4 Year Compensation Packages Comparison | Hacker News Reader

4 Year Compensation Packages Comparison

levels.fyi

94 pointszuhayeer64 comments

Free food provided by the company is for the company's benefit. If they asked you to stay another hour each day and improve your relationships with coworkers, talk about projects and possibly stay within a few hundred yards just in case of a pageable emergency, you would ask for a significant bonus. But providing $5-25 worth of food changes your attitude to "might as well eat lunch here, the food is good and it's free!".

It makes good economic sense.

Why can't it be mutually beneficial?

I really dislike this "us vs them" attitude. Sure the company has free food and sure you can have lunch with your colleagues and sure that's more likely to happen than if you had to find your own lunch but...

- you don't have to have lunch with your colleagues

- you don't have to eat at your desk or work through lunch

- you don't have to have a short lunch

I love the food simply because it's something I don't want to have to think about. I'm certainly not going to make my own lunch. It's not even about the money of going out and buying lunch. I just don't want to think about what I want for lunch today, where should I get it from, when should I go, how long will I have to queue, will it be a pain getting out of and back into the building (eg elevator queues) and so on. I just eat whatever is on offer that day.

So while the company may benefit from you being more likely to eat with your colleagues and that undeniably helps build culture overall, it's also of clear benefit to me and many others.

Why does this have to be a zero-sum game?

Yes, this very much so! Getting food provided for me at the office has more personal value than just the strict monetary benefit. Eating food that someone else bought for you just feels better than eating food you bought for yourself.

Try this experiment: pick a friend that you eat out with a lot and set up a system where you each alternate picking up the whole bill. You'll each spend the same amount of money on aggregate, but I am confident each of you will feel better every time you go out.

Personally I’m happy if the company realizes it makes good economic sense, and also makes me happy.

Too many companies will not provide food or overtime.

Plus it's a way to transfer money to employees without income taxes (if you assume that people are willing to accept slightly lower pay to get these benefits).

Depends on where you are. Benefits such as free food are taxable in some places.

Really? Where? I hadn’t considered that.

In most countries it’s considered a BIK so the value of those benefits is added to your taxable income, I don’t know how it works in the US and while it might no affect your federal income tax it might affect your local/state income taxes.

Food, car allowances/company car, travel and gym vouchers and virtually any other kind of benefit are taxed all over the world it’s also one of the easiest things to tax since the company knows how much it’s paying per head for each of those items.

Basically if it’s an expense that can be expensed for normal business reasons it’s not a BIK but anything else is taxable.

For food specifically if it’s just your normal lunch it’s a BIK if it’s a lunch while traveling for business or performing another business related activity such a business lunch with a client it’s an allowable expense.

Just a concrete example. Back when I worked for Square, lunch used to be $x. This was reimbursed on your paycheck and thus subject to income tax.

Does free food mean the company isnt wfh nowadays. Id be willing to take a 100k pay cut compared to a in office job.

Agree. Most companies do not get this though, and think of this as an additional cost.

Is this suggesting the standard stock package is $275,000?? Or is that just a default value.

If so I’m just now realizing I’m massively under compensated...

My stock comp for Google was $400k/4y in SF, so it's definitely not outside the realm. Once I started to look around I was amazed at how much I'd been leaving on the table.

How much experience did you have when you were offered $400k/4y?

About 2.5 years out of school, plus a couple of big-name internships (Adobe and Microsoft). I also had offers from some other great companies which certainly helped. Google only negotiates when you have other offers.

When you started looking around before or after Google?

Ah sorry my comment was a bit unclear. I had that revelation when I was in my third year at Square and started looking around (not to knock Square, it's a great company!)

For companies like FB and Google that's actually far below the level of a senior engineer (E5/L5), which is usually at around $350-500k range.

$280k sounds about right for someone who's about 3-5 years out of undergrad at these companies.

my L5 offer was a half of that (kind of lowball which i naturally didn't take). It looks like i got into what i heard is the "benchwarmers" category as a result of that being the second interview with Google - i.e. they hire those low and put on unimportant, to say the least, projects (and the projects they gave me did look so).

Edit in response to the comment below: it was Bay Area, SWE L5, about 3 years ago, was truly surprised myself. Since that have learnt about couple other people in the acquaintance network who got similar.

