing grant at 132k, and was worried a second year comp drop. It may be true that Google gives really good refreshers and my above average performance will increase my comp. But I think of that like depending on a percent bonus, it's less reliable than base and my initial equity grant. And if I start using refreshers, raises, and stock growth with Google, I should also use it when looking at competing offers.

> you don't ever feel like your compensation has flatlined.

Emotionally that may feel bad, but I think it's caused by employees getting lucky. I don't think it's a problem that needs to be solved.

1) It's objectively bad if I have a cliff because my employer hasn't increased my comp as my market value increases. I should probably look for a new job.

2) It's objectively good if my cliff is because the value of my initial grant exploded. The drop will be bad. But if it's such a noticeable difference I'm probably sitting on hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in profit from my initial grant.

I believe they used to due quarterly vesting for folks who didn't get much equity, but now that you can have vesting of fractional shares, ~everybody should be on a monthly vesting schedule.

This is a bit of a change from e.x. when I was hired and my offer letter said N shares, and so when I joined 6 months later my grant had increased in value significantly. But it's still not the situation in these other companies, where you vest 6.25% of the dollar value each quarter, converted to shares or whatever.

Actually that wouldn't really be compatible with googles vesting schedule, now that I think about it.

I busted ass to get a single job; how is "only" 4 offers not amazing?

Not back then. Was not bright enough. That would have been smart. I think if I had phrased it as "I'm very excited about your potential, but I'm young and black swan events may happen and I might have to leave early, how about a 6 month cliff?". Probably would have worked.

> If someone is so unmotivated at a job that they're not making an impact

I didn't phrase it well. What I'm getting at is that risk taking is disincentivized your first year. You might have an idea that could have an upside of 100, but might also lead to a loss of -10, and in year one it's best to sit on that idea because if it were to fail you'd take a big personal loss. I think you have misaligned incentives that first year where the number one goal is not to risk rocking the boat, and number two goal is impact.

I have some LinkedIn job searches saved for Amsterdam, NL and I started noticing jobs from companies like Twitter, Github or Stripe where now they allow working remotely from EU countries. It's different than it was 2y ago.

I have never really had the opportunity to work with experienced developers for a long period of time (at least not experienced with the work I was doing) so for all I knew I am doing all sorts of things with bad form.

If you know enough about a web framework to get it going, use it to complete a specific set of tasks, and get it deployed with a database, it would put you ahead of a heck of a lot of grads that I know.

I wasn't suggesting this as an interview question, but more a self check for juniors. Can you actually bring something end to end? Yours works better in an interview setting, although it seems fairly trivial.

    fn put_string(array: &mut Vec<String>, input: String) {
        array.push(input)
    }
    
    fn find_string(array: &[String], input: &str) -> Option<usize> {
        for i in 0..array.len() {
            if &array[i] == input {
                return Some(i);
            }
        }
        None
        // or perhaps more idiomatically:
        // array.iter().position(|s| s.as_str() == input)
    }

    #[test]
    fn test_find_string() {
        let mut array = vec![];
        put_string(&mut array, “foo”.to_string());
        put_string(&mut array, “bar”.to_string());
        assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “foo”), Some(0));
        assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “bar”), Some(1));
        assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “quux”), None);
    }

What kind of salary are you offering?

The rear weighted AMZN approach made sense to me in terms of both optimising retention and some proxy for reward to contribution. I say this also as someone who left after 2 years and as a result left most of their stock unvested. It definitely made the choice to leave much harder so I’d expect it to skew more heavily toward retention benefits than a typical schedule. A typical schedule has a linear growth of what you’ve vested. I’d expect the value of contribution of a person to grow over time though. More context, more experience, more everything. Hopefully that means the you 3 years from now is making a more significant contribution than the you they hired. Typical schedules hope that the increase in valuation accounts for that compounding return. AMZN have shifted it to the vesting schedule.

That said they always talk about “total compensation”. So for the stock you’re not getting in the first two years you typically get as cash via a “hiring bonus” anyway. You could always just use that cash to go buy the equivalent amount in stock, no vesting required.

It makes "stay 53 weeks and cash out" less appealing, it makes "stay 6 more months to hit the next cliff" less appealing, and it rewards long-haulers (who are underpaid almost everywhere else in tech).

It can be a tough sell, and recruiters are trained to just say no, but persistence pays off. Same thing applies to getting jobs in general. If you aren’t persistent in your application process and aggressive in your negotiation process, you simply won’t have the best outcomes. It just becomes easy to turn you down.

Never said that - but if you had answered $50k, I probably would have!

I'm surprised you are having trouble hiring people - but perhaps if you are in the Bay and hiring new grads, they might be surprised when it is in the low $100ks.

Have to find a way to get past the HR screen until you have experience. Somethings that work: go to meetups. Often times the hiring manager or a tech team member is there and you can meet them directly. Apply at startups that don’t have a recruiting department yet. Email the tech team directly if you can figure out who they are.

Broken systems product broken systems.

The median tenure at AMZN is also 1.5yrs, per linkedin. Their strategy seems to be to work their people extremely hard to earn their RSUs and pay them like plebs with hard caps on earning potential (base comp).