Salary history in interviews

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  • (None of this is legal advice and I’m not a lawyer though I spent a lot of time and money training to be one)

  • In NYC, it is illegal for employers and employment Agencies to ask about about salary history

  • But does that mean an applicant can’t bring it up?

  • No! Because “where an applicant voluntarily and without prompting discloses salary history to an employer, employment agency, or employee or agent thereof, such employer, employment agency, or employee or agent thereof may consider salary history in determining salary, benefits and other compensation for such applicant, and may verify such applicant’s salary history.” Cite - § 8-107 section 25(d) of NYC Administrative Code.

  • So the candidate has the right but not the obligation to share. That’s a good thing for the candidate to have given how asymmetric most candidate/employer negotiations are. When should a candidate share? It depends! But the typical case where it’s helpful to share is where a candidate is currently making a way-above-market salary.

Cybertruck!

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  • It “looks like it was designed by people who give things names starting with ‘cyber.’”

  • It’s supposed to be very tough but the results of the demo were mixed… It included a sledgehammer smash (no dent), a metal ball thrown at a window (it broke), and another ball thrown at another window (it broke too).

  • Musk says it should withstand a 9mm round. Was that the next test? Did that get canceled after the window smashing?

  • MOST IMPORTANTLY - how does this effect ME? We are car-less in Manhattan and back in the day I was a truck guy. As we consider a move to the burbs, the timing here seems perfect.

Ben Thompson's bull case for WeWork and a note on open floor plans

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Here, enjoy Ben Thompson laying out some justifications for WeWork’s sky high valuation!

While we’re on the subject of modern office space, I’d like to point out that open floor plans are a management tool to prevent you from having a nice private phone call with a recruiter like me.

When we talk to candidates, they are either on the street (“CAN YOU HEAR ME?” “Kind of!!”), they are working from home, or they are whispering while hiding in a conference room or stairwell. These last ones are the best because I feel like I’m in the CIA talking to a secret informant. Cool stuff.


too many emails!

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Cal Newport (CS professor, author of Digital Minimalism) contemplates the “irony in the history of technology that the development of synchronous distributed computer systems has been used to create a communication style in which we are always out of synch” in this new yorker article. Lots of good stuff, but my favorite part is the anecdote of a CEO who has managed to reduce the time spent battling the inbox - “Recently, the founder and C.E.O. of a publicly traded technology company told me that he spends at most two or three hours a week sending and receiving e-mails; he has replaced most of his asynchronous messaging with a ‘regular rhythm’ of meetings, which allows him to efficiently address issues in real time. ‘If you keep needing to send me urgent messages, then my assumption is that there’s something broken about the way you’re doing business,’ he said.”

It reminds me of an anecdote of that Dan Carlin shares in this podcast, about General Joffre, a leader of French forces in WWI. Joffre instructed his subordinates that, even during some of the most severe/dire fighting, he was not to be interrupted during mealtimes or sleep.

You can either be a doer/leader; or just a message-responder. I’m probably the latter ;)

gummies to just gums: a peek into the mind of a business owner post 8p

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im pretty sure in about 40 yrs i will have no teeth left, as i have a disturbing addiction to gummy candies (and burgers but that’s unrelated for this particular post). every night around 8p (post dinner..i’m not an animal), i fetch my gummy bucket (a cookie jar of sorts for gelatinous treats) and grab a handful. i think it’s about time i blessed the inexperienced gummy munchers with my rating systems of best to worst gummy options:

  1. twin snakes- these are without a doubt my favorite. so beautifully balanced- one sour, one traditionally sweet to have any which way you please. if you eat together its a delightful surprise. if you peel them apart, you can choose total sour or total sweet. truly so many options and so delicious.

  2. haribo goldbear gummies- a classic

  3. starmix- a bundle of options with all of my favorites, including twin snakes

  4. happy cherries

  5. happy cola

  6. peaches

  7. sour patch

  8. sweedish fish

enjoy!

Options and AMT

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[not legal advice and not accounting advice!]

The first question on most people’s mind when evaluating an options package is how much the value of their employer is going to increase. This is a good question. And it’s fun to think about. You can do some pretty straight forward option math (good summary in this post by Katie Siegel) and see just how much you’ll make. Of course, the IRS wants a piece of that. But who cares, you still made money, life is good.

If, however, you’re concerned about whether the value of your employer will increase, things can be trickier. Not only can the value of your options package go down, but the IRS may still get a piece! Income tax, after all, applies to all gross income, and gross income “means all income from whatever source derived”. It doesn’t matter that the options granted to you are not cash - they are taxable income the instant you receive them. The IRS can issue regulations that postpone taxation on income until there’s a liquidity-producing transaction - and that’s kind of what it did in the case of employee granted stock options. For a good summary of these rules, read this from the National Center for Employee Ownership (thanks to that Siegel post for the link).

