I wish that were true. I've seen it in person (of course, this is not representative of every team every day --but it also occurs).
This isn't a knock on you. This is a knock on people who are parasitic to a company. Look, people cargo culted the SGI&Sun ethos and said, aha, they know! Let's follow. But these places are no longer the cult of engineers, it's the cult of MBAs and biz-dev types who if they were not in tech would be doing similar useless things at investment banking firms.
These are the kinds of people who balloon spending: we had this and that at [FANG] Let's get this that and the other here without knowing why we had it there and whether or not it make sense here, but, hey, you hired me, so let me have what I know -no, I don't want this viable alternative, that's not what the cool kids at FANG used, eeewww!
The particular compromise attempt in South Africa was reported on lots of Internet forums.
My assumption is that Coinbase or their card provider was breached. That happens and I get it, but the lack of action (the card is still active!) in response to repeated customer inquiry is evidence of a broken process.
How would email being compromised leak a debit card number? Can't think of any service I've used online in the last decade+ that would send me the full debit card number that way, or even make it visible when I sign in to their website.
I was really big into Deep Work's hyperactive hivemind and saw Slack as a negative until I took a full remote job and found it to be a critical tool for async communication.
The solution ended up being really simple: cmd + q when I want to focus.
This petition was created by one person (may or may not be a current employee) and posted to Blind. There were zero replies before they deleted it.
The creator of this petition then sent it to @Carnage4Life/@GergelyOrosz[1] on Twitter who perpetuated the idea that this had actually been signed by employees and was causing a rucks at Coinbase.
To me this is borderline misinformation because it is not representative of any reality.
I don’t care about the initial trigger much, mostly that the CEO’s first response to a possible employee problem was that it was dumb and to threaten his employees over it. Not a great look regardless of whether it was one employee, zero, or several hundred. Leaders should have much more compassion than this.
I guess I'm just frustrated at these "tech writers" for re-posting unverified information from Blind and then needing to walk it back later. It's unprofessional and risky.
Too bad Mr. Armstrong didn't choose to keep his mouth shut for a bit longer, to verify if the claims were from actual employees. Alternatively, he could have made a single tweet:
"I am aware of the open letter published today that was claimed to be from Coinbase empoyees. We will do our best to verify this and also respond to those employees internally to try and solve any issues they have with the direction of our company. I appreciate all feedback from Coinbase employees, positive or negative."
> if the common stock becomes less than exercise price, their personal assets are on the hook
Can someone explain what that may mean for the >50% of employees at Bolt that bought into this program, now? I'm really struggling to grok what my quoted sentence entails...
By taking part in this program, you are essentially taking a personal loan, partially secured by your stock options which will vest later.
If you don't happen to understand Stock options: At a later date you will have the OPTION to buy company stock at a set price (often referred to as a Strike price)
So some entity is lending you money because they know you have Stock options and presumably will be good for the money when they vest/mature.
Of course, if the value of the Stock at the point of your options maturing is LOWER than your strike price, you essentially have earned yourself the option to buy $4 apples at the price of $50 an apple. Eg: your options are worthless (beyond their ability to purchase shares which might not be buyable on a public market)
So since you took out a _personal loan_ you now have to pay it back.
EDIT: I missed one thing - you actually get to exercise _now_ if you take out this loan... This has slightly more upside because it means that you could have in theory, sold those shares for immediate upside on the secondary market and thereby have de-risked yourself. If you didn't, then you got hosed. You could also have a capital gains advantage by spreading the gains I suppose
I was struggling to understand why someone would take a loan against options rather than just sell them on the secondary market like you mentioned and I think the key difference is that you can't sell an unvested option on the secondary market but with this Bolt program you could take a loan against an unvested option which is unique and kind of bizarre. Who would underwrite such a loan and how is the accounting for it done at the company level? Also wouldn't they be taxed as income?
a lot of popular and semi-popular startups are hard for some VCs to invest in. So some of them like ESO fund (https://www.esofund.com) will give you money to exercise and pay taxes but on condition that they'll take a decent amount of profits when you sell the stock
These employees chose to take out a loan in order to exercise the options. These employees now own the shares that they exercised their option for _and_ a loan to pay back the amount of money spent to exercise. If the price of these shares becomes _less_ than the price spent to exercise the option to receive the share, then the value of the employees' shares is now _less_ than the price paid to exercise. This means that if an employee wants to pay off the loan, they first sell their shares, and then they're still on the hook for the remaining difference between the sale of the share price and the principal for the loan.
For the Bolt employees who took this deal, I feel bad...
This post comes off as dated. What you're describing is how the market was in summer 2021. Not spring 2022.
The paradigm shift occurred in March and the sentiment continues to chill each week. Any signs of a "golden age" are the remnants of decision making that occurred sometime in 2021.
Where can I watch to see updates on this topic? Stock market I guess? Is this due to Ukraine/China (production reliance) or just the aftermath of pandemic?
With a quick google you'll find tons of recent job posts for software engineers and drastic stats for unfilled software engineer positions. Meta, Netflix, and Twitter come to mind as big tech that are struggling, but they are stand outs because pretty much all the other tech like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, etc. are still actively hiring and happily scooping up engineers that are being laid off. The impact on the hiring market for engineers has been negligible so far.
I found these channels to be helpful:
- Rahul Pandey (e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADWkkJtZna4)
- A life engineered (e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i5iFlP01mQ)