Frankly, NDS was the shit in its day. Huge improvement over the Bindery, and better in many ways than Active Directory. Bonus points if you implemented IPX/SPX networks or have spent time walking around looking for the missing terminator on the network.
Boardroom Miscellaneous Thread
- Thread starter Skoop
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My main reaction to Blind content was, "holy shit, do I really work with these people?"
I still have all my thin net tools, since I can reuse some of that for our legacy analog security cameras.
Thanks for that list - I kind of assumed salaries had to be stratospheric in the Bay Area, but I was still off by a factor of 2 with my guess on the 5+ years of experience...
edit: quote brackets were too tight, adding white space made link active again
Honorable mention for just generally being in charge of the token ring architecture?
How about a 100MB FDDI ring for the servers bridged to a 100/10Base-T network for everything else?
GroupWise was great in it's day, and I loved NDS. AD was not as good when it first came out.
And Notes on OS/2 was
Pretty sure not believable. Glassdoor gives starting salaries as less than half that, even in San Jose and San Francisco, and around $150k at Lyft for 4-6 years experience in that area. Are there really companies out there showering early-career engineers with 1-3X salary in benefits?
Many large companies in the fortune 1000 offer both bonuses and annual stock grants. This isn't just the case at large tech firms but some engineers I know at Discovery Communications get a 10%-15% annual bonus on top of their salary. Annual stock grants can also add up to a lot as long as you work there long enough for them to vest. Those are all included in TC but are not considered salary, nor are they always fully accounted for in Glassdoor's numbers.
It's also why Netflix is notorious for high base salaries because they don't do bonuses, stock grants, etc... and instead provide it all to their employees as cash.
Of course these are mostly only done in top job markets. I'm not aware of any company here in Orlando (regardless of how big) that does annual bonuses for software engineers, and I've only seen startups that really grant equity (and not to the amount you see at levels.fyi).
*Edit:* Actually I did work for one company here that gave generous annual bonuses based on the company's profit. However it was given as an excuse to not pay as high a market value for salary (though with bonuses it did end up coming to higher than market value), but then the company got bought by a private equity firm that immediately got rid of the bonuses without adjusting salaries. So not sure I'll fall for that again.
Just want to point out that unless you can liquidate your equity in a “startup”, it has no real value unless you get very lucky. So startup equity should be valued at zero.
Those are definitely TC numbers, and yes they're reasonably accurate. https://www.levels.fyi/ cleaned up their compensation data recently and you can now see the ranges for each company & pay grade. They aren't 100% accurate, but are close enough.
Seems believable to me. If salaries aren’t in the $250k-400k range how are houses selling for $1500k+ in such a HCOL area? After Cali and Federal taxes your take home pay takes quite a hit.
Would you rather earn $100k/year where houses cost $300k and the weather sucks or $400k/yr where the the weather is beautiful but traffic sucks and houses cost $1600k?
Maybe do the $400k/yr for 10 years and then FIRE.. assuming net income is $250k, should be able to live off of $100k/yr, save $150k/yr, or $1500k after 10 years not including growth.
Houses sell for that much because they are priced for DINKs who are both making huge salaries. Hugely annoying for families like us, where I earn more than enough but my wife is a preschool teacher. Can't even afford a plot of land within 1 hour of work.
Not really what happens here. There are a lot of all-cash deals though. Plenty of foreign investment and internet millionaires.
Lots of people just cash in their RSUs for a significant downpayment.
There are start ups and there are start ups. If I had started working at uber a year ago, I’m might not be thrilled with the current value of my RSUs but the correct accounting back then would not have had them set at zero. Some company that just raised a $2 million angel round is a different story.
It's not the "they get stock grants and bonuses" that's unbelievable. It's that they amount to multiples of what Glassdoor says is their totally believable average salaries. Not percentages, but multiples.
Yeah, I get 10-15% of my base salary in bonuses and grants in a good year, and I understand that at Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like, every year is a good year (until it isn't). But 2X? 3X? Do we have any people working for them on here who are willing to divulge their base pay and total compensation to validate these numbers?
Glassdoor shows base salaries. Levels.fyi shows base + bonus + equity. Compare the base numbers between Glassdoor and levels.fyi and you'll see they're in the same ballpark for newer companies like Uber.
Many of those high-compensation positions pay as much or more in equity than they do in base salary. That's where the 2X and 3X discrepancies come from.
levels.fyi also caters to people explicitly seeking high total comp. I get the impression it's skewed toward the best negotiators and those actively seeking high compensation numbers. I only have one inside source at one of these companies who vaguely corroborated the numbers as being in the right ballpark, though she suggested the levels.fyi data was about 20% higher than their internal comp data.
It's going to be interesting to see how the equity-based comp plays out if/when we hit a major pullback in tech stocks.
I recently interviewed at Amazon and bonuses + RSUs added nearly 50% to the base salary ($120k -> $170k), and that was for a fairly middle-of-the-road manager position (in Phoenix too, not even Seattle or the Bay). Doubling or tripling that is not inconceivable for high-level engineers and directors.
I didn't get the job, and (although it's easy to justify this with that in mind) I don't know that I would have accepted it anyways. There were some big red flags in the interviews and it was apparent that some of the toxicity that you hear about is right there under the surface.
How was the Amazon vesting schedule?
Amazon is notorious for back-loading the vesting schedule: 5% the 1st year, then 15% for year 2, then 40% for years 3 and 4.
You have to stick it out through the first two years to hit the bulk of your equity payout. Many of the ex-Amazon employees I know left around the 2 year mark for better work/life balance. They're definitely big on the carrot/stick motivational strategies.
Amazon is notorious for back-loading the vesting schedule: 5% the 1st year, then 15% for year 2, then 40% for years 3 and 4.
