They have one level and pay all cash with an option to convert some of it to equity.
For example, for a 500k salary you could say, I want 200k cash, and 300k in stock
Levels is showing that the average senior engineer at Netflix is only getting $11k stock though. If employees were allowed to choose what percentage stock they wanted, I'd expect most employees to choose a larger percentage than that.
Stock is likely to grow in value over the course of the year while cash is almost guaranteed to lose value due to inflation. You'd have to be pretty pessimistic about Netflix's future to choose the all-cash option. And even if you're only neutral about it, the stock is the better choice because it's inflation protected.
If I were a Netflix employee, I'd probably choose $200k cash, $300k stock. The fact that levels is reporting such wildly different numbers tells me employees don't actually have that level of freedom to control their comp.
versus
If you get cash, pay income tax on it, and then invest it, and then pay cap gains, that's another round of taxes you pay no?
ESPP can be a bit different, because you get a discount on the stock, but that discount is also taxed at normal income rates, and anyways is capped at like 15% or something.