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Comment by neill | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely out of the ordinary- Levels.fyi lists a salary of $224,000 for a Staff level SWE at Google

No you are incorrect. That 224k is base at google not including equity. Staff engineers at google get a bonus and the majority of their comp is in equity, just like coin.

Source, I have a lot of friends who are former/current staff engineers at a variety of Bay Area companies. I also was a staff engineer at coin.

Also if you want to earn something like this in cash go work at Netflix when they start hiring again. They give you the option to be paid in cash.

It's not incorrect, salary does not include equity. Total comp would be a combination of salary, equity, and bonuses. The OP refers to salary, not total comp. I'm using their information to reply in their thread. Happy to re-asses conversation at total comp (a different conversation) if they are referring to total comp instead of salary.

Coinbase isn't paying $380k base either..are you just quibbling over the meaning of salary?

I don't think it is quibbling. It is a really important distinction. Salary is (mostly) guaranteed. Equity isn't guaranteed at all.

It’s a bit pedantic to be honest. Multiple times it’s been pointed out on this thread that the OP was referring to total comp so I’m not sure why this keeps being brought up.

While equity in a public company can go down and go down significantly it’s liquid. Especially in companies like coinbase that don’t have a 1 year cliff, are public, it’s a significant part of your comp and not funny money like you get in many early stage companies.

> Salary is (mostly) guaranteed

Truth

The salary I banked at the beginning of the month is guaranteed.

>Equity isn't guaranteed at all.

Especially not at coinbase, whose stock has imploded to the tune of -75% just this year, and more since IPO.

To quibble even more, it's much harder (legally) to take away unvested RSUs than it is to demote / reduce salary.

The OP is confused, I work at coinbase and that figure refers to total comp. Also levels.fyi is listing salary and not total comp for the google position he is comparing.

I wonder if this is sort of imposter syndrome, where an engineer thinks a year of my time is just not worth $380k to $495k. We all know plenty of examples where good employees are worth this and much more to growing or very profitable companies.

Ask for what you can get and realize that you are worth more than you realize in the right situation. And never begrudge a peer who earns a lot.

The coin base is almost certainly total comp, especially since they give annual (rather than the standard 4-year) equity grants.

Yeah, no way that Coinbase is paying $380k salary.

I’m guessing 380k is total comp, which is 498k for staff at Google.

Levels.fyi lists that number as base cash salary, yes. Total comp for a Staff SWE at Google is easily breaking $500k. It is also not a secret to anyone that cash salary at most tech companies tops out pretty low, because as you grow in levels, cash becomes a smaller and smaller portion of your total comp.

$224k/yr is below what a midlevel/L4 SWE would make at Google in total comp.

That’s low. I don’t think they’re using “staff” right.

Also, Total comp in 224k is more like $400k. 15% bonus target is normal with a possible 2x performance multiplier. 100k/yr gsu stock. 50% 401k match. To say nothing of the perks. On-site gyms, fantastic food, free shuttles.

Not that I’m advocating for working for goog, just saying.

levels.fyi shows $498,910 in total compensation for a staff level SWE at Google. Different companies compensate using a different blend of cash and equity. At a public company like Google, it's all liquid. Similarly, an E6 at Facebook gets $576,886.

These are also roughly speaking first-year salaries. You can expect a refresh grant equal to 1/4 of a new-hire equity grant each year vesting over 4 years, plus a staff-level can get a signing bonus of $50-100K.

After 3-4 years in a staff role you can easily be making $1-2M/yr.

It's probably not 380K base, which is very high, it's likely 300K base + 25% bonus target = $375K, give or take. That's not hugely more than any of the mega-caps have been paying in cash comp for staffie's for like 5+ years.

> After 3-4 years in a staff role you can easily be making $1-2M/yr.

Refreshes exist but this is a total lie. I'm staff at Google. Nobody at L6 is making $1M in annual compensation, even if they have their sign-on equity and three refreshes. Let alone $2M.

Ok so I'm speaking from personal experience and network.

The point is that 3-4 years tenure is enough for significant appreciation in equity, especially in the earlier grants. Let's work an example, for someone who started 3 years ago.

