1. You will get a raise after 90 days, pending review. This is just a way to get you to agree to a lower salary. After 90 days, if they get around to it at all, your raise will be smaller than could have been negotiated up front. You’ve already declined other offers and closed other lines of inquiry. Nobody wants to go looking for a different job over $10k or $20k. You may even have moved. The company knows that and will use it against you.
How to combat this? Call their lie by bringing up past lies. “They said that at my last job.” Demand appropriate compensation up front. Flip it on them if you have to. “Pay me the asking rate now, then lower my pay if I fail to meet concrete performance metrics. After all, you can always just fire me.”
2. If things go well, you can work from home sometimes. In the best case scenario, you might be able to strong-arm them into working at home one day a week after entrenching yourself into some vital business process. They will still resent you and find every excuse for you to be in the office by 8am. If you can’t work from home starting the second week you never will.
3. We will fix X, Y, and Z after our next round of funding. Why didn’t they fix it last round? Or the round before that? The truth is they have bad management. Wrong priorities, incompetent developers, rampant scope creep, religious wars, crippling bureaucracy, indecisiveness, or complete lack of vision. Most likely several. All of those things are management problems. They will not go away after the next bag of helicopter money any more than a yard full of broken cars after someone wins the lottery.
4. Our next round of funding is right around the corner. If the next round was a sure-thing, why try to sell me on it? Is the company profitable? Break even? …Does it at least have users? Those are some good questions to ask in the event a company keeps hyping up its impending next round.
5. Your stock will be worth thousands of dollars after we IPO/sell to Microsoft. Stock has no value unless you can sell it. SEC regulations require potential buyers to have a shit-ton of money for you to legally be able to sell to them. In reality, you don’t even own stock. You will get options, not real stock. Your options will be “non-transferable”, which means that even if you could find a buyer, you can’t sell them. But you won’t even actually get the options. See, they need to “vest” over time, and you lose any unvested options if you are fired, laid off, or quit before then. Or if you get Zuckerberged. In the mean time the company will hold the unvested stock hostage to force you to put up with whatever BS they want. Oh, and don’t even think about asking for a raise or rocking the boat.
Not that the stock would ever be worth anything. Don’t forget that 99% of startups fail miserably.
6. It’s an industry standard employment contract. No need to read it. Except the part where they own your side projects. Oh, and the part where they can sue you if you dare to get a job for 3 years after they outsource your job to India. And that other part where you waive your right to a trial in any lawsuit. And the fact that violating a single line in the completely arbitrary “Employee Handbook” is considered breaching this contract. READ AND UNDERSTAND EVERY SINGLE LINE. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH ON THE LEGAL MEANING OF WHAT YOU DON”T UNDERSTAND. DON’T SIGN A CONTRACT YOU FIND UNREASONABLE. You can always demand they change it. I have and they did. Usually managers don’t understand anything in the contract themselves.
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