how to leave a techy company
March 20, 2011
After leaving my last employer three times over the prior five years (two voluntarily, one via a layoff), I picked up a few tips in terms of “how to leave” with the best preparation for your next step. These are rather specific, but I believe they work for Silicon Valley companies in California, and they may also work for other companies in other industries in other states (abroad is a whole different story). I mostly learned these tips from the information packet I got when I was laid off (which I did not get when I resigned), and others come from friends’ tips and my own experience. Here they are:
- COBRA: This is a federal program to make sure recently departed employees can continue to get health coverage. Unfortunately, this tends to be rather pricey (~$400/month if you had a decent plan at the old company, and that’s not including dental or vision). One good thing is that you usually have up to 90 days to enroll, so if you know you’ll be starting a new job in that time frame, you can hold onto the enrollment docs and retroactively file if you end up in the ER- you’ll have to pay the back fees, but it’s better than paying out of pocket.
- Health insurance: Generally, companies pay for employees’ healthcare a month at a time, usually on the 1st of a month. So if you quit on the 1st, you’re covered for 30-31 more days. This is great if you want to take time off between jobs. You can also use accrued vacation time to make the bridge if you want to leave earlier.
- Health FlexSpend: Companies must pay your full elected FSA amount to the government at the beginning of the fiscal year, then the rest of the year, you pay back the company (this is why it’s “lost” when you don’t spend it). So, if you use up that whole amount on the 1st day of the fiscal year and then you leave the next day, the company can’t collect the rest of the amount from you. If you know you’re leaving around the time of benefit elections, you can max this out and not have to contribute much towards it, but you will need to make the reimbursable purchases before your last day (such as doctor fees, contacts, prescription copays, etc). However, the government is getting much more strict about what you can reimburse. In other words, you could buy several pairs of crazy expensive eye glasses in your waning days, but otherwise, there may not be much point here.
- Vacation: Depending on how your company does holidays, try not to leave your job in December- the holidays are basically one big paycheck that you could be leaving on the table. In any case, you’ll get paid out for unused vacation time when you leave.
- 401k: Your money will stay in your 401k after you leave, and it’ll keep accruing value. Some 401k plans charge fees to “manage”, but you’re fine leaving it there for awhile. Eventually, you may want to move the money over to an IRA in order to have more control over how the investment is allocated. But no need to rush. One thing to try while you’re still at the company is that if your company matches your contributions, max out your annual contributions to get as much match as you can.
- Bonuses: If you want your bonus, don’t tell a soul you’re thinking of leaving until it’s actually in your bank account. There’s no way around this. ’nuff said.
- Options: Most option programs will give you some amount of time after you leave to exercise your options. However, if they haven’t vested before you leave, they’re gone. Check the timing of your option grants- if they vest monthly or quarterly, you may want to hang on or use vacation days to stay on the payroll until they vest.
- ESPP: The “Employee Stock Purchase Program” will most likely refund any contributions you made towards this, no more and no less, on your final paycheck. Once you have the stock, it’s yours to keep well after your departure. The key timeline here is whether you can hang on until the next purchase wave and utilize the discount.
- Income tax forms: Chances are, with all of these sorts of investments flying around, you’ll need lots of forms for your tax returns the next year. Track down your company’s finance contacts before leaving so when your accountant requests, for instance, that 3922 (for ESPP), you’ll know who to ask.
- Unemployment: You’re only eligible for unemployment in California if you’re laid off or fired. Firing exposes the company to liability; laying off prohibits the company from backfilling for a year. In other words, if you’re thinking of voluntarily leaving (i.e. your company likes you plus won’t be downsizing anytime soon), don’t expect to get unemployment.
- Exit interview: This is a weird procedure companies do in order to supposedly correct their wrongs so others won’t leave. However, most likely, what you say won’t have any effect, and the paperwork will last. So, don’t burn bridges in case you return. It’s tempting to use the opportunity to vent, but be constructive about it.
- Leaving itself: I left the hardest one for last. Leaving a company is a lot like breaking up- there’s no good way to do so that won’t hurt someone’s feelings. I believe the most respectful way to depart is to give enough time to transition your projects to your coworkers that works with your schedule (and the tips above), but that’s about it. Once it’s known you’re leaving, it’s hard to do more than transition because you have an expiration date. So accept this, and get out of the way so your now-ex-coworkers can move on themselves.
