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Comment by bgirard | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's incorrectly including the full 4 year equity grant in the yearly compensation grant.

Nope. The L4ish offers certainly would be far too low if that was 4 years, and these are supposedly "manually verified."

The hovertext also says they explicitly divide by N.

I only meant the top ones. There's a big discontinuity in the data and this mistake is more logical than seeing $3m equity grants that no other site can cross validate.

I think it’s a mix, where some are, and some aren’t. I’d be _very_ surprised to see a L6 making $1M/year.

You don't get a sign-on bonus every year either. Agreed, I'd say at most you're getting $250k/year in equity, no way L6 is getting $3.2M in equity over 4 years

The sign-on bonuses are amortized over the equity vest period (which is a bizarre way to do it, but whatever). Aggressive L4 offers can clear about $250k/year in equity, so I don't know where you're getting this "at most" quantity...

Research scientist ladder at Google is a higher comp band than swe by, at least for lower levels, about 1 level. So an L6 RS getting high l7 swe comp isn't out of the question.

That said, the person getting such a large stock grant with a lower base salary is suspicious. The other two offers for L6 are clearly correct as they are (160K/year stock is too low for L6), but that one is odd. Doesn't mean it's wrong though.

For some context, initial grants are usually larger than refresh grants, and an L6 SWE (who again is in a lower band than L6 RS) can expect a >200K stock refresh. So a new hire RS at that level isn't going to get less than 200K annually (or 800K/4yr).

One of the creators (Devi Parikh, a prof and RS at Facebook) tweeted about it and has answered a few questions about that: https://twitter.com/deviparikh/status/1310610025212071939

Seems well aware that equity offers usually vest over 4 years e.g.: https://twitter.com/deviparikh/status/1310654018654367744

You're telling me multiple L4s are getting $254k/yr ($1 mil total) in equity? That's surprising to me, and I thought I had a sense of the market.

I've seen (and tried to compete with) mid-level (not quite senior, not quite entry-level) pure SWE (non-AI, infrastructure-type roles) offers with that much equity at public firms.

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