141–150 of 351 posts
Common advice is to value earlier stage equity at zero anyway, so how the heck are people credibly calling that worth 600k...
Now the problem is how to get into this kind of companies. Is LC hard mandatory for junior-senior (below lead) IC job?
If you're really well-known, they'll come to you. Otherwise, get an insider referral.
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What I find more interesting is this: A sole proprietor landscaper making $45-50K a year in California is paying $675 a year in annual registration fees just to keep his newish pickup truck on the road. Why newish? Because the people he's servicing trust a guy with a nicer work vehicle than a beaten down 30 year old Tacoma. A $900k developer with the same pickup is also paying $675 a year. Extrapolate this seemingly…
I find it more interesting that the sole proprietor landscaper doesn’t just become a developer and make $900k a year. Extrapolate this to literally anyone making less than a developer.
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Honestly, if you take 300k home, the risk isn't that high. But the reward is insane.
To be realistic ... 300K in the bay is barely livable if you're targeting a middle class life with kids and targeting retiring at 65. First, ~46% of it is gone in taxes including federal tax (~25%), state tax (~8%), FICA (~4%), and sales tax on everything you eventually use the money for (~9%). So that's 162K left. Not a lot to pay sky-high rents, car payments, insane medical bills despite insurance, lawyers to fight…
You surprisingly (considering you're making 5x the median household income for the US) end up having to lightly adhere to some sort of budget. With car payments, sending money to your family, and local inflated prices, it's easy to find yourself not saving enough for early retirement
I think if you just don't buy new cars or first class international plane tickets you can get by pretty comfortably though. I saved $100k a year with a pre-tax total comp of $350k for a few years in the Bay Area
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Honestly, if you take 300k home, the risk isn't that high. But the reward is insane.
To be realistic ... 300K in the bay is barely livable if you're targeting a middle class life with kids and targeting retiring at 65. First, ~46% of it is gone in taxes including federal tax (~25%), state tax (~8%), FICA (~4%), and sales tax on everything you eventually use the money for (~9%). So that's 162K left. Not a lot to pay sky-high rents, car payments, insane medical bills despite insurance, lawyers to fight…
You can get legal insurance as well and get all that nonsense done for $20.
Elderly people can go retire in Mexico and have a better life than whatever is possible in the US, in towns full of other retired people.
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Honestly, if you take 300k home, the risk isn't that high. But the reward is insane.
To be realistic ... 300K in the bay is barely livable if you're targeting a middle class life with kids and targeting retiring at 65. First, ~46% of it is gone in taxes including federal tax (~25%), state tax (~8%), FICA (~4%), and sales tax on everything you eventually use the money for (~9%). So that's 162K left. Not a lot to pay sky-high rents, car payments, insane medical bills despite insurance, lawyers to fight…
It's always interesting to think about how someone somewhere is earning as much as you earn in a decade or lifetime in a single year. Also that you are that person for someone else.
What I find more interesting is this: A sole proprietor landscaper making $45-50K a year in California is paying $675 a year in annual registration fees just to keep his newish pickup truck on the road. Why newish? Because the people he's servicing trust a guy with a nicer work vehicle than a beaten down 30 year old Tacoma. A $900k developer with the same pickup is also paying $675 a year. Extrapolate this seemingly…
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I get what you're saying, but the median income for SFO is way below what tech people get paid. "barely livable" is perhaps a bridge too far for the $300k+ crowd. :)
> but the median income for SFO is way below Yes, it's a huge problem. There are greedy people buying more houses than they can use as investment vehicles, renting them out to everyone else who can't afford housing at unaffordable prices, and that ultimately increases prices across the board on everything because local businesses and service industry also need to rent commercial space and personal space -- and that u…
$600K of that is “equity” in a private company. You never know when the company will go public or with what valuation. I can’t sell equity in a private company to exchange for goods and services like I can stock that gets deposited in my brokerage account every six months.
You can absolutely sell the PPUs in OpenAI, you will not struggle to find a buyer.
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Paying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, because I know both low-quality and high-quality engineers at most FAANGs, but in principle isn't offering a lot of money a good way to attract talent? In the case of OpenAI you also have interesting tech and a brand that will massively accelerate your career if you want to stay in that field. So while yeah, you have to hire the best people; and OpenAI like everyone else will be payi…
Both may be benefiting openAI here. There’s lots of places to work on LLMs but “GPT” is a product/brand that people have heard of, and if OP is to be believed then they certainly seem to be paying “enough”.