It’s only kind of because if you exercise ISOs, you can end up paying a lot in AMT even though you haven’t sold the stock (as in the case of John, at that link). And if you were to hold on to that stock while it goes down (and in the case of privately held stocks, you might have no choice), you’d be in trouble. It happens! And if you were an uber employee who went into debt to exercise your options, this rocky IPO could be extra troubling.

Long story short, keep taxes in mind when thinking about an option package.

paying the bills

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New tech (at least in my case) makes it easier to pay for things and kinda lose track of what you’re paying for. Recently someone stole my credit card and purchased a monthly netflix subscription. I reported the fraud to the credit card company — they refunded the purchase and sent me a new card. And then the bank sent netflix the new card number so that the subscription continued uninterrupted! I was charged again this month. Turns out you have to call netflix too and get the card blacklisted. Maybe you knew that already. Anyway, enough about my $15.99/month fraud issue and check out a guy from Lithuania was recently indicted for stealing over $100 million from Facebook and Google. He sent the bills for products/services he never delivered and they just paid them. Wild stuff.

wtf is this....

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Amazon: The Treasure Truck

We hand-pick our favorite, new, trending, local, or delicious items, load them on the Truck, then cruise around town spreading joy for everyone with an appetite for fun. 

Here’s how it works:

  • We send you a notification revealing that day’s must-have item

  • You buy it on Amazon and choose a pickup location

  • You meet us at the Truck and get the goods!

Can't wait to meet you, 
The Treasure Truck Team

MCDP 1: "Warfighting" and the NATO Catfishing story.

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“[W]ar is a social phenomenon . . . the conduct of war is fundamentally a dynamic process of human competition requiring both the knowledge of science and the creativity of art but driven ultimately by the power of human will.” -MCDP 1

A recent Wired magazine story revealed that NATO ran a “catfishing” operation on its own soldiers to determine how much they could learn from and influence soldiers conducting a field exercise. The results are generally disturbing (they were able to track troop movements and learn soldier’s sensitive personal info) and the conclusions are familiar (blame Facebook!!).

I’ve been bothered by this story since I read it earlier today. At first I thought about it as the next iteration of a trend reported by the NYT last year (here) where bad actors spread fake and manipulative stories to civilians living near NATO operations to undermine faith and trust with those NATO operations. But this seems to be of a different kind that’s much worse - it’s one thing to disrupt some civilian/military relations and it’s another to undermine a soldier’s willingness to follow orders (and likely, ultimately, a soldier’s willingness to fight). The researchers “compelled service members to engage in ‘undesirable behavior,’ including leaving their positions against orders.”

This gets right to the heart of what warfare is, at least according to MCDP 1. MCDP 1 outlines the US Marine Corps’ philosophy of warfare - a more modern, shorter “On War”. Technology has always been an important dimension of war - it has a close relationship with a fighting force’s capability to destroy people and equipment. But this NATO operation revealed something new - a technology that, instead of physical destruction, destroys a soldier’s will to fight - per MCDP 1, the “ultimate” driver of the conduct of war.

So we can blame Facebook. But maintaining a soldier’s will to fight is the responsibility of the military (its most important one, perhaps!), not social media companies. The expression “weapon, gear, body” is supposed to instruct service members their priority of maintenance in the field (don’t eat food with a dirty weapon). Maybe it should be changed “get the heck off your phone, weapon, gear, body”.

Are the Atlassian founders fans of The Sopranos?

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The founders of Atlassian were just profiled in the New York Times. Besides being an interesting addition to the “billionaires - good thing or bad thing debate?”, it’s an example of founders growing a biz without moving to Silicon Valley (Most Atlassian employees, however, are now in San Fran). But most important are the portraits in the background of the picture that accompanies the profile - reminiscent of, and maybe inspired by, Tony Soprano and Pie-Oh-My.

guys, wework.... i cannot

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i died in october 2017 when wework’s ceo said their valuation was based on energy and spirituality. actually, i think he said, “No one is investing in a co-working company worth $20 billion. That doesn't exist. Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue." im sorry but this is truly insane.

i then died again when wework renamed their company the We Company. from bloomberg opinion w/ matt levine (thank you !!):

Me: What does your company do?

We: We encompass all aspects of your life, in both physical and digital worlds.

Me: Wait that’s terrifying.

We: We’re like Facebook, only you also live here.

Me: Who did you say you are again?

We: We are We.

they are actually making a preschool called wegrow because their cofounder and also wife of ceo thinks it will allow 5 yr olds to find their lives’ purpose. she said, “These children come into the world, they are very evolved, they are very special. They’re spiritual. They’re all natural entrepreneurs, natural humanitarians, and then it seems like we squash it all out of them in the education system.”

ive now died thrice with this.

ya’ll….this seems like the new theranos or something except with a bit more of an entertaining levity because they’re not messing with terminally ill cancer patients…but like still, what is this nonsense?

VanderZanden preaches the insurgent's creed

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“‘Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,’ Lenat explained. ‘What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.’ So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, ‘socially horrifying’: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.”

This is from Malcolm Gladwell calls the “insurgent’s creed” in “How David Beats Goliath” and it’s a good way to look at Bird and the crazy year the company has had.