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Comment by dangerwill | Hacker News Reader

Surely Twitter engineers weren't making $800k and more like $350k - 400k at the top end?

I mean, I read it more as, it isn't a yes or no, it's "everyone has a price". I'll do your dirty, high-stress work for a price.

For $800k? Yeah, we probably have a deal. For the parent poster's price, absolutely we have a deal. But that offer will never exist, and I rather doubt the lower $800k offer would ever happen.

Sure, but now the company's been taken over by a madman, you'd need to pay me (and many others) a significant risk premium to even consider it.

We may be approaching the first time in history employees will demand a security deposit from their employer.

Isn’t that a sign on bonus?

Sign on bonuses are usually contingent on you staying for a certain period, and are paid out in chunks. At least that's how it had been anytime I was offered one.

US-based principal and senior staff engineers, as well as staff engineers who negotiated hard with competing offer(s) and/or saw significant stock growth between their RSU grant and vest dates, could all have plausibly been clearing $800k in a given recent year. Even senior engineers, in outlier cases of the stock growth case.

But as of the takeover, RSUs and options are likely being offered valued at the takeover price, while Elon knows the next 409A will likely value the company at ¼ of that.

Twitter went public at $45 a share and only had a max of $77. Sure some engineers could have almost doubled their RSU valuations if they had perfect timing but this isn't a case like GOOG/APPL/TSLA where 100x jumps occurred. Or is my thinking here naive?

I think your thinking is correct, and “almost doubled” is the kind of multiplier I was thinking of for the outlier, but not unrealistic, cases of some staff engineers or even occasionally senior engineers ending up with as much as $800k total comp in a given recent year. No need for 100x or even 5x stock growth to have occurred.

There is considerably more risk now. I would want to be paid daily too.

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