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Comment by tempnow987 | Hacker News Reader

I don't fully understand how they have such high costs (G&A / Tech etc). Their revenue is actually fine / great. But these costs are wild - what makes up the bulk of these?

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Anecdotally, I've seen many talented + experienced ($$$) people move over, so I would assume they've been paying top of market or close to it.

Interesting. Sort of makes sense, as the risks in the crypto business do seem higher than say sticking it out at Google etc.

I did read their letter and eyes glazed at their Coinbase NFT push. Kind of crazy that folks are making mid - high six figured to develop stuff like that

When things are good you don't need to have any checks on spending. Poach engineers from FAANGs and pay them any salary they want. Hand out fat RSU packages to employees. Have no checks on expense reimbursements and discretionary spending by managers. Let your IT/infra costs balloon. Spend frivolously on sales and marketing without no measures or expectation of RoI.

It is inevitable that employees are going to (or already are) see a lot of tightening in all these areas now.

Very high salaries.

+1.. COIN trying to hire FAANG engineers so have to pay high salaries to attract them

I think a lot of tech companies are going to start seeing this as a big problem. When you are hiring regular rank and file engineers at 500k you blow through money really fast. We'll see if the bean counters decide that controlling payroll costs is worth having a harder time hiring.

Ridiculously high packages- I left a premier hedge fund last year, and right as the ink dried on the paperwork for my new role, a friend called me who I worked with in the past that landed a high up role there running a big revenue generating piece of their technology org, and I was like bud, its been awhile, I have been very fortunate, you might not be able to afford me... and he blew me away with comp about 50% higher than I had just signed for, and it wasn't one of those its all stock that vests in 4 year things, it vested I believe quarterly, with no restrictions to hold further. We are talking comp around the 7 figure range. Huge numbers.

Normal is a 4 year grant, with a 1year cliff, that is thereafter quarterly/monthly.

I'd have to look at my notes, but when they reached out they had just changed the schedule/vesting, but who knows may have changed it again since- this was a bit over 6 months ago. I just remember this is a big number that really had very few strings attached, which those big numbers often do. I felt no need to do an internal discount to what my real expected annual comp would be which I have pretty much always had to do when comparing offers in the past.

Is it though? How are stock grants counted? Yes, the big tech base salaries are higher, but the insane numbers people read typically include a very large stock component.

Someone else linked to levels for COIN and I saw mostly 100-200k base (some higher, but I doubt the company is mostly made of L7+ whatevers), but huge stock grants. The base seems perfectly reasonable for people working in a space where mistakes can cost significant amounts of money.

I think a bigger issue with big tech stocks sinking is top talent leaving to either do their own thing or take sabbaticals.

Here's a reference point on their salaries for anyone curious: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Coinbase/salaries/Software-En...

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