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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

You need to make sure you're comparing apples to apples here.

Netflix has high salaries but doesn't (for normal employees anyway) give equity. The other big tech companies do. And equity can be a significant part of your total compensation especially given tech stock performance. I think there's no bonus either but I'm not certain of that part.

Note that some will consider paying straight salary an advantage. It's certainly more straightforward.

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Equity has so many complications. I would take a solid salary over a not great salary any day. Maybe you miss out on a million dollar payday when the stocks perform well, but at $300,000/year salary, you're not far from it anyway, and at least that's a guarantee.

Agreed, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Also $300K a year is definitely in the "nice problem to have" category.

And with any public company you can still invest part of the salary in your employers stock if you want to participate in that $1m chance (not that I would recommend it though).

You're describing the equity situation at startups. Big tech has fairly stable stock prices, so stock performance means the difference between taking home 400k or 600k total tops. 400k us still more than 300k. On the flip side, this also means no million dollar payday from regular salary+equity.

Yeah, that sounds nice. Getting paid in stock is a huge hassle. You have to deal with special brokerage accounts. You have to remember to enroll for autosale if you want to get paid during "silent periods". There is an extra hour of paperwork to do every year for your taxes.

Given that stock was like half my compensation, I wasn't going to give it up to avoid the hassle. But next time, no thanks.

edit: just noticed your username, hah.

Cash has more utility and less risk than owning a large quantity of a tech stock. So I'd want to make significantly more than $300k if a big portion of that is equity. Are the other big tech companies now paying >> $300k in total compensation to the average employee?

According to Paysa's self-reported survey data (which, for all I know, is hogwash):

    Netflix,  senior software engineer, $323k ($323k cash)
    Google,   senior software engineer, $340k ($220k cash)
    Facebook, software engineer,        $317k ($190k cash)
    Google,   software engineer,        $281k ($180k cash)

Netflix has too few "software engineer" data points and Facebook has too few "senior software engineer" data points to include those. If this data is at all accurate, it doesn't seem like either of those companies are giving better deals than Netflix on average.

Aren’t bonuses are taxed at a much higher rate compared to salary?

No, bonuses are taxed at the same rate as salary. The withholding calculations are different, so you tend to have a bigger chunk taken out of your bonus check. But if that chunk is greater than your actual tax rate, you'll get the difference back in your tax refund.

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