I can't imagine a Google offer for a T5 SWE in the US only having <$200k initial grant anytime in the last 5 years (and probably much longer than that).

So this would either have to be a different country or a non-SWE engineering ladder and I would guess that's the case here.

To clarify, your L5 offer was some base salary, and then ~150k in stock vesting over four years?

Or was it 150k per year? Because the second is reasonable, and the first is low enough to be unheard of.

200K (i.e. the half of the L5 range mentioned in GGP comment) stock over 4 years (with the total - stock, base and bonus - about 220)

>low enough to be unheard of

as i said, a couple of guys in the vicinity got similar offers too. Both are somewhat like me - mid-age and 25+ years experience. One did even take the offer, and he run away after the first year :)

200K would be in the realm of possibility for someone at the very bottom of the band, I think. I thought you meant ~150K as in half of 280K. That would be really low.

Out of curiosity, was that before or after any negotiation?

they would not negotiate. Probably because i didn't have competing offers (wasn't actively looking, just responded to their recruiter).

I frequently interview candidates who are 3-4 years out of undergrad for mid-level engineer positions (between junior and senior level). A typical stock package at this level is about $350k/4, give or take. If candidates have multiple competing offers, they can drive this number higher.

You can see that the URL is specifying params to fill in values. I'm not sure where those values come from, but they're not 'default values'. They look like low-level FAANG offers.

If you reset the tool everything goes blank, and reselecting a company didn't fill in values for me.

$275,000/4 doesn't seem like an outlier package though, so you might be under compensated.

My original Google offer (as a new graduate) in 2013 had a stock package of about $250,000 (this was back when they awarded units instead of a dollar amount -- it was 500 post-split units).

The offers have only gone up since then for both new graduates and more experienced engineers. At L6, the market is closer to 800k - $1.0MM.

This is specifically for a Facebook E4 [1] vs a Square L4 [2] offer package (originally had that in my title, but got pretty long)

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/company/Square/salaries/Software-Engi...

I don't think people should try to price in stock value "growth" into the equation. The fair value today of the stock you're promised on the nth year is just the price of the stock today (for publicly traded companies).

Why on earth would it estimate a 48% y/y growth forever for Square stock. That's insane. Past performance != future performance, yeesh. At that rate by the end of the 4 year estimation here, Square will be worth $240B (4.8X) -- or the market cap of Tesla. By year 2028, $1.150 TRILLION (23X) dollars, or just shy of an Apple.

Keeping in mind that they just divested a major business unit, point to where in [1] you think this is justified haha.

It's downright negligent to suggest people consider a 48% y/y growth in equity when figuring their future compensation. I mean Square's down 6% since July 2. Not to mention, Square stock saw zero or negative equity total return from September 2018 until this week. It trades like a penny stock. Can confirm, am shareholder.

If we're moving up 48% y/y forever, I'll quit my job as I'm going to be a billionaire by the turn of the decade.

I think it's also important to consider that at a company like Facebook, you won't stay an IC4 forever, and you will start seeing IC5 refresh grants that will be much more substantial. I don't know how Square's handling leveling these days, but comparing my time at both, Facebook's going to be much more structured. It's not enough to compare without factoring in expected time to next level and next level refresh grants, and promotion grants. And, of course, grounding your expectations for equity appreciation in something approaching reality.

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/114365585/files/doc_financials/2020/Q1...

This is the problem of using a website/front-end created by some arbitrary person (Peter Levels in this case) to view what is essentially a read only copy of some crowdsourced data

I'm almost 100% positive that Pieter Levels is not the creator of this

I believe you are correct and I misspoke. I could have sworn I remembered seeing that site on his twitter bio as something he created, but now it seems to me that I have mistakenly identified him as the arbitrary creator :(

It would be a better overall comparison if you could factor in stock refreshers and the cadence of which they are given.

Free food to me is worth more than $10 per meal. It's the time that kills you. If you work out your rough hourly salary and calculate how much money you waste making food then it's worth thousands of dollars a month.

Measuring non work activities by how much opportunity cost there is in salary is a losing game, imo. Cooking isn't time that I can be paid for. (And besides, shouldn't we all be considering that time ours and not our employers anyhow?)

