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Comment by wdb | Hacker News Reader

Bonus is not guaranteed so why take that into account?

Stock maybe but you can't pay the bills with that or get a mortgage even can make it more difficult.

At Google more than 97% of engineers gets the bonus, only people close to getting fired don't get it. If you think there is a risk you might be in that bottom few percent then yeah, but most people never fail to get a bonus.

> Bonus is not guaranteed so why take that into account?

Bonus is not guaranteed only if you're about to get fired. Even lowest ok performance grade at google (CME) will get you 15+% bonus. But it's not a whole lot of money anyway. Stock is where you make bank.

> Stock maybe but you can't pay the bills with that

Only at private companies. FAANGs are all public and their stock is as good as cash. You can trade it for raw cash any moment the stock market is open (except during trading blackout windows before earnings) and pay your bills with it

The bonus is pretty formulaic with fixed performance multipliers - if you're doing poorly enough to get substantially less than the target bonus, you're at risk of losing your job and comp is the least of your worries.

And you absolutely can pay the bills by selling the stock when it vests. Agreed on the mortgage part though.

What's the typical vesting schedule? The companies I spoke you would get the equity after four years. Not even a part each year. The offered 0.00[0]5 equity is not great.

I think the packages in US are just much better compared to UK/Europe or maybe they just gave me shitty deals. My offer at one of the FAANG in UK was £85k + 50 stock + discretionary bonus (they didn't give details).

For a FB offer in the US I saw but ended up not taking the RSUs started vesting in the first month. I treated that part of the offer as cash equivalent but with an uncertainty factor (could be more, could be less but wasn’t going to be nothing.)

Monthly or quarterly vesting is standard across the industry. FB and Google start vesting within a few months and large companies are switching to this norm although large startups till tend to have 1 year cliffs. You get liquidity though from signing bonus (which is paid immediately after joining but you have to pay back prorated if you leave in the 1st year).

The one exception is Amazon which is notorious for its backloaded vesting schedule.

You sell the stock when it vests and pay your bills ?

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