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Comment by sombremesa | Hacker News Reader

There are huge issues with how these salaries are reported. When you include stock compensation especially: what about vesting schedules and taxes? You can leave a job (by choice or otherwise) where you worked for a year and were making "1 million a year" with less than $300k in total compensation.

It feels like a little trick being played on the employees, kind of like unlimited PTO. I'm sure some people actually enjoy the full benefits of what they're promised, but I'd be surprised if that's a majority.

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Equity compensation at places like Google vests monthly with no cliff, and it's taxed as income. You get what you see on the tin.

> places like Google

Which place aside from Google?

Facebook, Amazon (mostly cash bonus first two years, but still "vests" monthly with no cliff), Uber, Lyft (every 3 months), Snapchat, etc. It's not all of them but it's an increasing number.

Also, even with a 1-year cliff, for most people it'll still basically be indistinguishable from cash? Leaving (or getting fired) before you hit the 1 year mark is pretty rare, and after the first cliff it usually transitions to something like every 3 months.

The cliff is irrelevant, if you leave before you fully vest your pay rate does not actually match what you claim.

The reason I brought up taxes (which might seem odd to people since compensation usually ignores them) is because they will significantly change the equation for various reasons. (AMT, RSUs taxed as short term gains and not long term, state tax affecting comp regardless of cost of living, etc.)

Ultimately, any compensation number that rolls all of this up into one number is mostly useless for actually knowing how much money you’ll have in N years, but it is useful for comparing offers, which is fine - but then these numbers shouldn’t appear without qualification in the type of discussion where personal finance is involved.

Not to mention that since this is a forum where many people are involved in startups, a 50k salary often (ok, maybe not often but I’m on 1/1) turns into several millions in a few years. Does that mean founders should claim they were making $2 mil per year? I don’t think so - but that’s the only comparison available if you use levels.fyi.

> The cliff is irrelevant, if you leave before you fully vest your pay rate does not actually match what you claim.

This doesn't make sense as well. You don't need to work at Google for a year to get the first year's equity. So there is no one year cliff.

The frequency of how often you vest is also monthly. Specially at the L6+ levels. So you will lose at most of one month's equity (i.e. 1/48th of the grant) if you are bad at planning your last day. So to put actual numbers again, let's say your offer is 240k cash + 240k RSUs every year. So you vest 240k/12 = 20k in RSUs every month on say 20th of the month. If you leave on the 19th of your 12 month of the employment (i.e. before finishing one year), you don't lose on 240k of RSUs but just 20k of RSUs. So you will earn 220k of cash + 229k of RSUs before you leave.

One of your original claims was this:

> You can leave a job (by choice or otherwise) where you worked for a year and were making "1 million a year" with less than $300k in total compensation.

For the purposes of discussing compensation at FAANG & similar, this is basically untrue. If you work at those companies for a year you'll take home (short of a massive movement in stock price) something approximately resembling what was promised to you. Taxes do not change the equation on this, since vested RSUs are taxed as income (_not_ short-term gains; them being the same rate is irrelevant - they are in fact just reported as income on your W2, without being broken out from your salary, it's literally one number). AMT applies regardless of whether your income is derived from vested RSUs or base salary - if you work at Netflix you're probably getting hit too. I don't see how state income taxes are relevant, since, again, those apply exactly the same way to RSUs as they do to salary.

> Ultimately, any compensation number that rolls all of this up into one number is mostly useless for actually knowing how much money you’ll have in N years

Uh, no? You can straightforwardly project your take-home pay over time; if you want to be really precise you can do it as a probability density function to take into account the potential movement of the stock price over time based on the volatility.

This is all a bit of a distraction from your main point:

> I'm sure some people actually enjoy the full benefits of what they're promised, but I'd be surprised if that's a majority.

Untrue! Obviously, trivially untrue, as demonstrated above.

> RSUs taxed as short term gains and not long term

That's not correct. RSUs get taxed as normal income. So whether you get $600k cash or $300k cash + $300k of RSUs, your tax bill is the same. The gain on the RSUs get taxed as short or long term capital gain. That comes into picture when you sell. If you auto-sell, there is no/very little gain, so no additional tax there and for intents and purpose, it's as if getting $600k in cash.

The numbers reported on levels.fyi are not useless. They give you a good idea of what one can get if they started working there at that moment. You can extrapolate more out of it by understanding the stock gain.

How is it incorrect? Short term gains are taxed the same as income, which is exactly what both of us are saying.

This is setup to favor people who don’t understand taxes, so they don’t screw themselves over. It ends up screwing people who do understand taxes.

If you read my comment again, if you sell your stocks immediately after vesting, there is little to no gain. You can even do this automatically at Google using autosale program. Yes, this is short term gain, but it's negligible compared to how much you are getting paid. e.g. Let's say the stock was at $1000 when vested and by the time you got around to sell it 5 days after it's at $1050 - 5% gain which is not so common in usual scenarios. You will pay short term capital gain tax only on $50. This is the only additional tax you will pay compared to getting $1000 in cash as part of your base salary. The $1000 stock itself will be taxed as normal income.

The gain you get on the stock from vest till you sell is a bonus anyway compared to if you were just given straight cash.

I would advise you to run some actual numbers to get this. I don't need to as I have been getting paid this for last 5 years at Google.

It feels like a little trick being played on the employees

It's a common trick.

In the 1990's Bill Clinton famously categorized people who made $200,000 a year as "millionaires." Why? Because they "should" be able to save a million dollars within five years.

People in power find it easy to play word games with other people's money.

It's all fairly straightforward actually, as long as you're familiar with how compensation works at big companies (salary, stock, bonus, refreshers). Blind and levels.fyi have raised the transparency on comp quite a bit. $1M/year total compensation (that's annual comp, not the total four year vest) is reasonable for a L8/director-level at the tech giants. This is before tax of course, which is how literally everyone talks about compensation.

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