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Comment by andrewmunn | Hacker News Reader

I wish tools like this would account for equity.

Base salary in the Bay area has never been particularly high compared to comparable cities, but in my admittedly anecdotal experience, The Bay Area has the highest equity compensation of anywhere in the US.

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Equity should only count as a lottery ticket unless the company has IPO'ed and there is a place for the employee to actually value and sell those shares.

One could argue that if a company has had a public offering, they probably aren't at the low end of this pay scale anyway, but that's more speculative.

I mean...a really, really good lottery ticket which has a much higher chance of paying out than your standard powerball ticket. It's true that there is variance in your pay if it's partially made up of equity but it's clearly not worth nothing, which is how I would evaluate a lottery ticket in practicality.

It's more like a lottery ticket where a VC can come in and say sorry you now have 0.001 lottery tickets and if you hit a jackpot, I get the first $50M of it before we split the rest of the pot.

Hard to compare apples to apples with equity. Some equity is worth close to nothing, others (RSU) are pretty much just like cash. Many places give a little equity every year, others only your first few years, then you don't get any anymore (so does that equity count in your "total" or not?), for others it's totally random and variable.

But is the equity actually worth anything?

established companies (FAANG) come as RSUs that vest monthly or quarterly. so yeah, real money.

You can only sell once a quarter though!

That's only a Google thing. At Microsoft, for example, you can sell all the time.

There's no trading windows for insiders?

not if you enroll in auto-sell. mine vest and sell monthly.

So? Just budget the proceeds. If you need a bit of extra help not spending it all at once it's not that hard to set up an automatic transfer on a monthly interval with a bank. Just set it up for {Proceeds} / 3 for three transfers.

Like 30% or more of my comp is equity (autosold the instant I get it). I make more in equity alone than I would in total if I was back at my hometown.

Yea, by the time I left Google, I was making about 50% of my gross pay in equity, and this equity was basically as liquid as cash (the difference being the volatility).

What is this based upon? Do tech companies give different equity if you e.g. Work out of the boulder office? I've been looking for an excuse to move to CO.

Agreed. 30-40% of my total comp is equity and bonus and I've got friends with higher at big papa G and the likes.

agreed; more than half my compensation comes in the form of RSUs and bonuses.

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