- May 2019. -

Base: $225K.

Equity: $880K grant = 785sh @ 1120/share = 220K.

Bonus: $60K.

Total: $500K.

- May 2020. -

Base: $236K.

Equity: 196sh @ 1428/share = 280K.

Equity: $220K grant = 154sh @ 1428/share = 55K.

Bonus: $63K.

Total: $634K.

- May 2021. -

Base: $247K.

Equity: 196sh @ 2411/share = 473K.

Equity: 39sh @ 2411/share = 94K.

Equity: $220K grant = 91sh @ 2411/share = 55K.

Bonus: $66K.

Total: $935K.

Trust me, if they've been there for 3-4 years, they're making more than 1M in total comp. If you back my example out to someone who started in 2018, those refreshers easily push them into 1.2-1.4M, and factor in promo grants?

Okay if the stock price more than doubles in two years then yeah you can end up making a lot of money. This is why it is foolish to use vest price rather than grant price when discussing compensation. It isn't actionable information.

And Google wasn't giving $880k sign-on equity grants for L6 in 2019. You can't use todays numbers for past cases. And then you are choosing a peak pay before it drops dramatically after the sign-on grant ends. And after all that, you aren't even at 1M, let alone "easily 1-2M". With literally everything being used to pump numbers up, you don't get to where you cite.

So yes, there are people at loads of companies who make way more money than advertised because the stock ballooned. But this is a completely useless way of analyzing compensation.

> So yes, there are people at loads of companies who make way more money than advertised because the stock ballooned. But this is a completely useless way of analyzing compensation.

I couldn't disagree more. If half your total compensation is derived from stock, then you better be looking at yourself not just as an employee but as an investor. And part of that means making projections.

The point is that it isn't repeatable. Saying "oh I made bank investing in Tesla" is not useful information for another person making a decision now. Similarly, "Google stock went up dramatically between 2018 and early 2022 is not useful information for somebody who has offers in hand today from various corporations because they have absolutely no way of predicting future stock growth.

It's not about assuming that past performance equals future performance. With that attitude, nobody should invest in anything.

It's about bringing an investor mindset. Do your own analysis, make your own projections. It's literally half your paycheck, you owe it to yourself. It won't perform the same, sure, but your job as an investor is to analyze the quality of that investment. Will it go up or down? How much?

Whatever you vest is ordinary income. It's your compensation. Just because it's not fixed in advance doesn't mean it's not total comp! Don't pretend otherwise! :)

An effective investor mindset is to buy the whole market and forget it. Doing your own projections and trying to choose a particular company based on your belief that it’s stock will go up 150% over the next few years is a thing that virtually zero people can do effectively.

Except that you are literally investing a large chunk into the company you are going to work for. So while you may take that approach with your discretionary income, you are taking a different stock-picking approach joining a company that offers equity compensation. Unless you join Netflix.

So while you're saying one thing here, you're actually doing another.

I don't have data to prove you otherwise, but I don't think 880k would be not possible as the initial stock grant for L6. FB gives that to E5 now so I am not sure why you think L6 can't get that even in 2019. The initial stock grant bands haven't changed that much. I even got 400k as the initial grant in 2017.

Disc: Googler.

> And Google wasn't giving $880k sign-on equity grants for L6 in 2019.

Note that Facebook certainly was.

The original grant runs out after 4 years. You don’t just infinitely accumulate a higher annual comp through refreshers.

L6 @ Google, personal AGI last year (not counting capital gains or spouse's income) was just over $900K. You forget the massive stock-price appreciation between 2020 and the end of 2021. If you were granted $400K/year in stock compensation in March 2020 it was worth over $1M/year in Dec 2021.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I do not think it is useful to use grant price when discussing comp with other people because it is not actionable. People joining Google today cannot rely on another 200% stock growth.

And even if you managed to hit your sign on grant at just the right time, you still were below the proposed “easily 1-2M”.

Totally accurate and valuable information based on people in my network.

You can make a lot of money working as a staff engineer at a top tier company.

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