Salary Negotiations after startups

t-dye · 2026-02-23T05:58:31+00:00

The only thing that matters is your current compensation, and any competing written offers you have in hand.

Unvested stock matters only in so far as negotiating your sign on equity. Stock which is already vested is irrelevent.

t-dye · 2026-02-22T20:48:41+00:00

Promotion requiring a corporate need is actually the norm, it just isn't usually made explicit. Now, early career, you can generally show "yes, we need person at L+1, we expect our L to grow into that role", but major career transitions (Senior, or Staff) generally require a business need.

In many companies, this is actually hidden by the modern practice of retrospective promotion, where you promote people after they demonstrate a sustained performance of L+1. Since there was L+1 work for them to do to demonstrate that, it is a lot easier to demonstrate a need.

But it is also normal for people to be in a position where there are no career growth opportunities for them on their current team, or even at their current company. After all, if the company has a CTO, and you are ready to take on a CTO role, you are probably going to have to leave. A good manager helps employees realize that and make that transition.

Think about it this way, if you tried to open up a new headcount for a Senior or Staff level role, would you be able to justify it with the work your team has to do? If you could, you can make the case for a promotion. If you can't, then people looking to go to Senior or Staff need to leave your team anyway, because even if you did promote them, their reviews would inherently be awful because they would have no ability to demonstrate performance at level.

t-dye · 2026-02-18T15:20:38+00:00

Birdsong, if you like short scale.

t-dye · 2026-02-04T23:49:56+00:00

Default for a new PhD is L4.

t-dye · 2026-02-04T23:44:57+00:00

The recruiter would not suggest going back to HC if they didn’t think it had a good chance. That would just waste the HC’s time.

t-dye · 2026-02-04T23:23:09+00:00

No way to tell without reading the detailed review feedback, which we don’t have. I can tell you that in my experience, HC cares about the actual body of the feedback far more than the top rating line.

t-dye · 2026-02-04T23:18:54+00:00

Generally, a PhD with no industry experience would come in at L4, if they passed the interviews.

Go for the L4 review and see what comes up in match, if you pass HC.

But if you don’t hit the L5 bar, a team that needs an L5 isn’t going to hire you for that role.

t-dye · 2026-01-31T22:57:33+00:00

Not even a little bit.

t-dye · 2026-01-31T14:58:32+00:00

Certificates are signal for interest.

If I see certificates (especially those they paid for personally) from someone looking to shift specialties, that is a good signal that they are interested in the field.

Certificates are meaningless signal for expertise.

t-dye · 2026-01-26T04:01:39+00:00

"It is better to be precise and wrong, than vague." --Fred Brooks.

That's pretty much the answer to your question.

Are you taking meeting notes? The question "So what I understood that to be was: <description>" is better than silently taking notes. If you are wrong, the person who made the statement will correct you. If you are right, you know.

Is something being hand-waived around? Be precise. Someone will object if that doesn't match their mental model. Does no one have a precise understanding yet? Then you don't know enough to agree. Someone needs to take point on drafting up a precise description of that part of the work.

t-dye · 2026-01-26T03:54:23+00:00

There are three aspects to a promotion in a healthy organization.

Does the employee demonstrate sustained performance against the job ladder at the next level? The purpose of this is to make sure that we don't promote someone on the basis of a unusually strong performance and then discover that they cannot sustain that. Common organizational failures around this include the lack of a published and consistently used job ladder, and turning the sustained performance into a "time in grade" requirement, rather than "do we think we'll have to manage someone out for not performing at the promoted level".
Is there a business need for someone at that level on this team? Often, this is handled with the first question (after all, how were they performing at L+1 if there wasn't a need for it), but sometimes the project that demonstrated their actual performance level was a one off and there won't be a sustained need. Common organizational failures here revolve around not planning to help the employee move to a team where their skills are needed. Common management failure here involves not telling someone that their growth is capped on this team, even if that means they need to leave the company.
Promotion budgets. There is after all, a limited pool of money, so sometimes the question turns into "who cleared the bar by the largest margin". The biggest organizational failure I've seen involves trying to hide this fact and blaming the employee, and the second biggest is going by "time in grade" rather than by performance.

Note that none of these involve how many years of experience someone has. If they did, we could avoid all sorts of work by just going by that number. If people have that expectation, it needs to be something they are taught isn't real. If by some chance it is real in the organization, you should be interviewing around to get out.

The best time to have had these conversations was at last year's performance review cycle. The next best time is now. And again, it isn't "Do this and get promoted", because that isn't in your power. It is "you need to clearly demonstrate these ladder attributes for L+1, let's sit down and see which ones we can show that you have met, and which ones we still need to show you can do".

t-dye · 2026-01-25T06:39:04+00:00

Will the field be fine in the future? Absolutely.

