Salaries at Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Salaries at Facebook

levels.fyi

22 pointssamueladam9 comments

The thing people always forget when comparing salaries is that a huge portion of FAANG comp, especially at senior levels, is stock grants. It's a relatively recent phenomena that stock grants equal or beat cash comp, and 99% of employers in the US don't grant any stock to anyone below the C level. A lot of places don't have any bonus, or do a pro-forma "Christmas bonus" type of thing - I worked one place where every February 1, every person in the company got a bonus that was 7.5% of their salary, no matter what.

Comparing a FAANG's total comp to your total comp is a fool's errand. You need to compare cash to cash unless you are also getting a variable performance bonus and stock grants. $190k for an E5 at FB (which is basically "Senior Engineer") is still above-average for the US as a whole but it's not insane. You can certainly reach that in Chicago or DC or Austin but it might take a level higher and a few extra years. I can say pretty confidently that you're not going to be making $380k (FB E5 total comp) in Chicago or DC or Austin unless you're doing HFT and even then you're not likely to get anything in terms of stock that could provide long-term value, it's going to be mostly bonuses and probably $150k cash comp.

Yeah, that's why I like to ignore stock comp as it doesn't help me buy food at the supermarket

How exactly does RSU comp at a public company not help buy food at the supermarket or anything else? These are not options or illiquid shares, it really is the same thing as having a much higher salary. The only real difference is that your total pay fluctuates with the stock value. But even an enormous drop in stock value would leave you taking home real money.

I don’t know about the US but here I can’t pay in the supermarket with stock or buy a new appliance...

Once they vest, you can sell them in the market.

Vesting period varies. The whole point of stock grants is that you have some what of a skin in the game.

Vesting is monthly (for the FAANGs I'm familiar with), you can even set it on auto sale to automatically sell your shares as they vest and just take the cash every month if you never want to see stocks. I feel like I shouldn't have to explain that publicly traded stock is highly convertible for cash!

@samueladam - what’s the context here?

Probably this post prompted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286487

Yes, I extracted it from that post.

I wanted to save the reference. The context might be sometimes added by our peers like pc86.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com