11–20 of 202 posts
> the three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year Putting aside the fact that is terrible way to determine the rate of pay for anyone, let alone every single person in a company - how on earth did they come up with such a lower number for such a high cost of…
It's not much, and I'd wager they're restricting their talent pool mostly to people that are making less than that. A senior engineer can easily make almost triple that today. But I can admire their reasoning (empathy, equality) and the fact that they are sticking by a principle. If I had "f you" money I might simply join just cause what they're doing is so damn cool.
Salary? Easily? Where?
I've been browsing a lot of staff and principal jobs on LinkedIn recently. Some Crypto firms are around $300k, and I've seen one or two Fintech with specialized knowledge at $400k, but by far the majority are in the $200k region.
That was an interesting take on geographic pay differences.
> the three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year Putting aside the fact that is terrible way to determine the rate of pay for anyone, let alone every single person in a company - how on earth did they come up with such a lower number for such a high cost of…
Very interesting approach to gaining a comparative advantage in the labor market: pay everyone less.
They're a cool tech company doing cool tech stuff, so folks want to work there and are willing to make salary tradeoffs to make it happen.
So, look. I completely agree with this, and it’s an admirable ideal. If I were in a position to make this kind of decision, I’d make the same decision or one that looks a lot like it.
But if you’re anticipating counter-arguments, this glosses over a pretty important one. Regardless of geography, higher income brackets tend to have outsized influence on prices across all income brackets in that region. The more it deviates from the median, the more it distorts local pricing. All of this “rising tide” might eventually “lift boats”, but it depends where all that new capital is flowing and even in the best cases it doesn’t keep up with price inflation.
For a small company, that impact is pretty minimal and the rest of the admirable aspects of this surely outweigh it. And surely that falls into their “doesn’t scale” bucket, but deferring this analysis is different when the scale is external.
I’m not sure how best to mitigate that or whether mitigations are currently appropriate for Oxide. I have some vague ideas, but I’m not in any position to do anything other than comment. But I do think this impact should be part of the discussion, because the discussion is already poised for public impact.
It's not much, and I'd wager they're restricting their talent pool mostly to people that are making less than that. A senior engineer can easily make almost triple that today. But I can admire their reasoning (empathy, equality) and the fact that they are sticking by a principle. If I had "f you" money I might simply join just cause what they're doing is so damn cool.
> A senior engineer can easily make almost triple that today. Salary? Easily? Where? I've been browsing a lot of staff and principal jobs on LinkedIn recently. Some Crypto firms are around $300k, and I've seen one or two Fintech with specialized knowledge at $400k, but by far the majority are in the $200k region.
> Some will say that we should be paying people differently based on different geographical locations. I know there are thoughtful people who pay folks differently based on their zip code, but (respectfully), we disagree with this approach. Companies spin this by explaining they are merely paying people based on their cost of living, but this is absurd: do we increase someone’s salary when their spouse loses their jo…
It's not much, and I'd wager they're restricting their talent pool mostly to people that are making less than that. A senior engineer can easily make almost triple that today. But I can admire their reasoning (empathy, equality) and the fact that they are sticking by a principle. If I had "f you" money I might simply join just cause what they're doing is so damn cool.