Twitter Wants To Hire 88 Engineers, IPO Signs Grow

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Twitter Wants To Hire 88 Engineers, IPO Signs Grow

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday August 1, 2013 @08:02PM from the tweeting-on-the-clock dept.

Dawn Kawamoto writes "You should never do anything just for the money, but Twitter has 88 engineering jobs up for grabs and the company is apparently showing signs it may be moving closer to launching an IPO. If you find a Twitter job that works for you, better to get hired now when the cost to exercise your stock options will likely be far less than what you'll pay if hired after the company is public."

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Too late by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-01 20:15 · Score: 4, Interesting

If a company is popular and thinking of floating you're too late to get rich signing up. Chances are if you get shares they'll already have been diluted and you'll only get them if you stay there for a set number of years AND they don't get further diluted. If you're in the first 50 or so employees in a company that becomes a large multinational AND you play your cards right you MIGHT make some real money.
1. Re:Too late by tlambert · 2013-08-01 22:46 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  If a company is popular and thinking of floating you're too late to get rich signing up. Chances are if you get shares they'll already have been diluted and you'll only get them if you stay there for a set number of years AND they don't get further diluted. If you're in the first 50 or so employees in a company that becomes a large multinational AND you play your cards right you MIGHT make some real money.
  Depends on their valuation and exit strategy; if they plan to sell out to someone like Facebook or Yahoo, instead of an actual IPO, the options are going to be worth a lot less. If they are going to have a 35% loss like Facebook had, then it's not going to go well for the AMT charges for the people who exercise at the price they'd like to have, compared to the price they actually end up getting after whoever their makers are are done floating the stock to the first third party sell off prior to the employee lockup lifting. Facebook barely hit their ask in the past couple of days, and that was due to projected Ad revenue. Meanwhile everyone already had to pay their 2012 tax bill on their locked up shares for their RSUs and ISO early exercises at the "realized" value, which is much less than the actual.
  You are unlikely to get ISOs, unless they've worked a deal with the VCs, or have done the Google-thing, and made the ISOs non-voting stock to avoid control equity dilution.
  If they don't ask for too high a valuation, it could be a good deal, but it would have to be a grant price of something like at least 15% lower than the IPO value, assuming they wait a year after the grant, and long term gain it with a target between January and April, for you to break even on the taxes. That would mean waiting at least to Jan/Apr for the IPO so that you can sell long term stock in the tax gap to pay your tax bill. If they pull the trigger between now and the end of the year, instead, then it's a short term capitol gain and subject to AMT unless you come out of lockup before the end of the year, and can successfully sell. At that point, it's basically regular income, and if you're in California, that 15% for break even moves to 45% lower, since between the state and fed, that's what they're going to be billing you.
  Either way, you pay gains on your grant price as your basis price, and from $0-basis amount is considered income in the grant year (usually, there is a 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff before you can touch any of it, at which point it goes month to month on availability for sale). This is no longer pre-dot.bomb, given Sarbanes-Oxley. If you actually think it's imminent IPO, you would probably be better of getting bonused, unless they start low, have a quick ramp, a quick vesting cliff, and give you a great deal.
  Anyway, anyone entering into ISO or RSU agreements pre-IPO these days would be well advised to talk to a tax accountant before taking an offer.
2. Re:Too late by girlintraining · 2013-08-02 00:29 · Score: 2
  
  In other, unrelated news, Facebook stock prices briefly nearly reached it's initial sale price the other day, which the media has portrayed as a good thing. Unless of course you were one of the initial investors, in which case it's been two years and counting and still no return on your initial investment. The only other major social media website being publicly traded is MySpace (owned by Murdock, ticker: NWS). I probably don't need to remind you what happened to them.
  But surely a website named after a verb that means "to taunt, tease, ridicule, etc., with reference to anything embarrassing" will be a wise investment where these other two social media sites have failed... I mean, it's a foregone conclusion in marketing that social media is where it's at... despite these collossal failures. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta get back to denying climate change, the holocaust, and the notion that married people have sex...
  GirlInTraining
  Senior Marketing Consultant
  
  --
  #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
3. Re:Too late by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 01:11 · Score: 0
  
