"But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines. Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early. Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions."
Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard to tell what really has changed.
I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within 6mo of starting their first job).
From personal experience, I can say that Google was only willing to extend an internship offer a week past their initial two week deadline. This is despite the fact that I was still interviewing with other companies at the time. From speaking with my university's career center I am not the only person this happened to.
Interesting. From "Work Rules" by Google's head of People Analytics. "I think they [exploding offers] put a lot of unfair pressure on the candidate, who should be free to make the best decision for herself without duress. After all, companies have lots of employees, but each person holds only one job. It should be one they are sure of."
Same with Amazon for the most part.
Returning internships are only allowed 2 weeks.
Full time offers after internships are given 2 weeks, but you can ask for an extension which does last a couple months. However, you're given a questionnaire on the type of team you want to be on and the longer you wait to accept your offer, the lower on the queue you will be for getting the team you want.
It really depends on how much they want you, and how you negotiate. I recently changed jobs. I ended up getting multiple offers, and for all but 1 of them, they were willing to wait 3 weeks for me to make a decision. I was very upfront about that if they were not, I wasn't interested in them, however.
I'm not a new grad, but when I last switched jobs, I had to negotiate very aggressively to even get two weeks to consider other offers that might roll in before I had to make my choice. This was between a number of companies in the Seattle area, both big and small. I'm glad I negotiated to, because I got an offer that was >10% higher than my second best offer, and it came in about six days after the first (of four) offers I got.
I think the problem is that corporations value certainty as much as developers do, so they pressure people to make their choice now, so they can send rejection letters to other candidates, get the ball rolling on HR papework, etc. as soon as possible. For example, let's say an employer interviews 5 candidates, 1 per day, Monday through Friday. They conclude that their best candidate was Mrs. Friday, the second best was Mr. Wednesday, and so on. If they give Mrs. Friday a week to decide, and she rejects them, they might find that Mr. Wednesday has also accepted an offer in the meantime, and so is off the market as well.
That's why employers pressure you accept (or reject) them as soon as possible. They want to know whether you're going to accept or reject, so that they can move on to their next choice, before their next choice disappears as well. It's a way for the employer to minimize the opportunity cost of extending you an offer.
Mental math (and arithmetic tricks) are pretty important for scoring high on the GMAT (for MBA admissions). No calculator is allowed, and while you can solve by pen and paper, for a very time constrained test, tricks can be the difference between a good and great score.
It's also somewhat valued in the business / consultant crowd for talking through assumptions and making estimates of problems.
I was young for my year after being pushed ahead a grade. I did fine academically, socially, etc.
Two factors that make me want to start my future kids late:
-Social maturity: it's way easier to handle social dynamics with a year extra of emotional maturity. Particularly important in high school and college
-Physical maturity: older kids often perform very well in high school sports. I, for example, grew and gained ~15-20lbs after I graduated high school (playing sports). That would have made my HS sports career much different, and therefore college prospects as well
I don't see any reason to starting kids early for upper/middle class folks, besides parent's bragging rights.
But Fidelity isn't writing down the value of the company, it's writing down the value of its shares. Do you have any guesses as to what this means, given they are probably the most senior equityholders on this investment?
My suspicion (from experience in the mutual fund industry) is that this is tax accounting related. Overly simplistic explanation: Mutual funds typically distribute short term capital gains at year-end, which is taxed as ordinary income (~40%), not capital gains (~15%).
Managers of funds that hold private securities actually have the choice to 'mark down' the prices of their securities in any given month. Think of it like valuing a house - if you want to value your total net worth, you can mark your price as what you want, to an extent (see Trump). Managers often use this flexibility to 'bury' losses in down times, or for tax advantages.
Finally, can't agree enough about who loses in these cases. Employees who vastly over-value options are the folks who lose in this case. Investments made by institutional folks like Fidelity are too small to even register as a blip to their overall funds, and those funds are diversified and managed to handle downturns in sectors like this.
That's not exactly fair. They hold many assets, so of course any action on any individual asset may not have a significant effect. However, if they behave similarly across all similar assets, it will have an effect on the overall fund.
I think the percent of holdings argument is going to apply to these funds at Fidelity even if you take all the startups they own together. I guess "tens of millions" becomes excessively dismissive though.
Sure but even still, suppose an analyst saves all of Fidelity's clients 1M in two days worth of work. We can't dismiss that as silly because that savings is so small compared to 5 trillion AUM, right?
I'd also like someone who understands the issue well to let us know whether these mark downs have any tax implications to begin with. I think it might sometimes be the case that marking down such a holding would allow recognition of a tax loss but I don't think that is going on here.
