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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

It's a lot more toxic to HN users than to the general public. They pay well, they're making a lot of money, and they have lots of interesting problems to solve. It doesn't seem like much of a mystery to me why so many would want to work for them.

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I also wonder how much goodwill is still left from Facebook not being part of the salary collusion stuff over a decade ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Probably not much. That's ancient history from the perspective of the modern tech industry.

When so much of your compensation is tied directly to the stock price, you also need to make a guess where the stock price will be in 2-4 years compared to your other options.

FB is not cool, TikTok is eating Instagram’s lunch causing IG to pivot more to video, so it comes down to the Metaverse.

You just sell the stock every year and switch it to S&P 500 if you're that worried...

If the stock price for the company goes down, the value of your unvested stock goes with it.

This is a common misconception.

If the value of your invested RSUs go up: fantastic now you make more.

I’d the value of the invested RSUs go down: no problem, you evaluate if you want to wait to see if they go up, or if you want to go into the market and take a new job.

It’s nearly all upside for the employee (in a hot market).

It's not a "misconception." I may not want to go find a new job in 6 months because the stock tanked. There's opportunity cost if nothing else. While that company's stock is tanking, I could instead be at one that's growing at even a modest rate.

While true, frequently cash-rich companies account for this. There are a lot of levers CFOs of profitable companies have to prevent people from leaving when the stock drops: issuing more shares, cash bonuses, etc. Facebook and Apple have more than enough cash to retain their talent in the event their stocks get cheap.

Still, they’re likely to readjust your comp back up to baseline.

You face the opportunity cost of not working for a company whose stock will rise fast, making it worth much more in years 2-3+ than it was initially priced at.

None of us have a crystal ball though, so it’s all speculation.

Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

> Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

Absolutely yes.

HN posters are by far the noisy minority.

Even on HN the vast majority of readers don’t post. HN posters are a sliver of a sliver.

> Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

non-california, non-big city senior engineers have wildly different values from HN users. i'm not sure about non-HN big city or california engineers. i suspect that HN accurately reflects the values of folks working in SF/LA.

if i tried to explain the shit HN freaks out about every day to my coworkers, they'd think i was making everything up.

Yep, that is what I'm saying. Most of my real life SWE friends have attitudes that seem different from folks on this site. Perhaps they are secretly harboring the same views, but I'd guess that there is a selection effect that biases the sort of folks who comment here.

They don't even necessarily have different values. A lot of online people are virtue signaling to get virtual points.

In particular, the viewpoints that are downvoted differs from those that aren't. There's probably a lot of engineers that, like me, have learnt that HN isn't very fond of posts arguing for other perspectives in relation to big tech, and therefore will refrain from presenting them. Even if they don't, their posts will be hidden from view quickly enough to prevent them from affecting the overall tone.

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