  Define real money. I joined a company after their series C financing. I was employee 250 or so.
  Upon acquisition (500 people), I made enough to pay off my mortgage and pay for my kid's college education.
  You might make six or even seven from twitter (facebook employees who joined in 2008 had options which were worth over a million over the course for the four year vesting)
4. Re:Too late by dgatwood · 2013-08-02 02:21 · Score: 1
  
  Chances are if you get shares they'll already have been diluted and you'll only get them if you stay there for a set number of years AND they don't get further diluted.
  Chances are, if you're one of the first 50 or so employees in a company, your initial shares will have been diluted so much by the time they IPO that they'll be worthless anyway unless you're already sufficiently independently wealthy that they'll let you buy pre-IPO shares to make up for the dilution. Oh, and chances are, if you're one of the first 50 or so employees, the company will go bankrupt before it IPOs anyway.
  Ironically, it has been my experience that the only people who really win are the ones who start out with enough money that they didn't need to. :-)
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
5. Re:Too late by Jane+Q.+Public · 2013-08-02 03:08 · Score: 1
  
  "But surely a website named after a verb that means "to taunt, tease, ridicule, etc., with reference to anything embarrassing" will be a wise investment where these other two social media sites have failed..."
  Yes, exactly. Stock options and VC money mean little to employees unless the company has value to people.
  
  At least Facebook, while fundamentally evil, has a vision and can write software. Twitter has been short on both of these.
  
  Twitter bought out what many people consider to be the best Twitter client ever, TweetDeck, and then butchered it. Their newest version does not work anywhere near as well as the version from 3 years ago, from before the acquisition. I could post whole pages of basic interface mistakes and other errors they made with it.
  
  They bought up the blogging site, Posterous, which had some pretty nice features. Then they tried to turn it into some kind of "social" medium. (A blogging service? Made social? What?) It soon stopped working as well as it had before they bought it, and eventually they killed it outright. Just shut it off.
  
  Having said all that: I don't think it's a fundamental problem with the idea of social media. I think it's an issue of social media being repeatedly -- and rather blatantly in some cases -- done wrong.
#ipo #overvalued #buyanyway by Eternal+Vigilance · 2013-08-01 20:37 · Score: 1

I wonder if the Twitter red herring will fit in 140 chars? "1. ad tweets 2. ??? 3: #PROFIT"
Re:TWITTER IS FOR TWATS !! by Chrisq · 2013-08-01 20:56 · Score: 3, Funny

And they are hiring !!
Why not apply? - sounds like your ideal position.
I regret not taking engineering in college. by SolomonLallie · 2013-08-01 20:58 · Score: 3, Funny

My dad should've kicked my ass when I told him I would take Comparative Literature.
1. Re:I regret not taking engineering in college. by phantomfive · 2013-08-01 21:56 · Score: 0
  
  Why, because you think money is the most important thing? It's not, forget about it and get back to writing if that's what you love.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
2. Re:I regret not taking engineering in college. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 01:43 · Score: 0
  
  I'm in the same boat, even though I studied CompSci. I've spent years becoming a 5, 6, and 13 specialist but Twitter's HR is doing resume scans for 88 engineers.
need a new tag by phantomfive · 2013-08-01 21:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

We need a new tag for articles that are advertisements for jobs from Dice.com.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
1. Re:need a new tag by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 00:07 · Score: 0
  
  speaking of dice.. they need one or two of these engineers.. maybe they can fix the current poll so we can bash^H^H^H^Hdiscuss facebook some...
That seems an awful lot of engineers by Viol8 · 2013-08-01 22:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

... for a website that when it boils down to it doesn't actually do that much. Publishes messages and some photos. BFD. We're not exactly talking about online banking here or even a site such as slashdot. Why exactly does it need so many people to do apparently so little?
1. Re:That seems an awful lot of engineers by Begemot · 2013-08-01 22:59 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  So little? Really?
  Think about the crazy volumes of users, bandwidth, data and connections they're dealing with. Throw in global presence, 24/7 availability, exceptional up time, non-stop war against spammers, fake accounts, fake followers etc and you're getting yourself a pretty tough task!
  Check the titles of engineers they're seeking. You'll find out that they're going as far as customizing networking devices, Linux kernel and MySQL builds, all that to keep the service up and running with a reasonable response time.
2. Re:That seems an awful lot of engineers by elloGov · 2013-08-01 23:08 · Score: 1
  
