>We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. [https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-...]
Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?
I thought I saw this question answered in a previous thread and the answer was basically “no”, but the question has been avoided a lot.
Aspects of equity compensation would inherently need to be different over time due to valuation, fundraising stage, and so on. However I always thought it was strange that they made a big deal about paying everyone the same base salary but then were silent on the equity comp strategy. Everyone knows that in a job like this the total comp is important.
The old Oxide compensation discussions were interesting. There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically. I heard this from a now ex-employee of Oxide who was describing how to navigate their hiring process, so take with a grain of salt.
EDIT: I checked their website again. The compensation link goes to a blog post ( https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... ) which has this section about equity:
> Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation. While it’s true that startup equity is important, it’s also true that startup equity doesn’t pay the orthodontist’s bill or get the basement repainted. We believe that every employee should have equity to give them a stake in the company’s future (and that an outsized return for investors should also be an outsized return for employees), but we also believe that the presence of equity can’t be used as an excuse for unsustainably low cash compensation. As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
Which doesn't answer the question.
Most valuable people know they’re valuable, and do (and should!) negotiate compensation.
> Everyone at Oxide makes $207,264 USD, regardless of location. (Some sales positions have a lower base salary and contain a commission component.)
On our applications page (see it here: https://oxide.computer/careers/sw-control-plane)
It's also a pretty well known aspect of the company. Combine this with the fact that our hiring process is different, where interviews are the very last thing before possibly being hired, and someone who has missed this fact could come across as having not done some very basic research about the company that they're applying to.
To be clear, I still think calling it "a red flag" is a stretch. I fully agree with you in a general sense, for places that are willing to negotiate compensation in the first place, but we make it very clear up front that we do not.
> To be clear, I still think calling it "a red flag" is a stretch.
In my comment above I did not call it a "red flag". My specific wording was "somewhat of a negative signal". That seems consistent with what you said about judging someone for asking about a well-known aspect of the company because it signals they haven't done enough research.
It also dodges the question that keeps getting asked: Does everyone receive the same equity compensation as well? As far as I can tell, that question is not answered on your website. Asking it seems like fair game.
The person I was responding did, you are right that you did not.
> It also dodges the question that keeps getting asked:
This question gets asked in every thread about this, nobody is trying to dodge anything. The equity portion is variable, and the salary is identical. We do not do bonuses.
It seems that specifically your open disclosure very up front bypasses at least most of this from both sides.
For anyone talented and in-demand, there are attractive and unattractive total comp numbers.
If the company and the potential employee are too far apart on those, why should both waste their time on an interview process?
I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels. The cognitive dissonance is amazing.
Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it, and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment.
If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them.
But somehow, I'm supposed to not care about money at the same time caring about money.
That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the same. When I transitioned to software development (from basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my first software job, they were all because I liked the particular product in some way or another, and what the compensation was is basically the least interesting thing for me.
Of course, some level of base payment is needed, because I still needed to pay rent, but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. And no, I'm just an individual contributor who wants to like what I work with, not an executive, manager or similar.
For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business.
And, enough money can buy independenance in that you can get this flexibility of doing as you choose.
Yeah, I guess I've been lucky to be able to chose daily jobs in the past that basically gives me what you would create outside of work, except I got a fixed payment each month for doing something I really enjoyed. So I never had the need to do that stuff outside of work to derive enjoyment of most of my time, which I guess is my top priority and been most of my life.
If you have a team full of people who are just there for the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is increasing the paycheck. Which startups can't do in a crunch.
Better to be thinking in transactional terms from the get go especially in early startups, where majority of total comp is an illiquid call option.
I chose my current job against competing offers because it was a good thing for the world, but I would not have taken significantly reduced pay for it. Let me tell you why: nobody that insists on paying you below market rates is going to treat you right. Some of the worst professional interactions I've ever dealt with involved high ranking individuals at nonprofits. These were orgs may have had genuinely good missions, but also paid rank and file employees quite poorly. On the other side, the 3x above market rate job is just a fantasy. I could believe it if you were talking about a 20% bonus.
Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.
My only reservation is that I’ve interviewed with or worked for multiple companies that made some claim about paying everyone the same and there was always some loophole: The company might have a fixed base pay but then use very different equity grants. One company claimed to give everyone the same base comp and equity but then it was discovered that some people were getting huge annual “guaranteed bonuses” that were effectively base compensation. It has left me tired of seeing companies push the idea of everyone being paid the same while not being open about the entire compensation structure.
