Hacker News Reader

Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

Career growth. This includes job title, responsibilities, and compensation.

Companies can promote you every 1-2 years, but you need to start that clock.

That's not exponential growth. It's not even linear-with-good-slope.

And it's not even "give 1x work -same as before- and take x1.5 money" but more like "give 1.5x work and take x1.5 money" at best (and usually less): more responsibilities, more stress, and more work time.

> "give 1x work -same as before- and take x1.5 money"

This is exactly my case.

Here are my w2 compensation (salary+bonus+rsu) changes YoY working at $Yelp and $Grab:

2025 35.96% (projected)

2024 20.77% (projected)

2023 30.39%

2022 -0.65% <- promotion

2021 34.25%

2020 65.06% <- job change (December 2020; 2020 had a big jump due to unemployment in 2019)

I don't think my work hours, responsibilities, or work stress has any connection to my compensation or career growth, primarily due to the "work smart, not hard" thinking.

Even if you have zero promotions or changes in responsibility, RSU grants compound, even if your salary increase by only 1-6% (like mine did)

I don't know how old you are but you are likely to hit a compensation ceiling as an individual contributor at some point.

Or you manage to move into those staff/post-staff positions but those are very few, hyper competitive and during rounds a layoffs you have a huge target on your back.

> I don't know how old you are but you are likely to hit a compensation ceiling as an individual contributor at some point.

Realistically it's not a bad problem to have.

I'm no where near making a capped IC amount but if someone were in this position you really only need ~5-8 years of working to pretty much set yourself up for life financially if you keep your living expenses reasonable.

I’m 35. I survived 80% layoffs because I’m one of the lowest paid people in my grade and office.

Im still earning way less than what I see reported on Blind and what my coworkers make.

>because I’m one of the lowest paid people in my grade and office.

That puts those "30% YOY" in another perspective though, doesn't it?

Not really. There is always someone richer. I’m try to compare myself to my past self, not others.

For me, there was like a 3 year window of "exponential" growth. Everything beyond that has been fractional improvements.

It’s not exponential though, at most you’re looking at 2-3 orders of magnitude growth unless you’re a founder.

Not sure you understand what orders of magnitude means.

3 orders of magnitude is 1,000 times larger, so $100,000 salary would become $100,000,000.

Never going to happen.

I perfectly understand what orders of magnitude means. The growth you’ve described does happen, eg if you start at $65000 as junior eng and end up in dozens of millions a year as a SVP or CTO at FAANG-level company. My point is that even that is not exponential yearly, unless you mean “exponential” in the narrow sense of “compound returns”, by that is available to everyone with a brokerage account.

“Compound returns” are exponential returns. Is there another definition of exponential that im not away of?

I think you’re the one that has an abnormal definition exponential growth

My RSUs and total compensation has grown by 20-30% the last 3 years, despite my base salary only increasing 1-2%.

If that isn't exponential growth, idk what is.

RSU values compound.

Refreshers aren’t priced at the price of the date of hire, that would be crazy. It’s not more exponential than holding S&P 500.

Refreshers are priced at when they were granted and compound 4 years. So you have 4 years of compounding growth. Refreshers also stack, creating more compounding.

Once they vest, you can sell them to match snp500 past the 4 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com