I am about to have a final loop for Waymo as an L6, and I was wondering about stock. They gave me some general numbers at the beginning of the process, but nothing final obviously as I still have the on-site. I was wondering a couple things. 1. What is the comp for a hardware L6 lead at Mountain View? 2. How do Waymo WSUs vest? I know they don’t have a double-trigger and require taxes at vest. Does Waymo withhold some of the shares to pay tax or for example do you get 100k in value of shares and you personally then owe 40k in taxes? Current TC: 250k
Are there normally liquidity events?
No they are basically at the discretion of the company and there has only ever been one event and only for options (not WMUs)
They're working on something because people are defecting to Cruise in droves for liquidity. But no announcement yet.
1. Probs between 250-300k cash and an additional couple hundred thousand worth of illiquid stock. 2. you do pay income tax on them, and they are subject to withholding as supplementary income. They allow people to cover the tax in cash rather than swapping WMUs but I you’d have to be really hate money to do that IMO. Also lmao, the workday at alphabet is configured to do the minimum withholding on stock. This makes sense if you make liquid stock because it gives you extra liquidity if you’re doing something wonky like claiming a bunch of deductions. However it makes NO sense for illiquid stock because Waymo stock has no utility outside of liquidity events — as a result many people get a surprise tax bill on the additional under withholding that they are required to pay in cash. I asked Waymo finance about fixing this and they basically laughed at me and said “there is no mechanism for doing this”. Btw this isn’t true, they can fix these problems, they just want you to pay cash for tax because Waymo is strapped for cash and would rather you pay for the income tax (which must be done in cash) than them (by trading WMUs for cash and using that for tax). I really wouldn’t join Waymo unless you hate money. It isn’t going to IPO anytime soon, and there is no appetite to do so because google will just give them cash if they need it. Just my 10c.
Ok. So you can swap WMUs so you don’t have a massive tax bill at the end of the year? If I understand that correctly.
There might be some confusion here. It basically works the same as taxing a normal RSU. Except for the caveat is who pays cash — it’s either you or Waymo. Waymo burns the WMUs and gives you the after-tax amount (and hence pays the IRS some cash) or Waymo gives you the full amount of WMUs and the IRS asks you for a pile of cash. The problem is you can’t sell WMUs for cash so you are now on the hook to pay the IRS cash. Effectively you’ve now paid cash for tax on illiquid RSUs that you’re hoping will be worth something some day and you just gave Waymo a tax coupon. Myself and a few of my colleagues had to pay $10s of thousands in taxes on illiquid RSUs because of this bullshit.
All i know is thay you'll get Waymo than you would at Amazon.
Oh definitely. The quoted range of base salary is my TC now. Haha.
I don’t think this is true. Amazon comps have liquid stock and are offering lots of money rn. Waymo jerks it’s employees around with finance all the time