If you'd prefer to think of it as 'X company will give you 40 more minutes of leisure per day' or however much you cook, it's probably the closest financial approximation you can get.

Another way to calculate it would be to try and figure out what you would pay for another 40 minutes in a day, but that starts getting very subjective very quickly.

I have the opposite view, that I would rather be cooking or at least away from work for a break. I optimize for me, not for my employer.

Working for a salary, outside doing your job for the hours ageeed is free money for them.

I cook to relax, to get away from the computer.

only if the time that you’re making food is time that you could be getting paid but aren’t.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted (/sigh) because you're not wrong: from a strictly cost-of-time POV, an engineer making food is a pretty poor use of time. Now that doesn't mean you need to or even should work an extra hour (or whatever) either. You can use that for free time and it's still a net benefit.

Now, if making your own food makes you happy and you want to do it, do that. Of course. But having the option not to do that. How is that bad?

Because it gives the implied impression that time can only be valued by money, or that it should be in all circumstances. That's a recipe for depression imo.

This is a good point, now that I work from home I often spend ~40 minutes a day cooking for myself. I ain't even fancy in my cooking. I am also not counting the spinup and spindown time around cooking (or my bad habit of making far more food than I should reasonably be eating).

;; Though if it is thousands a month to you then you are either much better paid than I have ever been or are going all out on your meals. :)

How much time did you spend commuting, though? Many people in the Bay Area spent a lot more than 40m on their daily commute. I spent 1h15m on my walk to/from work.

I was recently laid off, but at my last 2 previous jobs I spend exactly 25 minutes door to door (Oakland to SF).

That’s hard to pull off, unless you practically live inside a BART station, and your workplace is also right next to one.

Hah, more than that, I insisted on arriving at work at 7:00 AM and leaving at 3:00 PM, so I could get the sweet sweet 12 minute commute both ways. :)

Boil water (other things can be done in parallel)

Add tofu, soy sauce, and green onion (45 seconds of effort)

Let it cook/cool down for 10 mins (other things can be done in parallel)

Delicious and healthy meal that wont hurt your wallet or time budgets

This assumes that you have ingredients on hand, and experience cooking. I won't comment on the meal choice, as that is a very subjective. Also, a lot of people like to have variety, which if you work at some of these big companies will provide.

It would be great if I could autopopulate the default values by entering a Level/location

Great suggestion, definitely something we can do – will work on it!

Just a random slightly off topic rant.

I’m of two minds seeing the comments below.

For context: I only started taking my career seriously about a decade ago and I’ve spent the last ten years jumping between 5 companies as your standard Enterprise CRUD developer/team lead/architect in a relatively low cost of living city in the south east.

Before my current job working remotely for Amazon (AWS Consulting), I was making about the median for my local market for level of experience $140K - $160K and with my wife working. We were comfortably able to meet our short and long term goals.

Then the local market tanked post Covid, and my former employer did an across the board pay cut.

My emotional mind is saying all of these folks graduating and within three to five years are getting more than I am even now that “I am working for a FAANG”. What did I do wrong? That’s a rhetorical question - a series of $bad_life_decisions for the first decade of my adult life.

On the other hand, my logical mind knows how fortunate I am that I am making what I make now, I am able to work remotely from a low cost of living area, and that I was able to do it without “grinding leetCode” and without a whiteboard coding interview.

How did you land your current job with AWS Consulting without grinding leetcode for a whiteboard coding interview, though?

Dumb luck.

Working for small companies all of my career forced me to wear a lot of hats. So I could answer questions about “the Leadership Principles”.

Consulting is more about helping “big enterprise” move to AWS. They cared about a few things - could I deal with customers, solve business problems, juggle tasks, and did I know how to do your standard “enterprise development”. It even seem to be an afterthought whether I had any experience with AWS - I did.

The interview process was a little more intense, but it was mostly just like all of the other soft skill interviews I had with my last two jobs as “adult supervision” for companies that were trying to move past the “move fast and break things” phase to the “how can we stabilize all of this stuff and have good processes”.

A recruiter first reached out to me about an SDE role - I knew I would fail miserably plus I didn’t want to relocate. She told me about the consulting role.

Pretty slick tool. I look forward to using it in the event I manage to stumble my way through the interview grind and into multiple offers.

