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Twitter Wants To Hire 88 Engineers, IPO Signs Grow

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

9 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Too late by Anonymous Coward · · 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 · · 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 · · 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
  2. Re:TWITTER IS FOR TWATS !! by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Funny

    And they are hiring !!

    Why not apply? - sounds like your ideal position.

  3. I regret not taking engineering in college. by SolomonLallie · · Score: 3, Funny

    My dad should've kicked my ass when I told him I would take Comparative Literature.

  4. need a new tag by phantomfive · · 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."
  5. That seems an awful lot of engineers by Viol8 · · 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 · · 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.

  6. Re:Yeah, right by allcoolnameswheretak · · 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.