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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

It's important to compare apples to apples.

Lists like these are incredibly misleading, as they include non-cash bonuses. First off, these bonuses (say, RSUs) take a while to vest (incurring opportunity cost), can go down (there's risk), and so on. For example, being an early junior engineer at the next unicorn can make you orders of magnitude richer than working for FB or GOOG as a distinguished engineer (basically top 0.0001%). But that's kind of a silly data point, because you're probably making a 70k salary, whereas the distinguished engineer is making like a 250k salary.

So let's stick with cold hard cash or let's stick with bonuses, but it's misleading to conflate them.

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Most companies and employees do not see 4-year stock awards (whether options or RSUs) as "bonuses" but rather part of regular compensation. There are some cases where engineers get additional awards, or some stock-based compensation is tied to objectives by contract, but levels.fyi has a "bonus" field for that data.

I agree that levels.fyi is doing a poor job of comparing the value of RSUs. For example, Microsoft / LinkedIn stock grew 55% in 2019 and pays a dividend. If MSFT did that again this year, it might eclipse Aramco. It would be more useful if levels.fyi simply recorded the raw grant details (e.g. RSUs uniform 4yr vesting N shares) and used stock price data to facilitate comparison. That's especially key when looking back upon offers 3-4 years back to asses salary growth (and potentially find oddities like no-poaches).

At Facebook, Google, and Snap, at least, the RSUs start vesting immediately (no cliff) and are as good as cash as the stock is liquid. It's not very clear what your distinction is.

Even if liquid, these salaries probably reflect people vesting stock from years ago - and the high end would include people vesting stock offered at a much lower valuation. In this kind of ranking there’d be a bias towards companies with rapidly growing share prices ... and remember that last performance is no indicator of future returns.

No, these are roughly inline with new hire offers

At all of the five listed levels?

Yes

You can get from 180k to 260k as a new grad at Google.

I'm an L5 that joined a FAANG last year, and earn 440k/yr. If I counted stock inflation, it would be 500k/yr. Most people don't count stock inflation into their total compensation.

When I compare the numbers for my level, I see a salary that is more or less in line with mine, and I see RSU compensation that is in line with the number of RSUs that I received in 2019.

In other words: it does not take into account stock appreciation.

I don't know whether or not that's generally true, but from where I sit, the numbers seem sound and are not inflated due to a rising stock market.

Yeah it seems to be an incomplete comparison.

I know some companies like Facebook have crazy signing and relo bonuses ($50-100k+), however the base may be much less (Taxes are also different as I recall)

Also a couple of the companies listed (Airbnb and stripe) have yet to go public so those RSUs are not exactly liquid cash like with goog/FB stock

It's true, but for most people they consider the yearly (or monthly) bonus and liquid RSU vests as equivalent to salary, so it's mostly apples to apples. RSU can go up or down, but you take the value at current market price as part of the offer.

Why should you exclude RSUs?

Risky or not, you'd be exceedingly dumb to not take RSUs into consideration when accepting a job offer somewhere. Chances are that they'll be a major part of your total compensation come tax filing time.

The data points are incredibly non-misleading. Most of the companies reported are public, and the compensation is already cold hard cash or publicly tradable RSUs (usually without even a 1-year cliff).

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