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Comment by _qwfv | Hacker News Reader

IMO, it's not useful to look solely at salaries. My salary and my compensation are radically different numbers. My salary is approximately $200k/year, but my compensation is closer to $650k this year. Most of the engineers I know view their salary as only part of the picture.

I'm also a firm believer in sharing compensation numbers openly and transparently as a mechanism for increasing worker negotiating power. Talk with your peers about their wages, share your salary, post updated numbers to levels.fyi on the regular, etc.

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Also people forget you cannot compare equity compensation just based on quoted value between companies. Even public companies have different growth trajectories.

Equity always carries added upside (and downside) value. Earlier you join the company, more risk there is, longer it takes to pay off, and but also more equity upside you have.

Google stock has 3x in the last 5 years. Equity in company 5 years before pre-IPO can increase in value 20x. Equity in a 1-2 old startup can increase 100x or more sometimes.

Is the rest RSUs? Only a select few that work for big publicly traded companies get to benefit from those...

Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple all have more than 100k employees, this is close to the full SF population, so doesn't look like "select few" to me.

These employees are not all software engineers getting paid out the yinyang with RSUs...

Working for small and privately held companies implies a major opportunity cost

I worked for a small private company for a number of years immediately post dot-bomb (not as a developer). It was a great job in many ways but not with respect to comp. It did lead to my current position which has been good. Everything has to be viewed in the context of career/life and alternative possibilities.

RSUs and bonuses, but yes, for the past decade for me about half of my compensation has been stock grants.

Even if we can get over the pro-employer stigma of not discussing compensation openly, we still have to deal with ego and the fact that people earning in the top 20% are going to be much more vocal than people in the bottom 20%. For example, see this entire thread.

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