EDIT: To be 100% clear, I don’t know what Oxide’s entire comp structure looks like. The examples above were for past companies I worked for.
Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an answer for.
If they gave everyone the same equity compensation presumably they’d put that front and center like they do for the base salary.
The claims about paying everyone the same are a red herring because it’s only about base salary.
> Congrats on the raise.
Thank you.
How good you think you are at your job is pretty meaningless if some manager above you wants to weaponise the company's perf policy against you.
Hello, Bryan! No, I'm on my own dime, no one else's. But it's decent of you to show such concern over my situation, in these uncertain times.
The point is not that my friends don't do a good job, the point is that this is work that does not actually further the organization's goals directly, but is necessary in order to keep their job. They'd rather be doing the actual work they are hired to do.
Anyway this is mostly just one example, it's just one that comes up often when I speak with my peers about how Oxide works vs other companies.
And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide, I really can't see how I'm meant to take any of what you're saying at face value. Instead it seems something much akin to "don't worry your clever little head about the boring ol' money stuff, darlin'! Don't you trust me to take good care of you?"
Okay, sure. I am also not a "I only want to put my head down and code" person either.
> And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide,
Not formally, no. Because there are no levels, no corresponding salary bands, there's no need to have a formal process, with all of the justification work that has to go in from the employee, and all of the reading and evaluating all of that stuff from management.
It is true that if you don't do your job, you'll be let go. However, that's a conversation that would happen between you and Bryan/Steve, not an annual or quarterly process with all of the paperwork and such that those formal processes demand.
Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our salary.
It sounds like it isn't an environment for you, and that's okay.
And some of "us" have an ownership stake, and some of "us" do not. But "we" like to talk about how everyone's working on a level playing field, anyway.
You're quite right. It isn't an environment for me.
I wouldn't wish to be taken as saying no employee is ever more valuable to the business than another. That would also be absurd. What I don't understand is why all the circumlocution.
By the way, I received every rating from Greatly Exceeds (including an additional equity grant) down to Meets Most, and the rating I got overall had very little correlation with either effort or impact. I got Meets Most for some of the most valuable and industry-impactful work I've done in my career, and Greatly Exceeds for something that got replaced in a year.
The culture difference between Meta and any startup will be night and day. People who are self interested min-maxxers don't join startups. Not dealing with "corporate politics" has to be in the top 5 reasons anyone leaves FAANG to join a startup. That has nothing to do with Oxide's comp structure.
Oh, sure! Now tell me another one. The idea that startups don't have politics is - well, I'll say it is extremely comedic, and we'll leave it at that.
Think about it for a minute. I'm not questioning the existence of the pipeline here described, and no one is questioning the existence of many pressing reasons for anyone at the FAANG "top of funnel" to want to flow along that pipeline about as quickly as is achievable.
But those "reasons" have effects on the people who experience them, because humans have emotions and psychologies and other such inconvenient externalities, and for like cause those effects are not instantly and perfectly ameliorated in every case by a simple change of environment.
Can you not straightforwardly see how this might produce some extremely adverse results, in a social and sociological sense? And how overt, documented, attributable, and discoverable personnel processes, far from some unreasonable burden, might serve a broadly beneficial role in such circumstances?
Sure enough when that bonus was due to pay out, I got a heads up from a friend (who was being compensated because he was like CTO or something) that it was worthless, because of course they get to pick the numbers so they're going to pick zero. I don't care, because I was on a different scheme and anyway I work for salary, if you want to pay me to do something, you can pay me, don't fuck about with nonsense about a "bonus", but some people ended up stuck for a year or two believing they're getting a bonus to wait.
Just about any engineer who isnt independently wealthy is:
- recovering from layoffs and a period of unemployment at a high-COL cost structure
- facing layoffs with the above salients
- facing an imperative to insulate their fucking house with cash for their turn in the above crosshairs
Competence and a willingness to work hard stopped equalling access to basic necessities in November of 2022 - February of 2023, depending on how you count, and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
"200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.
They’re a remote company. They’re not targeting HCOL metros.
> and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
> "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.
Claiming that $200k is not enough to live on is rich-guy talk. The majority of the country lives on well below $200K.
I agree that a single person living in a HCOL metro like SF Bay Area would not find this compensation attractive, but that person also has nearly infinite other jobs to choose from nearby.
Jobs like this (remote work for interesting startup) do not need to pay HCOL comp.