And a quick note for those left behind at the old company: the key thing to realize is the strength of the non-compete clause. This means the departed employee cannot recruit you for 9-18 months after their departure. Of course, you can still be friends and the ex-coworker can reach out to simply hang out. However, don’t be surprised if there’s awkwardness around asking how the new job is, if the new company is hiring, or even where they plan to go when they haven’t left yet (which could be construed as recruiting). The key thing is that your ex-coworker’s silence if you ask for help applying at the new company is not something you should take personally- they probably secretly want you to join, and they don’t want the new company to get sued in case you do.
things i wish facebook users knew about authing
January 12, 2011
When you’re going through an authentication flow involving Facebook, there are three core types of flows, and these do not intersect. So, if you know what sort of flow you’re about to enter, you can be more confident about what sort of data is getting shared.
1. Login: The Facebook login flow is like OAuth in that a 3rd party site never “sees” your Facebook password- nor should it. The 3rd party site hands you off to Facebook, and Facebook checks your cookies for a valid login, then simply passes you back to the 3rd party site saying “yup, this is the person they say they are,” or “nope- not valid.” You may not even see this screen if you’re currently logged in since Facebook will see you are who you say you are, and immediately pass you back (usually in browser instead of a pop-up):
No other data is passed in this flow, such as your contacts or access to your Facebook Wall.
2. App Approval: If a 3rd party site wants to access more data about you, you have to approve it with one of these funky screens (usually a pop-up):
This screen will tell you exactly what the 3rd party site wants to do with your Facebook data. You can say allow or not allow. This is different from letting a 3rd party site access your contacts, or a simple login.
3. Contacts: If a 3rd party site ever wants to access your contacts, this is a very different auth flow, and it applies only towards accessing your contacts once. In other words, the 3rd party site- even if you’ve approved them to access your contact list once- cannot store that list, and you’ll have to auth for them to do it again. This is very different from the app approval screen which creates a permanent connection between your Facebook account and the 3rd party site (until you deactivate it). Here’s how this screen looks, generally as a pop-up:
They may seem like peculiar nuances, but I find it helpful in terms of knowing when I want to hit that “Facebook Connect” button on 3rd party sites or not. The main thing is, Facebook is protective of your data, because at the very least, their control of the social market depends on it. Keep an eye out for these screens, and you’ll know what data is being passed and what isn’t.
is this why there aren't more women software engineers?
July 15, 2010
Ruminating over this fantastic comment/explanation by “ahoyhere”, aka Amy Hoy, in the Y Combinator forum titled “Startup boot camp Y Combinator illustrates dearth of women in tech“. I think it’s dead-on accurate:
“It’s not the programming syntax I think so much as the teaching of it.
Programming books, classes, etc., are led by people who ‘just get it’ – and therefore taught badly – and therefore can only be understood by people who ‘just get it’. And those people tend to look down on people who can’t ‘just get it.’
I, on the other hand, am a girl, and an extremely visual/verbal girl at that… an excellent designer and accomplished writer. I was doing all of that basically from a young age. I also learned BASIC.
When it came time to learn more complex programming, though, I got stuck, and nobody could explain it to me in a way that helped. I ended up teaching myself to draw loop diagrams, and procedural diagrams, and object diagrams, to visually THINK OUT the code, what it was doing. For a long time, I had to do this every time, or I was completely incapable of getting any traction on the coding problem at hand.
The thing about programming is that you have to actually BUILD AN INTERPRETER in your head. Some people seem to be born with the ability to do this. They are almost all – but not entirely – male.
I, on the other hand, am now an excellent developer. I know many developers who can write much tighter individual lines of code than me – but most of them can’t analyze and break down a problem, and architect as well as I do. And my lines of code are still very good.
So, I started out with a ‘disability’ but now I’m really great.
That’s because I read programming books, and went to programming classes, and instead of thinking ‘ZOMG I’ll never get this’ I thought to myself, ‘I’m really smart – this class is shit!’ And proceeded to nag everyone to answer my questions about my visual diagrams, until I got it.
That’s why I write and teach code in a visual way.
