In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/
I don't know what actually happens, but following the money is usually a good first place to look.
Am I looking at it wrong?
The really only reason I can imagine doing it would be if I really liked the team and product, such that the actual experience of working there was going to be really fun. But the startups I worked at were similar or worse than the larger companies on those fronts.
I think this Dan Luu article is a good look at it: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
If you want the money... you can't beat the highly profitable big-tech companies.
If you want small teams, deep ownership of the projects you work on, and like being invested in your product/company you might enjoy a start up more.
(also this isn't a dig at big companies, it's just way harder to match the start-up/small co. experience)
It all depends on what you want out of your work. The balance has shifted semi recently so that if you want to maximize your expected earnings, for most tech area engineers the answer has shifted from "pick the right startup" or maybe "go be a quant if you can" to "go work for FAANG".
Things get a lot more complicated if you are not merely optimizing for income.
Do not work at an early stage startup!
- Shitty experience because you won't have to do things right. Initial system will turn out like crap because you are rushed to build it. - You will be in constant firefights once live. You will feel like a hero but in reality you're just burning yourself out to make the leadership rich. - No customers so won't learn about scaling, - Little to no process. - Pay is crap - Equity is a complete scam. Company will do everything they can to keep you from capitalizing on them. 90 day exercise after leaving. 8-10 years before there's a market to sell and you won't last that long. Company won't buy them from you. Common shares instead of preferred. Dilution, etc. - Management is inexperienced and a lot of times abusive. - Once the company starts to succeed, a new wave of management will be hired. They will bring their own direct reports who blame you for creating the initial crappy system and your career will essentially be over at the startup.
I could go on.
(Also, your bullets didn't format properly, you may want to edit your response to fix that)
sidenote, it's a bit hard to access aggregated data, I always have to click bunch of things if I want to see e.g. distribution of salaries for role in switzerland.
(all the default views seem to show just a list of entries, I think you first have to pivot to company, then to location before you can see any aggregated data)
Discretionary income can vary widely after living expenses are removed for a given salary for a given locale.
We think startup compensation will be a huge and important next step for us. Hope to have more updates soon!
*Note that once a company switches to RSU we collect that as a cash value at that point (so for example Stripe would have a cash value for their stock grant)
Ultimately, if you join and the stock goes up, congrats on your "free" raise!
We do believe that the stock growth in the market in general influences the monetary amounts of new stock grants. The bull run in essence contributes to larger stock grants through a cascading effect, as people who are looking to switch to another company expect higher and more competitive packages to make the leap.
You’ll notice when you expand each row by clicking on it, there are some additional details such as if the data point is for remote.
I still would have had performance anxiety, but it would have been bigger, and bigger, is better, right?
I need some help interpreting the location data. For example, if you click on Los Angeles, there's a bar chart with median and different percentiles. I assume this is across all engineer levels (I - V). But I'm interested in compensation for a level at a location.
Going by years of experience, my level is Staff (IV) and the description notes that this is 10% of all engineers. Looking at the LA bar chart, the 90th percentile is around $325k total compensation. So a Staff level engineer in the LA area should expect around this much. Does this analysis seem correct with the given data?
Click on the levels to get a brief overview of the scope and responsibility.
You're abbreviating 'NSW' as just 'NS', is that intentional?