It's bad generally, this is a terrible time to be a working person in general. How SWEs stack up against profession X? Depends on profession X.
SWEs are in a job market where a bunch of folks who have been repeatedly prosecuted for wage fixing (most successfully/recently in 2012) are taking another swing at it in a much more lawless regime. That's as precarious as it gets when this cabal monopolizes the front row at the Inaugeration.
I think this is missing the point.
The target audience for remote jobs that pay $200K does not overlap with the target audience of people interested in working in SFBA at FAANG-level compensation.
If someone is interested in relocating to SFBA, they should do that and get a job there.
The median US income in 2023 was $39,982 for an individual, and $78,538 for a household.
My issue is with made-for-life, self-appointed elder statesmen on HN saying anything at all about other people's finances and imperatives from the comfort of a study in whatever isyllic community they're pontificating from.
Just, be grateful, and say nothing.
This is a sub-thread about it, so that's what we're talking about though.
> Just, be grateful, and say nothing.
That's not how message boards work. If you say that it's ridiculous to live on such a salary, I'm going to point out how out of touch that is.
This sub-thread is about the habits of speech that make a certain breed of armchair public policy economist jump out like a lump on plate glass. Get Patek in here and we could start a convention.
Okay, just so you know, I did not understand that you were speaking in generalities whatsoever.
I also regret any degree to which I've singled you out for a generally regrettable trend among the long-time community members: it's very easy to see the world through the lens of one's own experience and I've been as guilty as anyone of doing just that on plenty of occasions.
We should all strive for empathy and understanding, that goes double for people like you and me (and Thomas) who have been around forever.
Note that according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 200k in 2025 is equivalent to about 160k in 2020 when the pandemic began, and 160k would've been on the low end for an experienced software engineer at a Series A or B startup at that time, in the SF Bay Area.
Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things. Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It’s not poverty wages!
“I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I’m passionate about” is such a normal thing that everyone serious I know in this industry says. Or like… even just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there’s a reason online casinos pay their software engineers so much!). Not everyone makes the choice (and I get people saying no) and but in a sense I gotta imagine it’s part of the calculus for making it work. “We won’t have to pay people half a mil in total comp like meta has to, because the mission is more straightforward”. I feel like an O&F ep mentioning someone from intel expecting _triple_ the comp. 600k!
And like… people saying it’s not enough and talking about equity. You’re not paying rent with equity!
Signed: a guy who was at a small startup and who would have been very happy with the inflation/CoL equivalent of 200k instead of what I had those early leaner years
At one point “joining the scrappy startup” does involve some scrappiness. Otherwise you’re just working in a division of Google that hasn’t been integrated into the borg yet.
The "we all get paid the same" is a dishonest by omission. They don't all get paid the same, and while the peanut gallery may think so, I sure as hell don't think the IRS thinks the same way.
I personally don't really care what they pay their engineers, but to pretend to have this egalitarian approach to compensation and then hide the equity numbers is dishonest.
Here we instead hear that equity is as important as the air we breathe.
Yes, 200k is not life changing but at least it’s not pretending to be, like many other inflated equity schemes that never vest. It’s just an honest decent salary, better than what you can find in many places of the world.
Because, you know, you better have the same amount of skin in the game as I do.
reminded - the "amateur" (vs. paid "professional") requirement in Olympic and other sports, i.e. participation for the sake of only pure sport spirit, back then came from the aristocracy who could invest a lot of time in those sports without having to take care of making a living.
And when wealthy execs and founders tell what they want people who is interested in the mission/vision/whatever other than money - well, it is the same class thing. The ones who need money naturally can't have the required purity of vision as it is clouded by that lowly need for money.
That is, the work itself should be interesting and fulfilling.
Yes, we need money, but when the work relationship approaches being purely transactional the whole thing is demeaning for everyone and less effective.
Boy, it takes a lot of luck and skill and privilege to be able to shop for (or offer) work like this, and money is still important.
While this is true for most of the cases, it's not the case always. There are definitely jobs I'd work for less than I make at the job now and there are jobs which are considered "dream jobs", but ultimately there needs to be a solid base to make you and your family feel comfortable if you're spending at least 1/3 of your day on.
I used to have a manager that gave me this line. He left this company to join another one, had multiple offers, and told me he accepted the highest one because "it's all about the money".
They know, we know, everybody knows, but that's not the playbook.
I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much.
Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a year?
Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some people will just take “offer with most money” every time. Hell of a lot of people don’t.
I do think that C suite folks might not have the right vision of what “normal/comfortable” is for employees though. So they might offer a low number thinking it’s actually a “comfortable to live with at this stage of life” number and then get confused why they can’t recruit good talent and think people are obsessed with money.
First offer has gotta be within the ballpark of the right number if you don’t want your interviewee to immediately come back to you with a much higher number!
I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying.
For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.
Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck.
I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but it's not to the "worry not about money."
$200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest? That person can probably retire early in a few years.
If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck right? You’re putting money off to the side. Tho perhaps you’re not putting aside much for, like, travel.
Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level, especially when they’re lean. And I think up until this raise Oxide was lean!
(To be honest given this finding raise I could see a salary increase for oxide across the board, to help with that)
A while back I interviewed for a startup that was asking me to work from 6am to 8pm for about 75% of what I make right now working regular 9-5 at a different startup. It was super early stage so that level of commitment was understandable but I can't imagine very many engineers with families willing to take that much of a paycut. But that's the name of the game, right? When you're early stage you can't afford to pay much but you need your product done yesterday. Thats probably why most startups fail. Cheap quality talent is hard to come by, at least stateside. Offshore developers can be cheap and amazing (someone living in India making $100k USD would probably be considered royalty) but if you don't have someone from that part of the world to vet the devs it could end up being more expensive in the long run.
“Paycheck to paycheck” isn’t really accurate if you can contribute to retirement, emergency fund savings, and give additional money to your family. Far from it. You could pull back on any or all of those contributions and have extra slack. Also, presumably you’ll eventually have enough emergency fund and that slack will be available soon.
I think if your kind of comfortable is needing to clear 500k or million in comp a year then you aren’t not in scrappy startup mode! This is fine but money out the door is money that then needs to get raised in early rounds
I dunno, I do think oxide for basically everyone who joins is asking for them to get pay cuts but I would really hope that people would still at least putting some stuff into savings.
And like … even if the equity is variable if people are getting even a bit of equity, that might end up as something in the end.
Saying this I think with the recent raise the comp could be made higher just to make the buffer even better. There’s definitely an opportunity cost
It's not an unusual way of thinking, but every time I see it, it seems bizarre to me. If the candidate was to propose any project once hired, I'm sure these folks would want them to think about costs and benefits.
This policy selects either for people unable to reflect on their life with the same wit they apply to work; or people who will front about their motivations. Both seem like poor outcomes.
I think companies avoiding discussions about compensation is a negative signal, because they’re only in it for my labor.
When it comes time to actually cash out or you notice some animals are more equal than others, the excuses start. The drama happens. No one knows what the equity is worth. If you try and advocate for yourself you'll be told the equity is actually worthless.
From here the 200k salary seems fair. Just don't live in SF. Chicago , Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, quite a few cities are perfectly livable on 200k.
In fact, in any of the above metros you will be living nice.
I can't say anything of Oxide because I don't really know the people involved other than reading their writing.
This is an attitude a lot of industry veterans have. Most of them were in software pre-2015 and have long made their money and paid their debts. They saw the haydays of job hopping, massive salaries, massive equity, and "rockstars" (that never were). The people I know that joined software post-2015 and onward are not in the same financial position.
This is unlike an RSU from a public company, where you can sell the value of your shares as they vest and add that to your income with minor risk of price volatility.
> equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
I think that paragraph answers the question pretty clearly. As an Oxide employee you will get equity. It will generally be less than the people that came before you, but more than people that come after you. So it's obviously not the same as everyone else
Do two people hired at the same time get the same equity? Or is there room for one candidate to get more equity due to their experience or simply because they negotiated more?
Obviously early employees get more equity. The question is whether or not there’s room for negotiation. They heavily imply that everyone is paid the same, but all of those claims are about base salary.
It’s intellectually dishonest. I look forward though to their “in depth” follow up post.
> Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a commission component.
We have a "one rate per level" rule. The rates are published, and so are the definitions of the levels, and everyone's level (i.e. indirectly you can know everyone's salary)
Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't work. They only know incentive-based schemes.
So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the sales, which is (essentially) budgetted from their stock-option package (that everyone gets). I.e. they benefit from growth a little bit earlier and directer.
If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have a sales department.