And amazingly, I have a much higher percentage of women readers and women course attendees than the general coding population… and also many, many grateful men who come from non-traditional backgrounds, like history majors, artists, designers, musicians and linguists.
Comp Sci problems aren’t men vs women, they’re super-crazy-almost-too-left-brain vs normal-or-right-brain.”
the facebook era
April 9, 2009
One of my close friends, Clara Shih, recently published a must-read book titled THE FACEBOOK ERA, which prescribes how businesses can capitalize on social media. I couldn’t be more proud of her. 
She’s currently traveling around the world on a book tour- if you get a chance to see her, be sure to say hi!
Preview Excerpt: THE FACEBOOK ERA, by Clara Shih http://thefacebookera.com
'08 pensivate and '09 surmise
January 1, 2009
As is inevitable with the change of the year, there’s the urge to review the year gone past and to predict the year to come. As a product manager in the now-defunct Yahoo! Brickhouse, I was lucky enough to be tasked with watching for industry trends; a few stood out. Here are my observations of notable developments from 2008, and what I’ll be watching for in 2009:
Mobile
Finally, after years of buggy handsets and tyrannical carriers that made the US mobile offerings among the weakest in the world, the Apple iPhone and the Google Android OS are boosting the US mobile street cred. Granted, there’s still alot of catchup needed in basics such as MMS, GPS integration, transaction support, and network coverage. However, what I find exciting is the open platforms that make it easy for 3rd parties to build and distribute mobile applications- from simple mobile web sites (such as Twitter’s WAP site and NextMuni) to rich client apps (such as Shazam). This development throws open a world that used to be extremely silo’d, non-standardized, and subject to the whims of close-minded execs. I hope more silly “rules” of mobile will continue to fall, such as the separation of email/txt/im/voicemail, background processes being incompatible with privacy (particularly for location-based services), and financial transaction roadblocks. Which brings me to:
Transactions and Fraud
At some point, we will be able to use our phones like credit cards, but interestingly enough (although not out of character), I believe the impetus will come from abroad as opposed to within the US. We all know about the famous Japanese vending machines that transact with cell phones instead of cash or credit cards. Beyond this, though, are developments from groups such as United Villages which enable rural communities in India to transact with mobile phones instead of having to walk miles to a bank or somehow find a working computer (let alone electricity and a network connection). Startups like Mobillcash are breaking down boundaries with carriers to let people transact with cell numbers (and approve via SMS), and students are even building as their term project apps to track who-owes-who.
Of course, with increased financial transactions come more opportunities for fraud. I’m surprised there haven’t been more anti-fraud developments, but I expect this to change as the financial crisis simmers down and people begin looking into loans and credit scores again. When this does happen, I hope there will be push-back by people having to pay to access their own credit reports more than once a year or to activate credit monitoring services. It should be easy enough for sites such as Mint to make purchase monitoring a more upfront feature. In fact, I’d pay for them to regularly check my credit score instead of some bloated afterthought of a service through the credit agencies.
Pulses
Over the last year, I’ve become a full-fledged Twitter addict. It started at SXSW as a way to find out where the hot talks and parties were. It turned into a way to get a pulse of what my friends were up to, as well as share what I’ve been doing. Now, I use it to also read headlines and get a pulse of the world, following such tweets as the WSJ and GigaOm. In fact, I rarely use RSS readers anymore, instead opting to read the quick headline tweets- interspersed with my friends’ observations and commentary- and clicking through on the most compelling stories.
With the internet teaming with so much information, parsing it quickly is becoming ever more desirable. Search helped filter out the most relevant parts. Next will be tools to help consume more information faster, such as quick pulses and social network prioritized news alerts. Twitter is my favorite way to easily gauge a pulse of what’s going on now in my community, industry, and the world. Could Facebook or FriendFeed provide this sort of pulse? I think it’d take a significant revamp of their strategy, simplifying the UI drastically to bring in non-social-network news easily. Google or Yahoo could be better positioned to execute on this since it’d explicitly utilize yet go beyond the social networks.
