$900k Median Package for Engineers at OpenAI
levels.fyi
levels.fyi
But it's also important to note that only $300K of that is in cash. The other $600K is in profit participation, which could take years (maybe even a decade!) to be realized. It could also be worth $6M a year when it's realized.
But ultimately it's an investment of your time. Or to think of it another way, you're getting paid $900K a year but you're also investing $600K a year in OpenAI, which may end up being an amazing return or nothing at all, just like any startup investment.
Although with Sam at the helm, my guess is it will probably be worth more than $600K a year.
Are they just extremely rare cases or am I just not aware of the valley and their customs?
C-Level folks make many millions a year, either liquid or paper.
I am at FAANG and virtually everyone at L6 (staff Eng level, many thousands of people) is paid at least $500k, with monthly liquidity (no cliff).
With a bit of luck stock wise, it’s also not uncommon at all to get to $500k+ at L5 (senior eng level, many dozens of thousands of people).
Everyone in my SF network (hundreds of people) virtually make above $500k.
I decided I was tired of all that bureaucracy and decided to join a series C startup making $230k + worthless stock options. It was fun for a year, but it actually hurts now. And there’s been a bunch of nickling and diming on perks and benefits too, and no comp adjustments.
And here in NYC it’s surprisingly easy to blow through that paycheck. Didn’t feel that way when I lived in SF.
I don’t work at a FAANG so I could be totally off but I think there’s only about 1,000 L6+ at google [0] and they employ the most. So it’s not thousands of people at this level within a company. Maybe only a few thousand in total of all companies in the US.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-are-at-each-level-of-t...
First, the comment you linked is 7 years old. Most FAANG companies increased their headcount many fold ever since.
Second, there is such a thing as title inflation, over time more and more people get promoted to their terminal level, which at my FAANG is very often L6, each tiny team has always at least one or two of them. There are many, many more than 937 L6s at my company. Hell, I know for a fact that there are several hundreds of distinguished engineers (L9) at my company, which is an incredibly hard level to reach, so do the math and then scale it across the entire valley.
Third, do not discount my comment about L5 compensation reaching that $500k+ level very often. L5 represent a very large portion of the talent pool, probably the first or second largest (after L4).
You clearly do not have to believe me nor take my word for it. Not a problem. I just want to make sure other readers hear both sides of the conversation.
That means 10 people have to be completely destitute to achieve that level of distribution...
Though GDP can always grow, the simple truth is that a nation has a fixed amount of production in any given year and this shit is a disgusting manifestation of the imbalances of its distribution.
Even at large "boring" corporate developer jobs that don't pay a fraction of the FAANG salaries, it seems the decent engineers either escaped this trap (promoted to $150k+) or have settled into the $130-140k quicksand with little to no annual raise.
I was like that until I read levels.fyi data and blind app and gave it a shot
Worse they can say is no
Wow, great to hear that.
Do you know of any "outsiders" (people not living in the valley, working remotely) making that much money as well?
There are also people working in the office making that much as software developers working in Nashville, the DC suburbs, Dallas, etc.
That has basically been my strategy. After a bit more than a decade of working in the Bay Area, immigrating from Europe, I accumulated $4M in liquid net worth invested in fairly diversified assets, so I’ll be pulling the plug not too far into the future, and retire in Europe. I still cannot believe that these opportunities exist: in my own country, doing the exact same job I’ve been doing, I would probably have less than €200k saved up.
I understand that people’s circumstances are incredibly different, but to the extent that one is willing to go through the discomfort of uprooting their lives, spending a few years in the Bay Area and making a lot of money is a no brainer arbitrage opportunity that is still wide open IMHO.
$500k is more like $275k after taxes. Assuming $60k/yr in living expenses, which is pretty frugal in the Bay Area, that’s barely over $1M in savings in 5 years. Let’s say $1.3M after return on investments over 5 years.
Nowhere close to retirement money anywhere in the US.
I'm a very average engineer (probably way below average amongst the HN crowd) and I'm in that range.
Stock appreciation is the key + performance for sticking around
I mainly hang out w/ people from Europe and random parts of the States (like MA, they're paid good but not THAT good).
Dumb question maybe, but now I'm curious.
What does it really take to land a job like this one? Luck? Your network? Experience? All of it?
It’s not as easy as some posters make it sound, but it’s still on the order of 20-50k engineers. If you wonder why these firms move faster than the rest of the industry, this is a major contributor.
