Long story short... you will likely need a liquidity event for your shares to be sold for cash.
This could be though an acquisition, IPO, or the board deciding to let you sell your shares (usually back to the company via the right of first refusal).
Your shares are sort of "worthless" until one of these events, that is the risk you take by allowing some of your compensation to be delivered in private stock.
The good news is they are offering you a .25% vested stake and a shorter-than-normal vesting period of 3 years. Once those shares vest they are yours forever, or until you sell. If you decide to leave the company there is a chance they will offer to buy you out of your vested shares, that is where you can make some cash.
Yup. So basically value your ownership as 0 to at most $10k. If the salary and job title make sense, do it. If the pay is 50% of market rate, don't do it.
Thanks for the insight into the competitiveness of the terms. 99% sure there won't be an IPO for this company so I would need to ask him about his plans to sell or dividends I believe.
"However, the bigger news is that Microsoft plans to integrate the functionality from its mobile calendaring app Sunrise into Outlook, then shutter the Sunrise application when the integration completes."
* I am assuming you are applying/interviewing for developer jobs.
Stop worrying about being "too bubbly or enthusiastic", coming across young & organizing meetups.
Start worrying about not having outside work projects & being weak on technical questions.
You need to be able to prove to a potential employer that you can do the job. Organizing meetups is nice but does not show anything about your development skills. A github profile with a few projects related to the type of development you want to get into will do much more for you than anything else.
Well, I do have a share of nontrivial projects on github, I just don't think they'll attract companies. I've done a fair share of web scraping as projects (like scraping GSMarena for phones, or the Apple store for information + reviews). It's not exactly the sort of stuff to display though, in the way that someone who does iOS/Android/web dev can display.
I did want to create a web frontend to the GSMArena data, maybe I should extend that with something on the frontend.
To me, it does not require any more or less skill to produce compared to other design trends (Web 2.0, Skeuomorphism, ect). Flat design not new and it is not a cop-out.
Your take-home pay should be somewhere in the $2500/mo range. That leaves you with about $600,after paying your rent and parents mortgage, for everything else in life (utilities, cellphone, ect). That's not likely enough to save up for the things you mention.
Food: As cheap or expensive as you want. Typical lunch in the city will run $10-$15. Buy cheap groceries and bring a lunch every day.
Commute: Depends on where in NJ you are. Hopefully you are close to PATH, if not you will likely take a NJ Transit train/bus.
Reference: I am an iOS Engineer, working in Manhattan, living in Brooklyn. Have been here 5.5 yrs.
The house I will be staying at in NJ is very close to the PATH transit so that looks to be my best option right now. I'll be working in Lower Manhattan so the transit looks to drop off about 10 minutes walking distance away from where I need to be which will be convenient. You've been working in Manhattan for the past 5.5 years, was it with the same company and do you like it? Thanks for your input!
Pretty straight forward here... take the cash. With a wife and family, you need some savings for a rainy day. I don't know your specific situation, but I rarely count on options as money in the bank.
This could be though an acquisition, IPO, or the board deciding to let you sell your shares (usually back to the company via the right of first refusal).
Your shares are sort of "worthless" until one of these events, that is the risk you take by allowing some of your compensation to be delivered in private stock.
The good news is they are offering you a .25% vested stake and a shorter-than-normal vesting period of 3 years. Once those shares vest they are yours forever, or until you sell. If you decide to leave the company there is a chance they will offer to buy you out of your vested shares, that is where you can make some cash.