I am currently working for a SF based hardware startup but I am based out of New Delhi. That's the reason I am looking for a change. I interviewed with Swiggy and postman for Engineering manager. Teams Swiggy - location intelligence team Postman - growth I have now cleared both the interviews and am waiting to have the final compensation call. I am leaning towards joining postman coz they don't require me to relocate. Now, the question I am asking myself Is what should be the TC range I should look for. Before I started working for the SF company, my comp here in India was 48(base) + 48/4(stocks) with 7 YOE. YOE - 9 Current CTC - $72K(cash) + $250k/4(stocks). Vested 1/3 of the stocks.
I haven't received the postman offer yet. Waiting to hear from them The one in India was a unicorn startup. Did esops buyback so that wasn't paper money. The current company is a startup so it's paper money. My question was more towards understanding what kind of offer should have I expect from postman. Or would it be based just on my current CTC
Is your company's base location India or you are just part time ? This could be one of the factors because stocks comp is too to match for any Indian Startps. Postman will definitely offer on your current base but will have limits on the different parts. Secondly, base is something that can be matched using your current salary. One if the benefits of recruiting process for those having high salaries is that you can expect TC higher than current if you are looking forward with the process.
On paper, this is a consulting job. I am still able to get the stocks coz there is a legal loophole for that. This is really helpful. I am not looking for them to match my stocks. In an ideal case, I expect them to give me ~10% hike on the base and a reasonable amount of stocks. It's still paper money in case of postman too.
Hey OP, Postmanaut here and soon to be ex-Postmanaut. Suggest you get in touch with ex-employees (especially recent 13-15 exits in last 3 months) to understand ground reality. Also read up on the company review, specifically the one with title "“Great place to kickstart your career”" with 1 star. The founders, and early employees (who joined in or before 2017 and) still with Postman wield influence to make or break anybody's career. Opposing point of views are discouraged based on strawman arguments. Values and principles on paper looks good, but in practice the engineering teams are made up of leaders with "my way or the highway" mentality. Especially with your wife relying on you for support on her Ph.D., my suggestion as a person who hails from companies whose leaders are open minded, empathetic, joining Postman has been the worst decision of my career. The sales, marketing and the developer advocacy teams are the reason why Postman brand is famous, but the underlying implementation is brittle leading to a lot of major incidents that are swept under the rug. The support team make it seem like the issue is local to the users. Lot of horror stories, just get in touch with ex employees on LinkedIn. Just in case If you forget, remember: ~15 high-caliber engineer exits in past quarter and couple of high profile exits too. The CEO and his co-founders run the org like a tyrannical regime. DM me for more details.
Agree to this. Postman is trying to augment an HTTP client with ton of features that most don't even need. This means, the customers are paying for things they don't need to support a very small fraction of users (per the internal clickstream analytical data) who do need majority of the of features. I don't see growth beyond $100 mil ARR. Lot of competition out there. Microsoft, AWS, and plenty of others are providing similar features for next to nothing. But it's just me.
This is priceless. Connecting in DM
@OP with competing offers why are u only considering 10% increment only? 60+ base should be min, unless you have <1yoe as manager. Also, what kind of work were you/team doing at the hardware startup that's transferable to the other roles?
I am not looking for a specific number on increment. I have 3 years as manager but that was as a co -founder at a startup (moderately successful). This was 2015-2018. My current work at the hardware startup is as an IC mostly related to building an on edge media server - working with codecs, gstreamer, ffmpeg. Building infrastructure for stremainfg HLS, webRTC. some low level work with optimising Nvidia/Intel GPU outputs for video transcoding
Makes sense. Since you've gone thru the interview loop at swiggy and postman , how would you rate the culture at either place?
You would hardly get a feel for the day to day working culture just from the interview rounds.
Interactions with other engineers always gives off a general vibe. You could always sense something wrong if multiple engineers talk about things that set you off.
@OP what's the final offers and which did you choose?
@op what was the postman offer?
What is the Postman offer ? You haven't mentioned it here. Is your current company and the previous one public companies ( or paper money)? Your present TC is too good for India and from NCR based jobs, specially the stocks part - how come the stocks are so high ? Otherwise, bangalore has the highest salaries. Startups in India will give high base. If you have public company stocks, you have even more leverage.