This feels like a job posting for lemons. Edit: This was a reference to Akerlof's "A Market for Lemons"!
I’m a lemon. They’ve got me interested now.
Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
21–30 of 202 posts
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#22Very interesting approach to gaining a comparative advantage in the labor market: pay everyone less.
Having fun and making a cool product is more worth then more money and having to optimize a shitty ad-algo...for example at meta/google.
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#23It'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.
Well a lot of the compensation is not cash, but bonuses and stock grants. I know, stock isn’t cash and is subject to risk, but it’s a lot more than 190k even after you factor in the risk.
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#24I only spent 6 months in the Bay Area in 2019 for an internship, so I don't have a strong understanding of the cost of living other than "it's expensive". For a family of 5 (two adults, three kids) what do folks perceive to be the minimum base annual salary (with no other compensation) to support such an environment in the Bay Area comfortably and without, as put by the author, financial distress?
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#25I appreciate the transparency about pay - that's something we need more of - but the underlying idea is... strangely anti-capitalist for what's supposed to be a startup. This seems more like the viewpoint of a co-op or non-profit than a for-profit startup.
Or at least it did, until I found this buried in paragraphs and paragraphs of text:
> 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.
So they're still stratifying employees, but by equity, not cash comp. Likewise, they're still hiding information about the thing that is most likely to benefit the founders of the company more than its employees. If Oxide sells to $bigco for $1 billion, employees 1-5 might get $100 million each, and employee 100 might get less than that yearly "sustainable for everyone" salary.
How equitable and fair will that (for some positions, relatively low) cash compensation seem then?
I get the idea: Do the traditional startup thing, but instead of competing on cash, just make it clear everyone will make a living wage and should be in it for the equity. But if you do that and then aren't being transparent about what the equity is, you're not really being particularly transparent at all. You're just making a big splash.
All the other stuff about values, etc., is bullshit. The point of a startup is to get rich.
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#26It'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.
Can't share datapoints from where I work, but competitive datapoints I've gotten vary from 300k total comp to 800k total comp for senior, staff, principal engineers as well as managers in SF, LA, and DC (though DC is on the lower end). To your point, salaries tend to swing between 150 and 350, but the rest is made up with bonuses and especially stock comp.
Netflix recently advertised an eng mgr role for appsec with a published TC ceiling of 900k, for instance. They even wrote that into the linkedin JD.
That said, the higher you go on TC, the higher the risk that the company doesn't have much of a social contract with its staff and may in fact have a deleterious relationship with society at large - e.g Meta. Not always true, but generally yes.
levels.fyi is pretty comprehensive.
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#27"Everyone paid same as CEO" seems great as a morale boost at a startup of 23 employees. Even if it's not a lot, startups are often not flush with extra cash and equity is the main incentive to join one rather than a tech giant. I like the mature "this may not scale and it doesn't have to for now" admission.
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#28It'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.
From my recent interview experience within the past year as a Google L5 equivalent, all cash discussions were:
- Netflix pays over $500k
- ByteDance pays $530k (they were willing to do all cash at the time, but they may have changed it to 90% cash recently)
- 2 HFTs, both above $750k
Signing bonuses not included. Some companies had >$100k signing.
I'm not a rockstar and I have around 5 YoE.
If you're okay with stock comp (which historically does better than an all-cash offer due to the massive initial equity grant and refreshers), there are plenty of big tech companies offering around the $500k+ mark today.
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#29Very interesting approach to gaining a comparative advantage in the labor market: pay everyone less.
Pay has never been an accurate reflection of skill and skill has never been an accurate reflection of what a person can bring to a company. Big Tech thought they could use a combination of paying more and a stringent interviewing process to get the best talent. It turns out in the era of gamified interviewing (LeetCode and friends) that they were wrong and now are laying off tens of thousands of people. Having done over a hundred interviews at one of those big tech companies I was shocked by the people we were hiring and how much we were paying them towards the end of my time there.
Interviewing is a game of generalizations without any one-size-fits-all solutions. If you're a startup doing something ambitious, such as a from the ground up hyperscaler rack and software system, you want to attract extremely experienced and qualified people. Experienced and qualified people with a track record are likely on decent enough financial footing that they can get by on a salary with potential for future upside and an interesting problem to solve and mission.
Also later in your career you can't put a dollar amount on looking around at your co-workers and being thankful for working with high caliber people.
Re: Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)
#30They have 23 employees so that's roughly $8300 each? Not bad by North Korean standards!
"Not bad by North Korean standards!"
That's $691.66 pcm - what standards are you using as a reference to the 'not bad' NK ones?