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Wow, talk about being underpaid. $220k for principal architect at $BOX? Note that he received stock options, not RSUs, so the value of equity was very very small (strike price is necessarily very close to IPO price that close to IPO). That's 30% less than a senior comp at FAANG, and $BOX may as well be FAANG for all the "enterprisey" things that would be in place at a company that size.

Principal anything should be in the $700k total comp range, if not more.

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Titles are not standard across the industry. Also, comparing Box, which has had a mostly flat stock price, to FAANG is a bit unfair. Most of the FAANGs have done really well over the past few years, so when you hear about compensation, people will often quote you their expected comp. Netflix and Facebook are probably the only true outliers though.

The base comp at FAANG for principal is double his total comp.

Half of the FAANGs don't even have such a title and the title even among those companies varies quite a lot. Google principal >> Amazon principal, for example.

That was definitely surprising to me. Also, after checking his about me I realized it Nicholas Zakas! I learned so much about giant Javascript apps because of his books!

It really shows how much negotiation actually does matter.

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