* The Bay Area is a place where you can make $100k a year and be classified as low-income [1].
* Tech employees tend to live low-key lifestyles that don't really show how much they're making. I know people who make $500k and still live with roommates.
* Income inequality and progressive politics combine to make people less reluctant to talk about their TC packages, unless you're also at a similar socio-economic level.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/under-100k-low-income-s...
Not aware. That's not unusual compensation for key contributors. Especially in AI or other niche fields. Even outside the valley.
We acquired something a while back in Montreal, Canada and it sure wasn't cheap. Salaries were in the same ballpark as our positions in the valley. We actually got most of the team to relocate to California on O-1s but still have some guys over there.
First, ~46% of it is gone in taxes including federal tax (~25%), state tax (~8%), FICA (~4%), and sales tax on everything you eventually use the money for (~9%).
So that's 162K left. Not a lot to pay sky-high rents, car payments, insane medical bills despite insurance, lawyers to fight said bills, save up money for parental elderly care, save up money for yourself for retirement, etc.
And yeah, having kids on that money? Very difficult.
If you're not in the bay area, different story, it's a very nice income. But they probably won't give you that package if you're remote.
And if you're in the bay and not planning on having kids, it's an okay salary.
I’ll take my former $150K in the burbs of Atlanta over $300k in the burbs any day.
And before the usual responses implying I’m disdaining what I can’t have, I current work for BigTech remotely.
Yes, it's a huge problem. There are greedy people buying more houses than they can use as investment vehicles, renting them out to everyone else who can't afford housing at unaffordable prices, and that ultimately increases prices across the board on everything because local businesses and service industry also need to rent commercial space and personal space -- and that ultimately comes from greedy landlords who keep lobbying against building more housing.
Most of SF is NOT living a life that I would call "livable". Having roommates in late 30s out of necessity rather than choice, and working out of a bedroom with no sunlight and not retrofitted for earthquake and fire safety and removed of mold spores isn't even ethical IMO, but that's the reality that lots of people live in.
1. It's not as bad as you describe it. Not for tech workers, at least. Please go to the lady working at Walmart and ask her about her income and living arrangements before you rant about $300k a year.
2. Of course it's by choice. Nobody is forced to live in SF or the bay area. Especially not people in tech.
If you can't retire at 65 on 300k a year, you're not living a middle class lifestyle. Not even close.
Rent: 4k/month = 48k. Car payments 750/month = $9k. Using your post-tax numbers (which are wrong) that leaves over $100k per year for all the other random stuff you've listed, which is more than most people in the Bay Area make in a year.
(Also, you're math is wrong on the taxes; the rates you use are the statutory progressive rates, not the effective rates (so, for example, the effective rate on $300k would be approx 22% at the federal level assuming standard deduction but no retirement contributions or child credits). FICA is capped at the first $160k of income (meaning you don't pay more if you make more).)
Go on Zillow and find all the 3-bedroom rentals available under $4k/mo in the Bay Area that are within 45-min commute distance from downtown SF via Bart/Caltrain/Muni. I count at least 1,000.
I live in a modern 1-bedroom apartment within biking distance to work (major FAANG campus) and pay $2,500/mo. My apartment complex offers 3-bedroom units, with private patios, for $3,500/mo. This is a nice community, professionally managed, with pool, gym, BBQ areas and park for kids to roam around.
Isn't that enough to raise children? Most people in major European cities raise perfectly functional and happy families on much less sqft and amenities.
If I set "max price" to 4k in Cupertino (random SV place) and 3+ bedrooms (2 kids), there's literally 8 results on Zillow.
Car payments?
This is a weird form of retirement to me.
Car payments were calculated based on a 50k new car, so if he's paying more than that he definitely has a luxury car.
You surprisingly (considering you're making 5x the median household income for the US) end up having to lightly adhere to some sort of budget. With car payments, sending money to your family, and local inflated prices, it's easy to find yourself not saving enough for early retirement
I think if you just don't buy new cars or first class international plane tickets you can get by pretty comfortably though. I saved $100k a year with a pre-tax total comp of $350k for a few years in the Bay Area
My guess is that the maligned commenter I replied to is of the other school of thought, that they want to retire in the same house in the same town
I honestly don't know what to say. If you really think 300K/year is barely livable then I hope someone in your family has a sit down with you and ask blunt questions about what the fuck you're doing with all that money.
