For your first job this is easily explainable and as long as you leave on good terms with your employer you should be ok for any future reference checks too.
The concern with a short tenure at a job is when it becomes a pattern, say 3+ jobs w/o having stayed for about 2 years or more. That's when you might fall into a red-flag sort of situation when looking for future employment.
Your company does not have unlimited vacation based on how you have described the situation. It's unclear to us how much time you've been with the company. Let's say you've been there just 1 month and didn't mention upfront you'd be taking those 6.5 days off, then that feels like minor abuse of the policy on your end. Let's say you've been there a "significant" period of time of > 3-4 months, then they are shafting you.
In my experience unlimited vacation is only as unlimited as the person asking for it. Many people are too timid to actually ask for the days off. It seems like you've already done the asking, and this is more of a company culture problem and you are right to consider leaving or having a frank talk with your supervisor about what unlimited means. Perhaps you can change it to be 5 weeks a year with them and they'll feel better with a bounded number for you and you'll feel better being able to take off when you want.
Recently interviewed someone and was mentioning the work/life balance and unlimited vacation and their response was "Come on...unlimited vacation is a scam" I then explained that I had already taken off about 3 weeks this year with another 3 planned, and that it's "unlimited" if you ask for it. Maybe my situation is unique, or maybe people are too timid, I'm not sure. I'm glad I'm working at a place where taking vacation is part of the culture for long term success.
I'd also encourage anyone interviewing with a company that has unlimited vacation to talk to a non C-Level or founder employee about what vacation they've taken so far this year and their opinion of how well the unlimited policy works at their company - hopefully you can get a straight answer as this is just as important as monetary compensation.
First, a paid lawyer who has dealt with taxes on options is the best way to get a legitimate answer to your specific situation.
Speaking for US taxes - it depends on a lot of things. The first of which are they NSO or ISO's? Most likely they are ISO's.
If they are ISO's, them vesting has no tax implications until you exercise them. The company should have given you an exercise price. This is the per option price you would pay to own the shares after the vesting date. Let's say they gave you 1,000 options each year for 3 years at an exercise price of $1.00. Then after that first year it would cost you $1,000 to exercise those options. You would then be liable for AMT gains from the current fair market value of the options minus the exercise price. Let's say that when you exercises the 1,000 options, they were worth $2.50. Then you would have had a "gain" of ( 2.50 - 1.00 )* 1000 = $1,500 even though you haven't sold them or received any money. This gain is used to compute your AMT. The AMT has certain allowances so depending on how much that "gain" is and your salary you may or may not owe extra taxes on the gain for the current year.
If this was confusing - do some googling on ISO AMT and then contact a lawyer.
You should find the support channels at any websites you visit that don't offer ad free viewing options via paid subscriptions or otherwise and encourage them to add support for that. Then you can pay each of these websites individually.
If you're not into that, give some funding to a startup which is working to make micropayments on websites viable to remove ad-enabled content.
If you're not into funding something like that, try creating your own company or means to do that or joining a company which is working to advance ad-free viewing.
Now, if you're not into that, then stop visiting any site which has ads on it.
Lastly, if you're not into that, then suck it up and just view the ads which enable revenue for these sites to run.
1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.
2) I find that ad supported content tends to be not worth paying for. I do pay for subscriptions to magazines and sites that are worthwhile (a paywall is a very good indicator that you're not wasting your time).
> 1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.
What's your take on this thought experiment:
Imagine a giant barrel of apples on the side of the road with a coffee can next to it. There's a sign that says "Take an Apple, Leave a Penny"
Now imagine you don't carry pennies for moral and/or pragmatic reasons. They're too heavy, or you don't want to support Big Copper, whatever. But you want an apple.
It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.
Let's do a realistic thought experiment that's actually fair:
Imagine you have a movie that you love. It's showing tonight on an over-the-air channel that inserts ads throughout it. You decide to record the show and watch it later.
> It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.
This is why I said a "giant barrel", because serving web pages does have marginal cost to the server owner, and from there you could imagine a situation where your page view does diminish the number of page views left for "paying" customers.
I might fast-forward through the ads, but I wouldn't feel good about it or try to defend it philosophically.
If a website put up an "ad-wall" (click to view!), I would not try to bypass it. Instead, they want the experience to be friction-less, subtle, (or, alternatively, overwhelming and surprising) so I don't quite notice the ad is there, or can't click away fast enough to avoid being influenced by it.
That is malicious by any reasonable definition. They are trying to impose something on me without making it explicit. Shielding myself from such a thing is ethical. With your pennies and apples example, they are not imposing anything on me, they're not performing a bait and switch. We can both engage within the rules established on the sign.
The web existed long before ads. And it had higher quality content, too.
In this ecosystem, ads are parasites. If there is a workable method to filter out the parasites while leaving the rest of a site intact, one should use it.