For now it looks like it treats stock compensation in private companies (eg. Stripe) as equivalent to public companies. Would be pretty damn helpful if it could expose some knob that could adjust for liquidity risk.

My current approach (working for private Unicorn) is to heavily discount the face-value, operating on received wisdom that most of the time you'll get next to nothing.

However anecdotally, this has proved far too pessimistic (like off by a factor of 10).

Seems like location should be a toggle on this page as well, as I imagine that can contribute to a large variation in compensation figures (fairly or not).

That's a pretty decent calculator. Good points:

- It correctly showed Amazon's (crappy) vesting schedule (5/15/40/40%);

- I like the attention to detail with showing round dollar numbers on the Y axis

Areas for improvement:

- I believe Amazon's offer factors in stock growth in their quoted dollar value for your initial grant. It looks like the calculator is working on the nominal value (which is what Amazon should do too as their method inflates their grant value);

- I see no mention of 401k matches or vesting.

- No mention of cliffs or the lack thereof

- I'd probably show PTO days and company holidays too

- It might be worth showing vesting schedules as it can matter if it's monthly vs annually;

UI/UX suggestions:

- This site has enough information where you could pick a level on many company's job ladders and it will correctly fill out bonus targets, grant ranges and so forth. Likewise it could show salary bands. For the big tech companies it'll probably be pretty accurate;

- Arguably you can drop the table entirely

- I'd make the company names more prominent above the total 4 year compensation figures. The font is too small. This should be highlighted

- UI-wise I'd probably put the chart at the top and the offers side by side. It's weighted very much to the left column such that I get line wrap even on a 32" monitor (with the capped width). Even without the line wrap there's way more on the left column than the right.

- The top heading is (IMHO) too big. Reduce this.

- I'd move the Reset Form button, certainly from the top. Maybe next to the share link?

- I think you need a clearer breakdown of each bar between salary and stock. I'd even add a third category of bonus. Put them in this order from top to bottom: stock, bonus, salary.

So my suggested layout is:

    +---------+---------+
    |  Chart  |  Table  |
    +---------+---------+
    | Offer 1 | Offer 2 |
    +---------+---------+

If you ditch the table put the summaries to each side of the chart. I think the share link below the chart makes the most sense.

The last thing I have to say is for anyone comparing offers, I would advise you to consider the growth in the company value to be 0. It may well be more. It certainly has been for the last decade but this has also been the longest bull market in modern history. It can also go down. Zero-growth assumed IMHO is a safer course of action.

Put it this way: if you're putting in, say, that a company will grow 20% y/y why wouldn't you put all your money into it?

Two things about Amazon:

I was quoted salary + bonus + shares of stock.

I know Amazon’s stock vesting schedule is back end heavy. But the first two years are made up by the bonus. Even if I assume 0% stock growth, signing bonus/RSUs balance each other out over four years. What am I missing?

Thanks for all the feedback, all great points that we're planning to get to! We figured we'd launch this initially to let people play around with what we had so far.

We're planning to improve the layout and include more information from our benefits section [1] of the site. Still working out specific cases as you mentioned around Amazon, ByteDance, and a few other companies with varying stock / vesting programs.

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/

This is not really very useful. How are we supposed to know what the companies' future growth rates will be?

The major tech players have been consistently growing for decades. The major tech players before them likewise grew for decades.

It's hard to know if you're joining IBM in 2010 or Google/Apple in 2000 though. You can simplify the problem if you're comparing 150k in equity from a top-5 tech company by market cap with a 5+ year history of > 15% YoY stock growth vs. 150k in startup options. How much money are you potentially leaving on the table by not working at the large company? What does the return rate need to be on a 4 year time horizon for the startup equity to be worth it?

You estimate.

Look at past 1yr then 5yr. get average per year. Then look at forward growth potential, maybe read the last two quarter prospectus... and kind of guess/ballpark. You could be wrong so come up with a lowest case scenario even if it's negative and a top and middle, based on best judgment.

...this all goes out the door if they are so new as to not have 5yr of stock performance or if their revenue is negative. In this case, if it was me, I wouldn't even count stock in the compensation unless I plan to sell right at each vesting.

You can't, but from that fact you shouldn't just not bother to try. They offer a knob to adjust expected stock growth, so that you're able to make your best guess.

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