Fed + fica is 21% combined. State is 6%. Imputing sales tax doesn't make sense either - rent isn't subject to it.
Take home is a bit north of $200k. Yeah, that's affluent here. Not upper class, but solidly upper middle.
>save up money for parental elderly care
Sorry, what? Your parents? I can see that paying for 3 generations on one income can be hard.
I was writing mean rates, not marignal.
For 300K in CA:
- marginal is 35% federal, 9.3% state, 2.35% FICA
- mean is 24.74% federal and 8.06% state, 4.79% FICA.
> I can see that paying for 3 generations on one income can be hard.
Yes, most working class people have to care for 3 generations. Parents being wealthy enough to take care of their own retirement expenses is a small, small number. Working class people in their middle ages choosing to not have kids is also a small number.
Someone in the UK on £236K ($300K) currently takes home only 57%, and doesn't have access to 30 year fixed rate mortgage loans
LOL. Do you live in Mars?
If 300k is "barely livable", then how does a Starbucks barista make a living in SV?
Or by living in someone's backyard shed: https://news.stanford.edu/2021/05/04/revealing-complexities-...
Or by sharing one-bedroom apartments to split rent, and eating as little as possible, to afford closer housing and reduce commuting costs: https://www.reimaginerpe.org/20-2/Goldman
You can get legal insurance as well and get all that nonsense done for $20.
Elderly people can go retire in Mexico and have a better life than whatever is possible in the US, in towns full of other retired people.
That one is up to a 20% tax deduction on this year's income without spending any of this year's money. and it rolls forward 5 years if its value is greater than those percentages of your income. so it adds up if you keep incorporating that into your strategy.
I like this more than donating generally appreciated assets
B) Traditional 401k contribution, with W-2 salary this is up to $22,500 this year in most circumstances. But, the next part is important too for double tax deduction:
C) Borrow $50,000 from the 401k (assumes the 401k already had more money in it from prior years and good investments) and donate that $50,000 cash to the above non-profit. Borrowing from a 401k requires you to pay it back across an interval over 5 years. So in future years you're doing that + 401k contributions. Or paying it off whenever you want. Or just accepting the tax and 10% penalty. On years where you have a ton more deduction you might only be paying the 10% penalty if you chose not to repay your 401k.
So now lets add this up from a $300,000 base salary.
The government was originally looking at a $300,000 AGI to tax you on, but now you reduce this by
A) $60,000 B) $22,500 C) $50,000
so now they are only looking at a $167,500 AGI to tax you on, while you still have $167,500 + A) $60,000, so $227,500 cash. But you want to keep reducing that AGI from here.
Stop here if you're plan is to put cash in a bank account and never take any risk. This is probably already way too much for anybody addicted to conservative generic personal finance forums.
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D) I typically have some expenses for a side project or something intended to be profitable. The great thing about this is that it involves you buying things you already wanted to buy. if you're in tech that's consumer electronics, software licenses, good CPAs, lawyers, domains, subscriptions.
I'm being conservative when I say $30,000, but lets say you actually did an ad spend, the sky is the limit.
Your various side project pursuits just have to make revenue in 5 years to prove that its not a hobby. make an LLC for all of your various interests and get around to it making some money eventually.
For sake of this, you spent $30,000 of your own money (but realistically, all the banks offered you credit cards with high limits and you can float this balance for years too, and interest on business purchases can also be deducted, if you're not allergic to the mere concept of holding debt)
AGI: $137,500
E) did you get a mortgage yet? lots of deductions there on a highly leveraged asset. too many variables for this, but just the interest is deductible not the principle payments. you can play around with a lot here, such as paying interest up front to generate more tax deductions.
on a $2,000,000 property with a 30 year mortgage, let's assume another $30,000 in interest paid annually.
AGI: $107,500
F) was the mortgage on an investment property? investment property is also depreciably on its current assessed value divided by 27.5 (residential) or 39 (commercial). so, on a $2,000,000 property that's another $72,700 tax deduction every year.
AGI: $34,800
in conclusion with a "salary" or AGI of $34,808, according to SmartAsset.com for someone living in San Francisco, they would be on the hook for about $8,000 in taxes. This is effectively a 2.6% tax rate and you’ve already bought most of the consumptive goods you wanted to buy anyway and have plenty of cash left over for savings and investments.
not advice. I could go far more aggressive than that.