Content
First, I am very impressed with the Amazon .mp3 store and its integration to iTunes. I may discover some songs through the iTunes store, but I rarely buy through there because of the DRM. After all, what will happen after I upgrade my computer 3 more times? It’s legitimate use, yet I am treated as a thief. Second, I am likewise very impressed with Hulu and Netflix streaming. They successfully remove time from the equation that limits video consumption, and do so in a way that makes money. I’m even more impressed when thinking about the negotiations and contracts those companies pulled off to make it possible.
Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin, got a lot of press coverage with his keynote speech where he stated he doesn’t care about the death of CDs. Musicians are finding audiences and support through other means now, reducing the need to rely on the predatory large music labels. I see what happened to music extending to video and interactive video (a.k.a. games). All modes of content consumption that relied on DRM to maintain antiquated methods are finally losing ground. Just as Creative Commons is spreading to fields beyond art, the internet “threat” is finally becoming less a doomsday but more an opportunity for market-changing innovation across every copyright-centered industry.
A Toast
Beyond all the developments that made 2008 one of the more memorable- Obama, Olympics, financial crisis, etc- there are also many promising signs in the tech industry. I’m so tempted to go crazy poetic right now (“smashing barriers”, “opening walled gardens”, “bureaucracy be damned!”), but instead I’m going to leave it at this: keep breaking the rules, yo.
freedom streams
April 1, 2008
While laid up at home with the flu, I became completely addicted to abc.com’s full episode player streamer thingymabob. Without the strength to go downstairs and pick up a remote, I could watch a full season of Ugly Betty in all its same-quality-as-tv glory. I’m floored by the quality of the site. First, it’s easy to navigate and get working. Second, the user experience is beautiful and original while being straightforward and unbuggy. Third, they have a huge selection of episodes to watch, and it helped my week of sickness fly by. How on earth did a large company- abc- manage to put together something so smooth and beautiful? Anyone know someone on their dev team? I want to pick their brains.
intrepreneurship
November 14, 2007
I’m speaking tomorrow evening at the Women 2.0 “Intrepreneurship” fireside chat (I know, I was asking the same thing: we have a fireplace at Yahoo? Maybe we’re pow-wowing around the brick oven for the pizza). I’ll be talking about my own experience at Yahoo!- from participating in Hack Days as an engineer on the Mobile team to product management for our new product, Kickstart. Here’s the Upcoming link. Hope to see you there!
a kick in the career
November 14, 2007
My product has launched! Granted, it was a week ago (November 5th, to be precise), but it’s been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to blog about it until now. Kickstart is a professional social networking site that connects students with professionals of all sorts who can offer career advi
ce, share their own story, and even an “in” at a company for internships and jobs. The premise is that while professionals have networks they can work to find opportunities and get insider information, students think they don’t. We want to make it easier for college student to find people who can help them, such as alums from their school, relatives of friends, and other connections that exist in the real world but aren’t obvious to a new internship or job seeker. Here’s my profile.
It’s launched from the Advanced Products group, and it’s geared towards being more of a startup than typical Yahoo! products, such as a smaller, more agile team behind it plus iteratively developing the product as it is used. We’re right now in the pre-seeding stage, where we’re targeting enthusiastic alumni who’d like to help out their school by helping their soon-to-be fellow alums. We’ll be launching new features quite often, so keep an eye out for those plus feel free to send any feedback my way.
why search
October 2, 2007
I saw a demo for this a few months ago, and I could hardly wait for it to go live. And live it is- the new Y! search is out! It has a new “search assist” feature that categorizes the results so you may more easily find what you want. Of course I tested with my own name, and not only did it isolate my “mit” and “yahoo” online traces, all but one of the top ten “mit” results were legit links for moi as opposed to a librarian or a peruvian horse trainer. Check it out- I’m curious what you think. Yahoo!
brass knerd knuckles
September 12, 2007
I was naiively surprised to see that there is an actual wikipedia entry on the “Brass Rat”, the class ring for MIT graduates. Finally, a place to refresh my memory on all the “hidden”/ “too-small-to-be-seen-on-my-tiny-rat” nuggets in my year’s ring, as well as those for other years. Here is my favorite bezel, namely because (as rumor has it) the ring committee- the designers of the ring- did not realize the design’s inappropriateness until someone pointed it out an hour before the Ring Premiere. My friend, Matt, also wrote an MIT admissions blog entry talking about the historical background for the Brass Rat.