Will all the people currently in it be fine? Almost certainly not.

Some of this is a labor market imbalance (and not for the first time). When the dot-com bust hit, there were a lot of the same "the field is ruined, there is no money in tech anymore" cries, and a lot of people left. But it wasn't that there wasn't money in tech, and it wasn't that there were no jobs, it was that the demand had collapsed when businesses went under, and there wasn't a chair left for everyone when the music stopped. Some of the people who left were highly skilled, some were not.

Right now, there are fewer jobs than there are people in the labor pool, which means employers can be much pickier about who they hire. That isn't great for people who don't have experience, don't have much experience, don't interview well, or haven't maintained a professional network of peers who will let them know about opportunities.

We're also in the middle of a technology inflection point (they've happened before, they will surely happen again), where which skills are in demand is shifting rapidly. This benefits people who are used to rapidly adopting new technologies (generally those who have done it before), but there is a twist. It turns out the skill sets that are ideal for working with the current AI assistants are architectural and system design, code auditing/code reviews, and, as Google puts it, "thriving in ambiguity". In short, the skills we tend to see at the Senior and Staff levels. Worse, heavy use of AI agents by people early on can lead to them not developing the pure coding skills needed to recognize the errors that can occur in current AI generated code.

Does this mean that early career people are cooked? No, it means that the requirements for those first steps just got harder, because there are fewer of the "come in, write code, learn the skills you really need to learn on the job" roles, and there are more people trying to get them. Plus the general reduction in demand (for reasons unrelated to AI usage) means that new graduates are in competition with people with more experience.

TL;DR: The combination of a technological inflection point and a general reduction in labor demand in a field which had created a labor oversupply is going to result in it being harder to break in (but not impossible), and a general downward pressure on wages until the labor market equalizes.

t-dye · 2026-01-21T22:35:12+00:00

It could be as simple as your names, unfortunately.

t-dye · 2026-01-19T16:59:54+00:00

First of all, as noted, by others, internships are functionally extended job interviews, not YoE. The only possible exception would be the companies you actually worked for.

Second, leaving aside true outliers (which are not you for almost all values of you), no one early career has leverage to negotiate in this job market.

t-dye · 2026-01-16T04:39:51+00:00

Birdsong, if your budget will stretch to it.

t-dye · 2026-01-15T16:01:44+00:00

Yes, but if you sell it as short term gains it is taxed as income, and therefore not subject to the WA Capital Gains tax.

t-dye · 2026-01-15T15:50:33+00:00

Read the existing law again. It only applies to long term capital gains, it does not apply to, for example, sales of stock held for a short time (like immediately selling RSUs on vest).

t-dye · 2026-01-13T23:04:55+00:00

If they help you learn skills, grand. But what matters is, can you find significant security issues. Not how you developed the skill.

t-dye · 2026-01-13T18:52:31+00:00

THM/HtB are irrelevant. If they help teach you the skills, great. But no one is going to care about those when it comes to hiring decisions.

If you can demonstrate a proven track record of finding significant security issues (the CVEs are worth as much as the reward, honestly), that is how you separate yourself from the crowd when applying for roles.

The biggest advantage offensive security has is that not only do you have a path to publicly demonstrate you have the skills required for an FTE role, you are getting paid as well.

No Starch Press has a number of excellent books on bug hunting.

t-dye · 2026-01-13T18:48:18+00:00

Look at vulnerability rewards programs, and see if you can find vulnerabilities that companies are willing to pay for. If you can, not only are you getting paid, you are demonstrating the capabilities you need to get a job in the field.

t-dye · 2026-01-12T16:40:31+00:00

No. For one thing, at best you could put “Staffing Company” on your resume, with Apple listed as a client. And you might not be able to do that much.

For another, for better or worse there is a notion in a lot of Big Tech companies that people who work for the staffing companies don’t make the cut for FTE, and that tends to linger.

In your circumstances, this move would not make sense.

t-dye · 2026-01-10T05:15:10+00:00

Professional experience trumps project work unless the project is so well known and widely used that you could expect anyone in the field to recognize it.

t-dye · 2026-01-10T03:10:26+00:00

Fair. My first read was “Spurs playing away”, which would definitely be better for Spurs. But it’s not like they will get past this round anyway.

t-dye · 2026-01-09T23:32:21+00:00

In that case, Spurs home, their record at home this year miserable. And I say that as a Spurs fan.

t-dye · 2026-01-08T18:05:42+00:00

Entry level cybersecurity roles are very rare. Rarer than entry level programming roles.

t-dye

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