Edit:
I love this analogy
> Or to think of it another way, you're getting paid $900K a year but you're also investing $600K a year in OpenAI, which may end up being an amazing return or nothing at all, just like any startup investment.
Would someone invest 2/3rds of their compensation in one company? I know I diversify my RSUs within six months after getting them.
I also sell my RSUs right away. But you're forgetting one thing -- if I make $600K somewhere else, I can't invest it in OpenAI. It's the opportunity to invest in a startup that you wouldn't get otherwise that is most valuable, if you think the startup will be valuable.
Can you name on tech company that went public in the past decade that has outperformed the S&P? What’s OpenAIs moat that couldn’t be duplicated by a deep pocketed public tech company like Facebook, Google or Amazon (my employer)? Two of those companies already have large publicly available data centers and an existing customer base to sell to.
There have been many startup employees that have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes only to see their paper gains eventually disappear.
There's a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to most companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0][1] (Some use the term "dark matter devs" but I know it has another meaning [2]). These guys tend to fly under the radar quite a bit. If you are in a tier 2 market or company, your chances of attracting one are close to nil. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally).
FAANG companies have internship pipelines, with bonus for returning interns. These guys are off the market years before they even graduate.
[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
[1] http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/
[2] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
All this money spent, yet if the open source world can catch up, it'll all be for naught.
They need a world where everyone sits atop OpenAI, not a thousand different startups with their own models.
OpenAI might pay its engineers $900k, but an AI startup founder can easily get to a $5M, $10M valuation in under a year.
It might sound simple, but I've never viewed startup equity like that; thanks for the slightly different perspective.
and if the info about the actual architecture of GPT-4 is legit, OpenAI might not have as much of an edge on the competition as they'd like people to believe. So that equity might not be worth quite as much as they think and explains why they so cagey about it in their paper on it. And why Sam Altman is calling for restrictions on research to slow down competitors
https://twitter.com/soumithchintala/status/16712671501017210...
Although with Sam at the helm, my guess is it will probably be worth more than $600K a year.
or not . I would rather work for facebook with profit participation. zuck seems to know how to make a profit.
no "right to first refusal" or some transfer restriction?
fingers crossed. don't forget to buy some of the S&P too.
A sole proprietor landscaper making $45-50K a year in California is paying $675 a year in annual registration fees just to keep his newish pickup truck on the road. Why newish? Because the people he's servicing trust a guy with a nicer work vehicle than a beaten down 30 year old Tacoma.
A $900k developer with the same pickup is also paying $675 a year.
Extrapolate this seemingly trivial example across literally EVERYTHING in life.
We do not have marginal sales tax rates because it is not feasible.
Marginal income tax is feasible, and so it does exist in most places.
Marginal property/wealth tax is somewhere in the middle, given the difficulties in valuing thinly traded assets, and the tremendous effort required to appraise them all the time, over and over.
LA introduced a mansion sales tax.
Anywhere else?
My main issue with a marginal property tax is that the areas with high property values already have enough taxes generally for the things property tax covers.
Not sure at least in the US how feasible it would be to have a marginal property tax and the revenue go to the state and the Fed (or even the county's general fund in most places).
My guess is there's a 0% chance the marginal property tax could go to the Fed to reduce Federal income tax, and in most states, a low chance it could even go to the state, or even in most counties that it could go to the general fund instead of mostly to the local school district and local fire department (which are usually already funded adequately).
Norway has a wealth tax of up to 1.1% of wealth, with discounts based on different types of wealth and a minimum deduction of ca. $150k. Discounts are based roughly on how liquid assets are. Houses etc. are valued at 25% of market value, so let's say you have a $600k house, the taxable value is $150k, which falls entirely within the minimum deduction, so most people pay very little wealth tax.
The big issue in my opinion is defining property/wealth (not just land and cars, but also intellectual property, art, etc), and then the feasibility of appraising all of that, and then litigating those appraisals (for the populace as a whole).
Seems like it could get into quite a bit of the country’s resources going to refereeing the game, which at some point takes away from productivity.
I'm not saying the highly-paid developer is hurting, but the better question is why does it cost $675/year to register a vehicle in CA? Our income tax system is already highly progressive, so why do we have all these other stealth taxes that hurt low incomes the most.