You have to stick it out through the first two years to hit the bulk of your equity payout. Many of the ex-Amazon employees I know left around the 2 year mark for better work/life balance. They're definitely big on the carrot/stick motivational strategies.
Literally the only question I was asked about actual personnel management was "How many people have you fired, and how do you approach that process". Not "How do you motivate your team", or "How do you help build camaraderie in previously dysfunctional situations" or anything like that... but how well do I fire people. Sounded lovely.
This is why I didn't spend much time on our local FA
Of course, I ultimately ended up in a toxic, overworked situation anyway, so maybe I should have just gone full FAANG from the start.
Yes, engineers can get more than 2X yearly base salary in their initial RSU grant on a 4 year vesting schedule at the big guys.
I don’t know about the senior numbers but I’ve seen offer letters in matching situations for new grads and that site looks fairly accurate. Plus google and facebook at least are offering signing bonuses to people right out of school.
Perhaps they've had a problem with managers keeping poor employees too long and being unwilling to separate from employees that should be let go?
It could also be a sign they are trying to correct that in new management hires.
That question could reveal a lot about a manager’s performance management style as well as their general exposure to difficult situations. First-time managers often require a lot of mentoring to handle difficult situations, so it’s helpful to know if someone has that experience.
Theoretically, if I had asked that question of an interviewer I’d want to hear:
- How the employee’s problems were identified, quantified, and measured
- How the manager communicated the problem to the employee and provided additional mentoring and direction
- What pass/fail criteria were set for employee improvement and how these were communicated to the employee (PIP. No surprises.)
- How was the firing handled for the employee and their team.
- With perfect hindsight, what does the manager wish they had done better?
- How did the manager adjust their interviewing practices and hiring rubric based on this experience
- Does the manager take any partial ownership for the bad hire or poor performance?
- What is the general tone of the manager regarding firing: Empathetic, or spiteful?
The line of questioning could reveal a lot about the manager’s approach to difficult problems. Firing someone is near the top of the list for common difficult situations.
That said, the ex-Amazon employees I’ve worked with were all unnaturally paranoid about being fired for the slightest perceived mistake. Could be coincidence, but I got the impression that Amazon culture has a heavy “up or out” pressure where the threat of being fired looms large over everything.
Theoretically, if I had asked that question of an interviewer I’d want to hear:
- How the employee’s problems were identified, quantified, and measured
- How the manager communicated the problem to the employee and provided additional mentoring and direction
- What pass/fail criteria were set for employee improvement and how these were communicated to the employee (PIP. No surprises.)
- How was the firing handled for the employee and their team.
- With perfect hindsight, what does the manager wish they had done better?
- How did the manager adjust their interviewing practices and hiring rubric based on this experience
- Does the manager take any partial ownership for the bad hire or poor performance?
- What is the general tone of the manager regarding firing: Empathetic, or spiteful?
The line of questioning could reveal a lot about the manager’s approach to difficult problems. Firing someone is near the top of the list for common difficult situations.
That said, the ex-Amazon employees I’ve worked with were all unnaturally paranoid about being fired for the slightest perceived mistake. Could be coincidence, but I got the impression that Amazon culture has a heavy “up or out” pressure where the threat of being fired looms large over everything.
Facebook asked me the same thing. I laughed at the recruiter and said "I don't have to fire anyone.... I just give them nothing interesting to do and they self-select out". Apparently the wrong answer.
We could probably take 500 of the 1500 people in the IT org here, stick them in a room, and pay them to do nothing, and we'd be better off.Facebook asked me the same thing. I laughed at the recruiter and said "I don't have to fire anyone.... I just give them nothing interesting to do and they self-select out". Apparently the wrong answer.
Or they enjoy doing little to nothing and getting paid for it.
Facebook asked me the same thing. I laughed at the recruiter and said "I don't have to fire anyone.... I just give them nothing interesting to do and they self-select out". Apparently the wrong answer.
I used to have a lot of friends that worked for a large financial firm that had a similarly sized IT department. From listening to them talk about their jobs at parties, at least 50% of them were superfluous, and their project timelines were insanely long.We could probably take 500 of the 1500 people in the IT org here, stick them in a room, and pay them to do nothing, and we'd be better off.Facebook asked me the same thing. I laughed at the recruiter and said "I don't have to fire anyone.... I just give them nothing interesting to do and they self-select out". Apparently the wrong answer.
I was hanging out with PWC and some other banks at a Sox game last week. And yeah, the other banks were fucked up in almost exactly the same way(s). It was kind of amazing.
I'm not sure if I felt better or worse about our situation after that.
I'm not sure if I felt better or worse about our situation after that.
We could probably take 500 of the 1500 people in the IT org here, stick them in a room, and pay them to do nothing, and we'd be better off.
Ug. I'd make the effort to do good work just to get out of that room. I didn't get into IT to be around people all day.
I would, too. The difference is that I know what "good work" means. And it doesn't mean "Run harder on the same hamster wheel you've been running on for the last 20 years."
Most of the folks in that room wouldn't know that. And if you explained it to them, they would ask how they were supposed to keep running on the wheel while they did the new thing.
Most of the folks in that room wouldn't know that. And if you explained it to them, they would ask how they were supposed to keep running on the wheel while they did the new thing.
A coworker and I were making a comment just earlier on how the organization seems content with not making progress towards goal X for over a year and contrasting that to the fact that I'm trying very hard to not drive myself crazy because I've been here over a month and feel like I've gotten nothing valuable done.
In other news, my company just sent us an all excited email about how this new vendor management tool was now live. I go to click on the links provided and nothing happens. I try to select any of the text and nothing happens. That's when I realized they sent a welcome email to everyone that consists of a giant single image with all the text and "blue links" as part of the image.