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Comment by andreilys | Hacker News Reader

In the last 20 years they’re stock has only gone up 150%....

Yes that’s better than bankruptcy but Walmart is a far cry from a successful old incumbent being able to address new upstarts.

Also what makes you say Walmart Labs has great tech and hires top software talent?

A quick look on Glassdoor shows the salary is quite low (esp. as it’s based in San Bruno). I know plenty of new grads that are earning much more, even at non-FANG company. I imagine like most incumbents, Walmart underinvests in tech because they see it as a cost center.

The typical Walmart Labs Software Engineer salary is $116,635. Software Engineer salaries at Walmart Labs can range from $66,567 - $184,513.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Labs-Software-Engin...

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In the last 20 years they’re stock has only gone up 150%....

To be fair, they’ve been paying ~ 2% dividend yield that whole time. Still, if your comp is mostly in stock, those dividend payments hurt versus something like a buyback.

Dividends don't always "hurt". They let one automatically claim profits on a trade, without the hassle of divesting shares.

What I mean is, if I get a stock grant spread out over four years, then the shares I receive in year 4 have implicitly had their value decreased by the dividends paid out in years 1-3.

But that assumes the company has the choice of keeping dividends and investing it smartly.

With trades being commission-free these days, that benefit is negligible. Even with $10 trades (the usual price before commission free trades), and you withdrawing $20k from your retirement account annually, once a month, that works out to a drag of 0.6%. OTOH there's a very real downside to getting paid dividends (and incurring a taxable event) when your income is high (eg. making 400k bay area salary. If it was poured into the stock price instead, you could wait until you retire and get taxed on a lower marginal rate.

you enjoy your annual ex/cum-divi volatility and applying income tax and potentially overseas withholding taxes and exemptions and treaties rules?

the administration and process involved in setting dividends isn't very trivial either

and too often maintenance of dividend payments are placebos for lackadaisical areas of more important management responsibility

and it's too common for factions in the boardroom to be trying to serve and attract entirely different types of investors who would be better served with tracking stocks or demergers and so on

for some people any dividend unsupported by a very clear rationale is a red light but of course if you are doing in depth company analysis you may have all of this covered in your models and settlement and actions systems.

Depends on the stock based compensation; some of them will be adjusted for dividends paid during vesting, and some won't.

>To be fair, they’ve been paying ~ 2% dividend yield that whole time.

If you check the total return price, they're actually doing better than the s&p 500.

total return for walmart: 223% (https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/total_return_price)

total return for S&P 500: 221% (https://ycharts.com/companies/SPY/total_return_price)

So they're an average corp...

For a giant company, isnt that a good thing?

It's expected that some of them would be about average (relative to other giant corps).

Glassdoor grossly underreports the range of tech salaries to the point of being useless.

Something tells me only people who feel insecure about their pay report it to Glassdoor...

Point being, Glassdoor data is so incomplete that I don’t think you can meaningfully compare even two companies on it. Especially if they have different comp structures.

I figured it was because they have old data but I noticed the same.

Glassdoor numbers are inaccurate and 99% of the time only reflect base salary for every company I've looked up.

Stick with levels.fyi

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Walmart-Labs/salaries/Softwar...

While their RSUs are not at a FAANG level, the base + bonus are more than in line with top paying companies in CA.

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