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Comment by 0xB31B1B | Hacker News Reader

300 tc is pretty standard for FAANG and the big unicorns. I pull down 330k w 5 years experience at a Uber. 180 cash, 150k equity. I’m incredibly average, 5 years exp.

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Shouldn’t there be a distinction made between public and private company equity?

150k of Facebook stock seems much more desirable vs 150k of Uber stock because at least with Facebook stock you could liquidate it on the public market?

Or am I missing something?

Paysa puts Uber at #1 for compensation, but their stock isn't liquidatable like a public company. Doesn't make sense.

https://www.paysa.com/company-rank

> 150k of Facebook stock seems much more desirable vs 150k of Uber stock because at least with Facebook stock you could liquidate it on the public market? Or am I missing something?

If you're fresh out of school and need to cover the student loan and the rent - sure. If your previous employment includes significant time spent at GOOG, FB, AMZN, NFLX, AAPL, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, NVDA or even YHOO or AMD or TWTR, your everyday cashflow situation is likely taken care of, and what you're looking for is potential growth.

right. stock compensation is your independence fund and I don't think about it like I do salary or cash bonus.

The secondary market used to be an easy way to liquidate, back before FB IPO. Is it still ok?

https://sharespost.com/companies/uber/

Ask anyone you know who works at those companies. They will confirm that paysa's data is absurdly wrong. Their "median" is the minimum at my company.

What's the company?

Uber stock has more promise of growth. Also there are private markets (idk to what extent one can participate tho).

And more risk that they will never even go public. I've had options for more than one company that no longer exists.

Can't you sell the stake privately? Does it have to be approved by some higher up? I'm guessing it depends on the company.

Uber Stocks don't feed you tho.

Can't pay the rent with private equity!

It’s definitely not standard. Esp at say amazon.

You forget: Everyone on HN makes $300k, drives a Porsche and has a supermodel as a significant other. I’d regard the self-reported anecdotes as outliers. $300k (total including equity) is at least one, possibly two standard deviations above the mean for software professionals. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and work at one of these ‘top’ places and don’t make anything even close to that. These threads are always good for a morning laugh though.

this makes me sad... On paper i make 90k, but haven't been paid in > a month because of cashflow (dev firm with one major client (MLM Company) who's not paying recently and not happy).

Before that most I've made is 65k.. as a jr/intermediate web dev.

The rest of my company quit, because of the pay issues, so I'm now the sole dev trying to pull us back up from the void, as a bonus now I'm a partner and President of Software Development... with 10% equity should we succeed.

I'm always 'planning' on groking ai/ml but I never did algebra 2 or calculus, so I've got some math I need to brush up on before I get there.

Before I get there i'll probably have my own tech agency/consulting firm and just go the entrepreneur route, rather than become a level 10 developer working on ai, but I can always dream right?

Cost of living mustn't be too high where you're at or I wouldn't imagine you'd be able to make ends meet with the savings that $65K would afford. I hope the absent payroll doesn't last long for you. One has to wonder what your hours are if 'the rest' of your company quit. Good luck.

Lately it's about 12 hours a day... till I get us to launch day on the clients app. Then we should get all back-pay they're withholding...I can burn both company/client to the ground, if I'm not paid eventually, and I'll pull the nuclear option if I have to.

Hopefully after launch we can afford at least 2-3 more devs, as pres. of software, I'm planning on making us be more 'lean' and spend less money. We got rid of the office/went remote for one thing. We'll focus more on full-stack devs instead of having frontend/backend people who would sometimes sit around and wait for the other team to finish something that was blocking them... working the back/frontend of the stack can alleviate those bottlenecks some.

Lol, I know.

Amazon is a huge exception. You do well at Amazon when the stock price explodes upward and the equity value grows more than your total salary, because Amazon cuts salary and equity refreshes to cancel out stock growth as much as possible. Amazon stock price had been exploding updward on average for the past decade though.

Ignoring stock appreciation Sr. SDEs at Amazon have a total comp target of ~$250k-$350k. Same for L6 SDMs. It’s definitely “standard” for some levels/job families.

May I ask what's SDM?

Right now it's happening a lot actually, because of stock growth. There are a mountain of people making over $300k whose total comp should be lower.

It depends on position. Total compensations for AI positions in top tier technology firms are well beyond $1M mark, some go as high as $3M annually.

talk about an edge case. top of the top of the top.

What is the job title for one of these positions? Background required? What is the daily work like?

I donno. Research Scientist/Machine Learning Researcher?

They're probably tasked with analyzing data and create AI models to assist AI-assisted product features / apis, etc.

How many people are making 3M?

I think a PhD is compulsory at that level

Do you have data/sources?

Is that equity you can sell? Or does it have several years lock-up? In that case I can imagine that the value is hard to estimate, e.g. SNAP employees will have had a significantly lower comp than thought.

Companies generally under-value private equity precisely for the purpose of compensation, as potential hires are attracted to upside.

SNAP employees who started around IPO time or a few months thereafter are likely having a bad time, longer time employees have received equity at much lower prices than today's $15.

Amazon comp is below 300 until probably principal level. Maybe a few seniors have it.

That implies that there are thousands of employees, including very hard to achieve senior engineer level who work at a Amazon only because they dont care about making an extra $100k/yr or are in love with the company or can't pass interviews at any of Microsoft or Google or Facebook or one of the many local startups. I believe it for juniors who all quit after 2 years if they can, but seniors?

Depends also on location. Toronto amazon employees have lower salaries because there isn't enough local competition for talent.

Seem to highly depend on date of joining. Is it unreasonable to assume that someone who joined around 2015, when the shares were in $300-400 range got an offer with a grant of 1,500-2,000 shares for mid-level?

An L6/SDE3 that started a few years ago might do it with stock appreciation

What was your salary trajectory? Where did you start and at what point did you start reaching the 200k+ to 300k+ range?

200k range is L4 at most big cos and mega unicorns. So 2.5 - 5 years exp. I studied chemical engineering in school, started at a bigger company, then small start up, then to Uber. Reached 300k this year w promo from L4 to L5.

cool! then there's some hope yet!

By 5 years experience, do you mean 5 years out of school? If so, where did you go and what did you specialize in?

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