teratau's comments

teratau | 3 years ago | on: Is Elon right? We labeled 500 Twitter users to measure the amount of Spam

The difficulty is, how would you take a random sample when you don’t know who is a monetizable daily active user or not? Twitter can do this, but third parties can’t. They can only take random samples of people who tweet, people who follow, etc.

teratau | 14 years ago | on: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

I know profitable companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon typically offer you more options and stock grants (in addition to cash bonuses) at annual reviews or whatever.

Do (not yet profitable) startups do the same? From what I've heard, most don't offer bonuses in the form of options and stock grants, but this seems kind of weird to me. I can understand not offering cash bonuses if they're not yet profitable, but it seems like if I do a great job, I should get extra stock (since otherwise, basically the amount of stock I ever get is purely determined from my status when I joined, which could be much different from my status four years later).

teratau | 14 years ago | on: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

Ah, I did, and he slightly more than tripled my RSUs (from 150 to 500), but left my base the same. Which is also weird since that base is lower than my current one.

teratau | 14 years ago | on: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

Do you know if the 10% raise is automatically applied to the base salary of new hires as well?

I'm looking for a new job, and strangely, Google's base is about 10% lower than the base from my other offers (Apple, Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn), rather than 10% higher.

Also, to add my own datapoint: I'm four years out from undergrad at an elite school, and Google offered me $120k base and 500 stock units over four years. My recruiter said that given the way annual bonuses work (15% bonus if you perform average, all the way up to 15% * 3.5 = 52.5% if you're extraordinary), I should haven't have much trouble getting about a 30%-35% bonus. So my expected annual salary from base, stock, and bonuses is about $120k + 125 stock units * $600 (which is what Google is currently trading at) + 30% * $120k = $231,000.

If I'd joined Google right out of school, I expect this would be even higher, since I would have received the 10% raise last year (and also, I've made a series of poor career decisions to join no-name startups that I think have kept my current base salary lower than normal and made me a little less desirable). Pure speculation, though.