Sales might seem mystical and magical to engineers but it isn’t. A small company with a small sales team can absolutely work without commission. Yes, it is harder, but it is not impossible. The carve out for sales undermines the ideas behind a flat salary structure. Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts. Sales is as much about the partnerships between sales people and product/engineering, why aren’t all the people who work on a deal getting commission?
I’d go as far as to argue that oxide is in the perfect position as a big-ticket long-cycle business to abandon traditional sales commission structures. They take on all the negatives (sales people overselling to get commission) with no benefits. There are other ideas. Company wide bonus based on sales made during the year?
This is the fairest form of compensation. It's unfortunate that engineering contribution cannot be measured the same way. If we could engineers would all be getting a nice pay hike.
Basing compensation on supposedly objective things like "the dollar amount a sales person brought in" might be important to a given pool of potential employees, but resist the temptation to think of it as objectively determining the value of the employee's work. Remember that all you're doing is making offers that people will accept.
I don't even know if we can.
Yes, you can measure the number of deals signed they called dibs on. But:
1. You don't know if the salesperson earned it, or the whole product. There's a baseline demand driven by the whole company. This is the whole old argument that nobody can prove that ads work; you just can't pinpoint the purchase decision to exposure to an ad. So yeah I guess you can make your salespeople compete against each other and reward the one who stochastically floats to the top while punishing others. Sounds like such a fun workplace, I thought everyone agreed Microsoft's rank system sucked.
2. Several times I have witnessed salespeople selling non-existent, non-planned, functionality and forcing the rest of the company into crunch mode to not have a major client semi-publicly end the contract early. You're often just rewarding the biggest liar while everyone else has to cover up for their shit. Once again, sounds like such a fun workplace.
It comes down to, competitive sales is a cancer, and you're choosing to have it.
either you have a rule or you dont. the moment you start to do exceptions this will call for more down the road.
there is tangible reason for sales to be commision based. you could say its just like another regular position. An engineer can also be a sales multiplier if they improve a product yet they dont get a commission. Same thing. Having boots of the field is no justification.
If they have a fixed salary with a high objective to "make it" (e.g. if you sell less than $X, you get fired), lots of sales folks will skip on it because they can't go over, and most probably prefer to have a quarter or two or year at e.g. 70% salary while working on longer term deals, rather than losing their job for not being good enough within that arbitrary time period. And going over their quota can be wildly lucrative depending on the terms.
Outside the bubble, it isn't always the case, or the structure can be a bit different, but salespeople in the Valley (as it were) are a different breed.
Commission based sales was definitely not a Silicon Valley invention.
I work with tech salespeople with a variety of former employers as tech sales people, and I've never heard of anyone having worked without a commission. I'm vaguely in tech sales myself (solutions architect) and I'm on commission too, and so is everyone who joins our division from similar employment (solutions engineers/architect, or even customer success folks).
It sucks but they like to think that if they work harder they'll get paid more.
And those equity grants are effectively as good as cash, since they are publicly tradable stock.
How come it works for basically every other job on this planet? Developers aren't paid per feature implemented/bug fixed, and we still do those things, how come sales people are unable to do things for a fixed monthly salary?
A top salesman can make more than the CEO from commission. Many top salespeople have a zero base salary.
The pressure is pretty crazy, though. I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.
> Many top salespeople have a zero base salary.
Hmm, probably true in some places, but here (Spain) that wouldn't even be legal. When I worked in sales we had minimum wage + commission, but I'm sure the salary would be 0 if they were allowed to set it up like that.
Many jobs will start you with a base for a few months, while you build commissions, but they stop it, after a while.
They can also get fired at the drop of a hat. Not much job security.
Sales are easy to convert to incentives. Just take a cut of the sale. It’s not so easy to calculate value from other jobs.
Yes they can not. It is not high quality work but high quality results for sales guy. Developer work is complete once service deployed. It wouldn't be developer failure if user volume doesn't reach x thousands per day on their web service. It would definitely be salesman failure sales does not reach x dollars in certain duration.
Developer equivalent of sales would be to say "I have distributed x sales brochures and call x number of clients this month. My job is done."
In the United States having "zero base bay" is hypothetical. If a full-time employee had no commission payouts they'd be compensated minimum wage as necessary to comply with laws.
Sales jobs often come with a warm-up period with either a higher base salary or they get paid part of their commission target for a number of months regardless of how many sales they make.
It isn't that "sales people"[0] can't work for a fixed salary. The good ones just won't because they can find another employer that will pay commission, and they know they will make more with commission than without.