Though I would like to see a search engine that only returns sites without ads. I suspect the results would be better.
You shouldn't be "forced" to see ads. Quality content can exist with and without ads. But, ads are the price to pay to visit one of these sites with ads. My suggestion was leading towards that if you don't like a site with ads, then don't visit it. As opposed to using an ad blocker as a filtering method.
With respect to "the web existed long before ads" - Water has also existed before water companies. If you don't like to pay them, you can't just hook in directly to their water lines and syphon it off to yourself and bypass payments. You could however go out and get your own. Just like you could create your own news stories, online games, sites etc without ads.
Your search engine idea is a novel one, and it'd be neat to see that exist.
End users having ultimate control over presentation of content is the price to pay for using the web. If a business does not like an end user having control, they can't expect to reject that aspect while still keeping its users. Instead, they can go create their own platform.
I can appreciate the idea that creating an economy makes for sustainability. But I just don't see the merit with regards to web ads. The most noble ad-driven business model is news media, which is already rife with paid placement (and other propaganda) despite the ads - the motivation to profit from both sides is too great. And the most prevalent ad-driven business model is to aggregate creations from users who are not paid. If we were talking about what's right, then such sites should not even exist - they should be users' individual federated websites or even a better non-centralized protocol. But amorally, those sites create needless centralization points in order to profit off being gatekeepers. So users should feel no compunction about also doing self-interested things, like running ad blockers and other privacy extensions.
Nah, it's not my job to make your business viable. Internet business models would be a lot more likely to succeed without ad blockers just like airplanes would be a lot cheaper if gravity didn't exist.
This. If a business stops working because of technological progress, it's not my problem to keep it afloat. We don't have many blacksmiths anymore, so should everyone stop using things made of metal or make their own? Ad tech has been digging their own grave since they started with crap ads, poorly-secured platforms, annoying / malicious experiences...and now they're asking everyone to feel bad for them. Google manages to make an absolute killing with ads, and those don't make my eyes bleed like the ones on most news sites. I guess ads for articles don't work; the value the viewer gets isn't worth the price. Free market blah blah ok so maybe your business isn't viable any longer. Pivot, get acquired, or die, just like everyone else.
What is the argument for AMT on ISO's? The Uber employees would own an asset which is not liquid, but a tax on them as if they were. And, if investors are buying preferred shares and not common stock which the employees own, how is the fair market value of the ISO's determined?
Just curious if someone can make an argument on the positives of AMT holistically.
Lack of AMT on ISO exercise creates a bunch of tax loopholes.
Imagine a family member transferring a large family asset to the next generation by treating the asset as a corporation which keeps issuing new shares. If shares are transferred as-is, the recipient would have to treat their value as income, so instead the corporation issues a bunch of ISOs and allows the recipient to exercise those.
If the shares are never sold, the recipient avoids income tax and estate tax on a fairly large wealth transfer.
> if investors are buying preferred shares and not common stock which the employees own, how is the fair market value of the ISO's determined?
IRS code section 409a. Companies typically hire 409a evaluators who have data on companies with similar metrics. But from employee's standpoint it's basically the strike price of ISOs issued to someone who'd join today.
Affirm has taken on a lot of debt funding as opposed to equity funding. Partly because they are in the business of issuing loans and paying equity for the loans would be silly for founders/investors/employees.
The total amount of money raised is probably < $100mm in pure equity, and the valuation is probably a favorable $800mm when fudging the numbers.
With a recent WSJ article citing that 43% of student loan borrowers are currently not paying back debt, and with Affirm largely trying to issue loans to that "millenial" market, we will see how this high risk lending plays out.
While doing this for your own profile could be useful for you and some metrics you may want, someone else could be a bit more nefarious.
On a high profile/traffic blog, web app, or site - could just include some targeted, random, or interesting LinkedIn profiles, and then all of these people would be bombarded with misinformation about who's viewed their page.
Want to confuse sales team at XYZ Startup Corp., sure have all of their profile links in hidden IFrames too...
If all you need to get onto the list is a request to the profile page URL, even a simple image link in a forum signature/profile image/etc. might be enough...
Unless it's actually "your business" and you are a founder, then leaving on Friday after this 80 hour week is ok.
If it's 6pm or 7pm on a Friday and you have worked 80 hours that week, and you need to work more, then you've scheduled something wrong or management has.
And, if you're a founder, who is imparting a culture of leaving to get rest on a Friday evening is not ok, or working 70-80 hour weeks is the norm, then good luck with that culture when people turn resentful.
Respecting yourself and your life and your employees lives while trying to be successful ... that's how it works.
The concern with a short tenure at a job is when it becomes a pattern, say 3+ jobs w/o having stayed for about 2 years or more. That's when you might fall into a red-flag sort of situation when looking for future employment.