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Comment by orky56 | Hacker News Reader

Comp at Netflix is all salary whereas the other ones include equity. For some reason, this is not taken into account and thereby skews the whole discussion.

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Yeah, it's so weird looking at these when they're not "total comp". When I worked at Google, half my W2 income was equity.

It just misleads other companies that are competing for the same talent. "Why is everyone taking a different offer? Our salary is above Google!" but startup equity != RSUs, which you can autosell and treat as cash that shows up every month, just like salary.

Except you get a pay cut when the market goes down

Pay cut when the market goes down and pay raise when the market goes up? Sure there's volatility involved but these stocks beat the market on average and drive close to 15% of some indices (i.e. FAANG at 15% total market cap of VTI). Those RSU's drive more wealth creation among FAANG employees than not over the long term.

Also a pay raise when the market goes up. If we assume an average flat stock price, it's pretty much same as cash comp.

Yeah you do. It's prudent to value accordingly.

It’s only data salaries, which are lower than software engineering salaries at most companies as compared to Netflix. The reason being Netflix considers everyone as softwaRe engineers and pays them the same wages, while other companies don’t.

Software engineers at the other companies have similar base comp. It's the equity portion that's missing.

You literally missed my point.

Enlighten me, what was your point?

It's really hard to compare apples to apples if you bring equity into things. Even for large publicly traded companies where the employee's equity is liquid. What value do you use for the equity that makes sense to simply add to salary? Equity value when granted? When vested? When eventually sold?

I don't see how ignoring the majority of a persons income is more reasonable than estimating based on reasonable extrapolations.

Not to mention that the article literally says "work for Netflix, get rich" based entirely on the fact that they are ignoring non-salary compesation. It's an outright idiotic conclusion to be drawn.

Most of the stocks are down this year. Except apple. I would rather have all cash up front right now if I could, personally speaking.

When granted, that's accepted quite widely when people talk about compensation.

Because the stock market is efficient, the market price of the equity grant at the moment the employee receives it will be very close to the expectation of the price the shares will sell for when the employee decides to sell them discounted a little to account for the fact that the employee is probably not a professional investor (and consequently won't be quite as efficient as a pro would be at choosing the best time to sell).

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