Valleyjudge is a program that generates graphs that help you decide between different tech company offers. I wrote it to delude myself into thinking I was deciding the rest of my life in some kind of half-rigorous fashion. If you have multiple offers, you may find it useful, as I have, for convincing yourself that the facts support when you're already decided to do.
The program takes as input details about your base salary, signing bonus, performance bonus targets, as well as RSU grant totals and vesting schedules, and produces graphs of cumulative after-tax income over time.
Valleyjudge knows about 2016 rates for federal taxes and state taxes in Washington state and California as well as applicable payroll taxes on both the federal and state level; it also understands how to compute the alternative minimum tax, and will use the AMT instead of the federal tax under the appropriate circumstances. I am no tax professional, but this program computes taxes to the best of my knowledge. You can turn off the tax calculations if you'd rather see before-tax figures.
There is no inflation adjustment: I'm guessing that salary, valuation, and taxes will increase in something close enough to lockstep that inflation doesn't affect the relative merits of various offers. There's also no cost-of-living adjustment: there's no good way to apply one automatically, and you can always apply an adjustment to the input figures.
Valleyjudge has no "user interface". You use it by writing a
little Python program that calls into the valleyjudge module to
implement the main logic of the program; in this call, you give
valleyjudge your program's argv array and some arguments that describe
your offers.
(Hey, it's one step up from "configure the program by editing the source".)
The output is a gnuplot file. Run gnuplot on the file to generate a pretty graph or a PDF you can turn into a poster. The --terminal and --output command-line options to valleyjudge control the corresponding gnuplot parameters in the generated gnuplot file.
$ cat demo.py
import valleyjudge
import sys
from valleyjudge import make_offer_comparison, Offer, RsuGrant
from datetime import date
make_offer_comparison(
title = "Example offers",
start_date = date(2016, 8, 15),
# taxes = None,
show_dollars = True,
offers = (
Offer(
name = "Initech",
base = 105000,
bonus = 50000,
state = "CA",
color = "red",
grants = RsuGrant(total = 100000),
),
Offer(
name = "Contoso",
base = 95000,
bonus = 10000,
state = "WA",
color = "purple",
grants = RsuGrant(total = 250000,
vesting = (0.05, 0.15, 0.40, 0.40))),
),
nr_years = 4,
argv = sys.argv)
$ python3 demo.py --terminal='pngcairo font "sans,20" size 1600,1200' \
--output='demo.png' | gnuplot \
&& open demo.png