Employers will pay commission because that's how you attract the best sales people, and the best sales people are worth orders of magnitude more to their business than average sales people. Despite how much they earn, in general and compared to their average peers, the best sales people don't cost orders of magnitude more (5x is a more typical spread in tech sales.)
The advantage of 100% commission -- where it is legal -- is pretty obvious from the employer's view point. The company only pays for production. These sales people are commonly (but not always) independent contractors. The benefit for the sales person is a little less obvious, but, generally, they have more autonomy, a simpler comp plan without any caps, and earn more per dollar sold than they would on a base + commission plan.
0 - whether magic or not
Top salespeople generally won't work for a fixed salary because they want to make as much as they can, and the way they do that is by having as much of their compensation tied to personal performance as possible.
I personally think more engineers/developers should think the same way, but it's also much harder to directly tie job performance to compensation when contributing to a product.
But that's the same no matter if you work in sales, customer support or many other roles, a lot of people just care about the money with little regards to anything else, yet the sales department are the only ones who must have commission?
It's actually not the same for many roles. See the comments from people in this thread alone who scoff at the notion of maximizing compensation. I don't get it personally, but it's not an uncommon thought.
> yet the sales department are the only ones who must have commission?
I think there's a very high likelihood that a salesperson is primarily driven by compensation, and good salespeople will already be working in a commission-driven compensation model elsewhere.
Why would a top salesperson at Dell, HPE, Oracle, or wherever else a hardware salesperson comes from move to Oxide to take less money and completely decouple their compensation from their performance?
One place I worked I tried to move the quota system more towards being the final response on a resolve issue, but upper management didn’t want to ever judge whether an issue was resolved even when the customer said they were happy. They did incorporate an NPS query for every interaction, though, and a multiplier against the volume-based quota. Unfortunately that favored people who were good BS artists when lying to the customer about looking into things.
The fallout from the above paragraph was that quality, caring staff would get punished for actually solving customer problems.
You have to separate out 2 different ideas of the "theoretical idealized salesperson that works for fixed salary" -vs- "real-world salesperson that works for variable commissions".
The businesses that have attempted to pay fixed salaries for salespeople end up attracting incompetent salespeople who can't sell. They become a negative cost on the company's payroll because they can't bring in any revenue. In contrast, the high-performance salespeople (the "rainmakers") are attracted to the variable high-commission, because they know they have the hard-to-find skills to actually sell and bring in the money. If a salesperson has the skills to get a customer to sign a contract and pay money, they have the leverage to get a percentage of that.
Developers, db sysadmins, tech support staff, etc are not in situations to directly influence and shake the hand of a new potential customer and convince them to write a check.
To get that kind of proportional payback in engineering you'd need very clear financial objectives for a project. I could see that happening in optimization scenarios where consultants are brought in and get paid for whatever they can trim from operational costs.
Sales professionals have a lot of different places they can sell things. The market-rate compensation for sales includes commissions. So to get the best sales people, you want something easy and exciting to sell with a good commission structure tied to the sales.
If a team of developers work together to fix a bug, how would you calculate the revenue value of the bug and how would you distribute that to the team that solved it? Technically the value of a bug is negative because it costs the company, so do you subtract that from the pay of the engineers he worked on it? If 5 people implement a feature that uses a library developed by 5 other people, which was built on the platform team's infrastructure, how do you divide up the commission? It doesn't work.
In sales it is uniquely easy to identify your contribution since it's literally measured in dollars coming in.
There's no way to quantify that for feature implemented/bug fixed, it would devolve into endless politics.
> how come sales people are unable to do things for a fixed monthly salary?
Sure they are able, but no good sales person is interested. Presumably you'd want to hire the good ones. You can certainly staff a mediocre sales team on a fixed salary, they just won't do much selling.
This logic about stops working as soon as you sell something that is not some immediately exchanged mass produced commoditized gadget. Sales people on commission have tons of incentive to saddle the company with demands and imaginary product features they can't actually deliver on and be long gone before the bill comes due.
Employees apart from the very early ones are likely really getting fucked on equity because oxide explicitly treats candidates asking about equity as a red flag.
Companies structured like this end up turning into a combination of rich people who don’t need money and are just interested in the problem space and then mediocre people who can’t get a better offer. (If you are good, remote work with high TC is definitely available.)