Stasis' logic is along the right lines - you need to think about it in terms of portfolio management strategy. Effectively, the manager is trying to switch as much of the gains of their fund from being taxed at 40% to being taxed at 15%. A decent explanation here: http://www.nicholasfunds.com/dividend_info.html
You're right that it won't be a large drop in the bucket. It's not news because it's a large drop in a bucket, it's news because its a valuation change on companies many here follow. Nonetheless, one could object to poor management if Fidelity didn't take this action, regardless of size.
Note - this only gets at the 'why now' part of the motivation. What it means for 1) their internal company valuations and 2) implications for shareholders without liquidation preferences is more interesting.
Can you explain the mechanism where it is a tax loss and show where Fidelity has used it? That sounds like a gotcha, but I'm genuinely curious if it is clearly the case that they can recognize a tax loss here.
I think the mark down mostly does two things. It allows Fidelity to honestly inform their customers what they hold, and it signals to the startups that things aren't necessarily going the way Fidelity would like to see them go.
If these securities have been held for <1 year, their gain/loss goes into the short term bucket. So losses (in this case, writedowns) can offset the size of distribution, which is a bad deal for investors.
To a personal investor (e.g. mentioned in the world of WealthFront/Betterment), this is 'tax loss harvesting'.
Yeah agreed. The linked article mentions distributing income but snapchat has no dividends so it seems irrelevant. I'm not clear how this has any effect on Fidelity's taxes for 2015. It seems like its just bringing the valuations closer to what Fidelity expects they are worth so there are no surprises later.
Postmortems like this are always a bit unfair. You ask employees who lost their job when the company folded what was wrong with the company, and they'll air every little complaint or inefficiency that existed within the company.
Isn't the ethos of Silicon Valley to 'hack it together' with tape and glue? Moreover, I'm pretty sure that's the reality of almost every high growth company. I'm sure you could find matching stories from within almost every winning unicorn: key bugs they didn't catch, poor decisions that cost them along the way, leadership gaffes, etc.
I think there are a couple interesting points to consider that the other comments address: difficulty of direct services, customer acquisition costs, 1099s. But we should expect more from reporters than to throw in every other possible anecdote they could dig up.
"Isn't the ethos of Silicon Valley to 'hack it together' with tape and glue?".
That explains the low single digit success rate. And that is not really the ethos either. It is mostly a translation of lack-of-experience.
Silicon Valley is a business arrangement. Some folks have money which they spread over a bunch of high-risk/high-return investments. They net out positive. What we get is handful of mega successes, tons and tons of failures, lot of marketing noise, opportunity to work on some cutting edge experimental stuff. It has a mix of people living well (which we hear about) and people who endure bad living conditions.
> Postmortems like this are always a bit unfair. You ask employees who lost their job when the company folded what was wrong with the company, and they'll air every little complaint or inefficiency that existed within the company.
Couldn't agree more. I work at a unicorn and if we blow it there will be a very similar hindsight- and mediocre-employee- biased article. We aren't idiots, we are all taking calculated risks and sometimes they don't pan out.
Also, if Homejoy ended up becoming the next Uber the anecdote about working over Christmas would have been celebrated instead of derided.
The other thing that comes to mind is that they are a business fundamentally reliant upon distribution. Of course they should be building out a footprint, and marketing their services in sync with their technological development. It seems like one may have gotten ahead of the other, but in any other business this would be perfectly typical. The only industry for which this doesn't apply is software, where distribution is pretty simple. For example, talk to anyone in the cold supply chain business - frozen or refrigerated goods. There is a huge chicken/egg problem with product awareness and product access.
Most software companies will retract upgrades when they're not stable. Are the stakes different here? At first glace, yes, but upon second glance, if your magical test is replaced with a normal blood test in a Theranos booth, you're probably Ok. In that case, Theranos is just a sales/marketing company - which is a viable business too.
Their founder, Chris, is actually a former McKinsey guy. The thought was exactly that - to align 'McKinsey pitch deck thinking' with professional design.
I've used their service and was pretty happy with it. A large share of YC companies use them too.
This is pretty crazy analysis for what I see to be a pretty simple phenomenon. Put the truncated "Oh" in front of the "no", in order to indicate emotional sentiment, and you have your simple explanation.
"oh no" = hat tip to an [unexpected] unpleasant feeling
"oh yes" = hat tip to an [unexpected] pleasant feeling
Take the "Did you see any birds at the park?"
"yeah, no, I didn't see any" = "Oh yeah, it would have been nice to, but no I didn't see any.
This stuff is already being done legally, with certain industries and within certain financial institutions. Just seems like these guys were just caught in an unfortunate legal snag - otherwise they just seem like good traders to me.
Definiately not the case for league tournaments. In the spring split of EU LCS they wore 3M Peltor ear defenders over small in-ear buds for their actual sound.
More recent tournaments they seem to have integrated ear defenders with headphones with Mic's on. (Previously they had 3 headsets, the ear buds for sound, the defenders then their sponsors headsets around their necks for the mic.)
Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard to tell what really has changed.
I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within 6mo of starting their first job).