  Shouldn't judge an iceberg by its tip.
  Not to undermine the massive infrastructure twitter must maintain for its core service, Twitter has additional services such as Vine (short Video sharing) and TwitterTV (from the jobs posted). In addition, maintaining an API which multitude of businesses, academics and individuals rely has its own challenges. I'm sure I'm missing more info, but the point is there is much more going on at Twitter (as with most other companies) than the simple services the general public seems to be exposed to and these services are created and serviced by employees.
3. Re:That seems an awful lot of engineers by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-01 23:25 · Score: 0
  
  Seeing as /. get's a lot of things wrong that may not be the best example.
4. Re:That seems an awful lot of engineers by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 00:44 · Score: 0
  
  You are a moron. I sure hope you don't work in IT.
5. Re:That seems an awful lot of engineers by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 01:03 · Score: 0
  
  For maintaining the tracking & surveillance system of course since that's what's "in" nowadays everywhere!
6. Re:That seems an awful lot of engineers by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 02:17 · Score: 0
  
  Even simple things like publishing messages and some photos are hard when you have a hundred million people trying to do them all day with the expectation that everything should happen in 100 milliseconds.
Yeah, right by Viol8 · 2013-08-01 22:33 · Score: 1

Its generally only people who have a lot of money who say that money isn't important. Its fine being a wistful poet spouting profoundities on a blog read by 3 people and a very smart dog if you have a nice trustfund to pay for the skinny lattes and hosting fees. But its a bit of a different story if you have a landlord on your back and don't know how you're going to pay for the next meal, never mind next months rent.
1. Re:Yeah, right by allcoolnameswheretak · 2013-08-01 23:57 · Score: 2
  
  More money beyond what is needed to pay the bills and exercise your hobbies is not important.
  If you dream of yachting, driving a Ferrari and owning your private, tropical paradise, then money probably should be an important factor in your life. If you're like me and enjoy travelling, gaming, and the simple things in life, such as going for walks and sitting in a nice café, reading a magazine, without being shadowed by bodyguards, then having an enjoyable job is more important than having a higher paying job. Work will be almost 50% of your life. Choose it wisely.
2. Re:Yeah, right by dgatwood · 2013-08-02 02:32 · Score: 1
  
  More money beyond what is needed to pay the bills and exercise your hobbies is not important.
  Untrue. Most of us would like to be able to own a house, but that falls above your threshold. Most of us would like to eventually retire rather than working until the day we die, but that requires earning above your threshold so that we can save money for retirement.
  That said, there is some point at which earning more money is pretty much pointless. Having more money beyond what is needed to retire on the interest while still maintaining your desired standard of living is clearly not important. At the point where you no could have at least a middle-class lifestyle for the rest of your life without work, work becomes optional, and having more money is not important.
  By my math, somewhere around 3–5 million dollars (after taxes) is that magic threshold in pretty much any city in the U.S. except possibly New York. Anybody with significantly more money than that is wasting his or her life if he or she continues working. More to the point, those folks are taking scarce resources away from the rest of us who have not yet reached that threshold. Everyone would be better off if every CEO in the world retired after five to ten years and allowed somebody else to take his or her place. But I digress.
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
3. Re:Yeah, right by phantomfive · 2013-08-02 03:37 · Score: 1
  
  You don't need to become a programmer to pay your bills. You can do it fine, even with comparative lit.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If my calculations are correct... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 00:31 · Score: 0

When this baby hits 88 engineers, you're gonna see some serious shit.
1. Re:If my calculations are correct... by Megane · 2013-08-02 00:59 · Score: 1
  
  But they need to remember to be careful about where they get their plutonium from.
  
  --
  #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
88 New Engineers by ProzacPatient · 2013-08-02 03:21 · Score: 1

Maybe we'll finally get to post 228 character messages now instead of just 140!
Does my resume by LordMael · 2013-08-02 04:08 · Score: 1

have to fit in 117 characters or less?
It's never been a better time to be... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 05:52 · Score: 0

... a superstitious Asian, a piano-player, or a neo-nazi. Am I missing any other 88 references?
88 == HH people! by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 09:37 · Score: 0

Come on, not a SINGLE comment about 88 == Heil Hitler? Come on Slashdot, don't let me down, hurry up and add some conspiracy theories in as well for good measure.
job site doesn't work with Firefox by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-03 06:21 · Score: 0

Can't open any job that is listed... fuck them