Unless Oxide is giving out huge equity bonuses for good perf (which would make their comp post hypocritical), it’s going to have a continuous talent decline as it grows. There aren’t enough independently wealthy high performers interested in what Oxide is doing to sustain a talent pool.
But how good do you have to be at things other than the work itself (edit: and how lucky as well) to land one of those jobs with higher compensation? For someone outside of high-cost-of-living tech hubs, Oxide's fixed salary could be life-changing all by itself, even with minimal equity. The fact that they take that deal doesn't necessarily mean that they're mediocre.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at compensation tables and reference data. $200K is definitely good salary, but I wouldn’t call it “life changing” relative to what someone qualified to work at Oxide could earn in an average non-tech hub metro area.
The type of candidate who qualifies to work at Oxide has numerous options for high paying remote work, and probably well paying local work too.
You’re not gonna retire early, take years off at a time, or anything else like that which the big tech companies RSU grants can get you.
We are not, as long as you are willing to have work overlap with PST. We have several European employees, for example.
However I’d also suggest that the concentration of tech in the last decade is also partly due to startups chronically stiffing their employees on equity. The difference in compensation potential naturally forces a talent split where talent joins larger and much better compensated firms.
Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the same upside that founders deserve?
How is it silly if they already do that for salaries? Co-ops with equal ownership isn't unheard of, and isn't silly at all.
They're a worker owned co-op and have grown very nicely over the years.
The founders aren’t really taking on that much more risk than the rest of the early team; it’s the VC’s money, not theirs.
I absolutely don’t agree with the idea that employees deserve the same upside as founders (because I think initiative and persistence against adversity/inertia is insanely rare and valuable and should be rewarded immensely), but it is not an insane proposition.
It’s especially popular among people who think the actual work output is more important than the leadership initiative. Both are obviously essential, and founders do both, while employees do only the first (or they’d be founders themselves).
Let’s define this. Let’s say 1:25? 1:50? What ratio is appropriate?
If they didn’t like the deal, they would become founders themselves, or choose a company that offers a better deal.
It turns out that leadership drive and the compulsion to bring something new into existence from scratch is actually quite rare.
Your figures seem to be roughly in line with what the employment market has settled on, although price discovery could be better (most employees don’t get to see the cap table during hiring negotiation, which, IMO, is wrong).
But what sorts of things input into the function of "deserve"?
How much equity or salary you get in a company is a function of supply/demand and the marginal product of your labor. I would say there are probably fewer CEOs who can take a company from startup to unicorn status than there are really good founding engineers out there, so CEOs tend to get more equity in a company. Sometimes the founding engineer knows something that nobody else in the world does, so their equity reflects that. It's also a reflection of how much risk the engineer is willing to take on (they'll probably take a salary cut to be a founding engineer, and they also risk the company randomly running out of runway and finding themself suddenly unemployed).
But it has nothing to do with what you deserve. Maybe if the CEO/President is a sentimental type, he'll award you equity based on how much he feels you deserve but ultimately it's about supply and demand.
If a CEO puts in 90 hours a week at a tobacco company while his engineers put in 20 hours a week, does he deserve lots of money (and therefore a more comfortable life) because he puts more effort into killing people? Or does he deserve every bad thing that happens to him because he decided to spend his limited time on this earth making it a worse place?
Does the world class engineer or business development lead just take it easy and travel around after they join?
Does the new manager push the team and business forward or prioritize stability?
Do engineers spend their time on reactors and impressive sounding projects or figuring out what customers need?
Do people feel lucky to have a seat in the org or do they spend their time complaining and looking for the exits?
Money isn't the only lever, but its a strong one - startups will never compete with established firms on cash outlays.
Employers play an iterated game where they will hire/release/develop many workers, Employees play a single game where they choose the firm that maximizes their compensation offer.
Once the employee joins, the incentives flip - employers can take advantage of the fact that employees can't move in less than a year to maximize output, while employees can take advantage of their influence on the organization to minimize expectations.
Hence employers offer strong bonuses, or pay above market to avoid this behavior. Supply/Demand influences what companies pay - but isn't the only influence.
Thinking that you can stiff your employees on equity compensation and have it go unnoticed is imaginary. Employees convinced of outsized valuations for equity compensation will quickly become disillusioned.
The founders are excluded from the employee compensation discussion. They own the company because they founded it. Nobody thinks they just put the equity into a structure that nobody owns.
The question is whether all employees are compensated equally, which is a very important detail. Giving everyone the same salary is very different than giving everyone the same total compensation.