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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

I really do wonder if any of those rock star $100m++ hires managed to get a 9-figure sign-on bonus, or if the majority have year(s) long performance clauses.

Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.

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I'm sure everyone is doing just fine financially, but I think it's common knowledge that these kind of comp packages are usually a mix of equity and cash earned out over multiple years with bonuses contingent on milestones, etc. The eye-popping top-line number is insane but it's also unlikely to be fully realized.

The point isn't doing fine financially, it's having left multi million dollar startups as founders.

In essence, they have left stellar projects with huge money potential for the corporate rat race, albeit at important $.

They’re pretty sophisticated people and weighed the trades. It’s not as if they’re deserving of any sort of sympathy.

I think we are stretching the term "corporate rat race" a bit in this case.

If the AI bubble pops such that Meta's exorbitant AI spending is seen as a flop, how well would those startups have done?

>I'm sure everyone is doing just fine financially

They are rich. Nobody is offered $100M+ comp if you are not already top 1% talent

$100mm comp packages are more like top 0.0001% to 0.00001% compensation.

Taking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.

Patrick Boyle on youtube has a good explanation of what's going on in the industry: https://youtu.be/3ef5IPpncsg?feature=shared

tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.

Nobody is paying $10mm to $100mm comp packages to bench people.

They want an ROI. Taking them away from competitors is a side bonus.

Its a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.

So wage suppression is good because it’s better for the _collective_?

Wage suppression? Its the opposite were talking about here. Pay large amounts of money to make sure people don't work on challenging problems.

But sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.

This is the Gavin Belson strategy to starve Pied Piper of distributed computing experts; nobody get's to work on his Signature Edition Box 3!

Fuck Banksy!

The comment I was responding to was implying that it would be better for the collective if Meta was not paying these exorbitant salaries. You said “it [paying high salaries] is a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.”

In other words, you’re suggesting that _not_ paying high salaries would be good for collective growth and development.

And if Meta is currently willing to pay these salaries, but didn’t for some reason, that would be the definition of wage suppression.

Oh ya? If I am willing to pay my cleaner $350, but she only charges and accepted an offer of $200, I am engaging in the definition of wage suppression?

Wage suppression is anytime a worker makes less than the absolute maximum an employer is willing to pay? That would include just about everyone making a paycheck.

Based on my cursory knowledge of the term, wage suppression here would be if FB manipulated external factors in the AI labor market so that their hire would accept a "lowball" offer.

You gotta re-check your position. This is an extreme interpretation of wage suppression.

This has never been the goal of any business, despite what they say.

We should also say that "being really lucky is the best way to make sure that other people don't have as much luck as you do"

Who would be the first-rate companies in this analogy?

Its all in RSUs

Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well.

That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares

It's not even in RSUs. No SWEs/researchers are getting $100M+ RSU packages. Zuck said the numbers in the media were not accurate.

If you still think they are, do you have any proof? any sources? All of these media articles have zero sources and zero proof. They just ran with it because they heard Sam Altman talk about it and it generates clicks.

Oh they aren't getting 100m, but directors are getting something close to 25m.

I suspect some "strong" hires will be on 75m

Source; my company was bought by facebook. (no I didn't get fuck you money. )

None of them are getting $100m+ packages. Zuck himself even debunked that myth. But the media loves to run with it because it generates clicks.

I have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes, but Zuckerberg saying “nah that’s not true” hardly seems like definitive proof of anything.

This is nonsense. Offers have been leaked to media outlets since then.

I'm not an academic, but it kinda feels strange to me to stipulate in your contract that you must invent harder

I have never heard of anyone getting a sign on bonus that was unconditional. When I have had signing bonuses they were owed back prorated if my employment ended for any reason in the first year.

Are most people that money hungry? I wouldn't expect someone like Zuckerberg to understand, but if I ever got to more than a couple million dollars, I'm never doing anything else for the sake of making more money again.

This is a very weird take. Lots of people want to actively work on things that are interesting to them or impactful to the world. Places like Meta potentially give the opportunity to work on the most impactful and interesting things, potentially in human history.

Setting that aside, even if the work was boring, I would jump at the chance to earn $100M for several years of white collar, cushy work, purely for the impact I could have on the world with that money.

It's not such a weird take from a perspective of someone who's never had quite enough money. If you've never had enough, the dream is having more than enough, but working for much much more than enough sounds like a waste of time and/or greed. Also, it's hard to imagine pursuing endeavors out of passion because you've never had that luxury.

I was a startup where someone got an unconditional signing bonus. It wasn't deliberate, they just kept it simple because it was a startup and they thought they trusted the guy because he was an old friend of the CEO.

The guy immediately took leave to get some medical procedure done with a recovery time, then when he returned he quit for another job. He barely worked, collected a big signing bonus, used the company's insurance plan for a very expensive procedure, and then disappeared.

From that point forward, signing bonuses had the standard conditions attached.

Must feel real good to get a golden ticket out of the bubble collapse when it's this imminent.

Is it imminent? Reading the article, the only thing that's actually changed is that the CEO has stopped hand-picking AI hires and has placed that responsibility on Alexandr Wang instead. The rest is just fluff to turn it into an article. The tech sector being down is happening in concert with the non-tech sector sliding too.

If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.

I am very certain that AI will slowly kill the rest of "social" in the social web outside of closed circles. And they made their only closed circle app (WhatsApp) unusable and ad invested. Imo either way to are still in the process of slowly killing themselves

A social media company is more diversified? Maybe compared to anthropic or openai, but not to any of the hyperscalers

Yes, of course it is.

I've heard of high 7-figure salaries but no 9 figure salaries. Source for this?

"Why Andrew Tulloch Turned Down a $1.5 Billion Offer From Mark Zuckerberg" - https://techiegamers.com/andrew-tulloch-rejects-zuckerberg/

"according to people familiar with the matter."

aka, made up. They can make up anything by saying that. There are numerous false articles published by WSJ about Tesla also. I would take what they say here with a grain of salt. Zuck himself said the numbers in the media were widely exaggerated and he wasn't offering these crazy packages as reported.

That seems insane - even over 6 years. Maybe he was offered 1.5 billion in funding for the work itself ?

"The New Orleans Saints have signed Taysom Hill to a record $40M contract"

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