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Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Joined among the first 10 employees. The company grew to 200 employees and 400M valuation in 4 years. Sold last year a portion of my vested shares for 1M to investors as part of a secondary transaction, and I still have a decent amount (70%) of vested shares and unvested options, since the company hasn’t exited yet and management has no plan of doing so in the short/medium term.

I’m not counting on the rest of the equity to be worth as much because I don’t believe in the company ability to execute well at this point, too many changes diluting the quality and the mission. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to sell more as part of the secondary transaction (company rule), otherwise I would have dumped it all (the vested part that is).

Yet I consider myself lucky after having read all these comments, but had I gone to FAANG 4 years ago my financial outcome would have been very similar, if not bigger.

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Seriously? 4 years at FAANG would net you $1,000,000 savings?

That seems... crazy. Can someone explain how that works? Your salary alone living in the bay area, definitely isn't goin to net you $1,000,000 in savings.

I got an offer from Netflix for 450k cash and another offer from FB for 210k cash with 600k equity over 4 years, a few years ago.

Considering how well those stocks did after such offers were made to me, and how frugal I am (avid minimalist spending <50k a year in the bay), I would have saved even more than 1M (I know most of my friends working there did).

Also, the 1M from the startup wasn’t net, but gross (taxed at long term capital gain luckily).

> 210k cash with 600k equity over 4 years

Could you please explain how does this work? Is it a one-time payment of 600K spread over 4 years? And afterwards you just end up with 210K base (or maybe a small increase) for the following years, with no additional bonuses/etc?

You need to look up how Equities work.

This looks like an RSU grant of 600K; there are different vesting schedules (i.e. how much of the RSU becomes actual shares in the company, owned by you which you can sell/keep). Typically its 25% every year with a 1 year cliff (i.e. you get 0 actual shares when you start, but 25% after a year and so on).

You get refreshers so, no, it's not just base once your initial grant runs out. In a normal case, especially early in your career, the refreshers are larger than the initial grant as you get promotions and raises.

This is not necessarily true if you've plateaued and is not necessarily true if your realized comp greatly exceeds your target comp. If your target comp is $500k per year but you're realizing $1000k per year due to stock growth then your refreshers will reflect the $500k rather than the $1000k.

So how many years of experience are required for these types of salaries? What job title?

In my case, the title was software engineer, at the time I had 6 years of experience and BS + MS in computer engineering. The offer at FB was for level E5, and I negotiated decently. I’m a very average engineer with average accomplishments, truly nothing special.

Interesting thanks - is this something recent that has changed? I don't get the sense that this was how it was even 4-5 years ago. Do you think these salaries are sustainable?

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1006321911926870017

It depends on how you live. I know people whose entire expenses in NYC are $1.5k/mo, including food who make about $300k/year. I'm sure their bank balances grow like crazy.

I would not want to live that way but they seem to be pretty happy.

Depends on what career stage you are and what you will be doing. If you have 5-10 years of experience and doing distributed computing/info retrieval/AI then $1M worth of RSUs over 4 years is VERY normal and totally expected by everyone I know.

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