If you want them to pay, tax the fuel and consumables like tyres, or put a tax based on how hard is to recycle the car once it hits the scrapper. Bit more complex with EVs I admit, but making someone pay just for keeping car even if they use it once a week is silly.
Yearly fee should be proportional to legalese required to keep it registered (paying wages), not much more.
Do you mean tax? I think you mean a tax, on owning a car. Nothing promised in life but death and taxes.
Extrapolate this to literally anyone making less than a developer.
And sure they are paying double payroll tax, but they also get to deduct all their expenses associated with employment (customer dinners, internet, computer equipment, mileage to customers, etc).
What's described here affects everyone, and is a reason to something something Gini coefficient.
Someone on $1k/year can't afford for their $50 smartphone to get damaged or stolen; on $10k/year they can't afford for their fridge to break and their food to spoil; most of us are close enough to $100k/year to not need an example; $1M/year I can't imagine, as despite my close (logarithmically) to $100k income, my expenses are closer to $10k but without the stress of low earnings.
Or $50k to book a charter flight and just have my driver take me straight onto the tarmac, thus avoiding the airport entirely
I am that person for myself, for my first year in the workforce.
I am also that person for myself when I was studying in college.
I think it is only interesting in the case when you are performing the exact same job, and yet the compensation varies by an order of magnitude or more.
(I jest. I just really like that song's beat & Busta's verse in terms of sheer speed & enunciation & crispness in staying on beat.)
Especially if you're American. Gallup [1] reports:
> The median annual household income worldwide is $9,733, and the median per-capita household income is $2,920
Even among developed nations, Americans get paid more.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...
I look at 900k$ and think wow from the perspective of my very well paid job in France.
Getting 900k$ a year would bring great things to me and probably make me retire earlier. This will not be life-changing though.
And then I think about people who earn 5% of what I do and for them multiplying their income by two would probably be truly life changing for them.
And then these 900k$ do not look that wow anymore.
Doubling salary post-tax will at the very least put you at a 50% savings rate, and that yields a time from zero to financial independence of 16.5 years. Assuming historically-similar stock market returns and a safe withdrawal rate of 4%. This relationship does not depend on absolute numbers beyond those stated above, only savings rate.
Most likely you'd not be starting from zero and having a positive savings rate already. Whether you'd be comfortable doing this is a different question. Many would never be, and hence never completely comfortable retiring.
But this is just the bare salary - you will have to take off about 20-30% for various taxes. But then you get free healthcare and education, and retirement.
Some companies will have a bonus ("intéressement / participation") which can be an extra 10 to 20% once a year.
You would typically have a straight salary, no equity or something like that.
When you look at the most senior positions, this is about 130k€.
But it really depends on the city, on the industry etc. Generally speaking your salary is not that big, bt you have extra advantages (such as the social committee, a company-funded organization that will reimburse part of your vacation costs, give gifts at Christmas, ...)
> When you look at the most senior positions, this is about 130k€.
You're being generous here. A new grad in France in engineering or development gets more often in the 40k€. The most senior positions in most companies plateau around 90k€.
In some companies in Paris it's higher, but that's the exception.
And the dollar sign goes on the side I put it: nine hundred thousand dollars. The fact that you want to write $900k is just an idea specific to the finance world (such as using parentheses for negative numbers).
Do you usually write m4, in7 or lb9?
In the case of OpenAI you also have interesting tech and a brand that will massively accelerate your career if you want to stay in that field. So while yeah, you have to hire the best people; and OpenAI like everyone else will be paying $LOTS to a few useless engineers in the mix, I think "$900K and everyone knows it" is a pretty good substitute for talent-spotting, which anyway can't be bought.
Both may be benefiting openAI here. There’s lots of places to work on LLMs but “GPT” is a product/brand that people have heard of, and if OP is to be believed then they certainly seem to be paying “enough”.
How do you quantify best? Number of degrees? Publications? Association with prestigious institutions? Past work experience at top companies? Speed of problem solving? All of this is gameable once it starts being _measured_ and enough incentives exist for people to devote their life to winning the "game".
However, if you happen to hire a math olympiad winning PhD with numerous publications from a tier-1 research institution with a known track record in industry, it would be hard to argue they aren't the best. But success breeds success, and top people will keep being poached to other top places. Kinda how money makes more money.
We’ll, by the number of Leetcode Hards they’ve completed, of course! /s
The bests have cool stories to tell.
As a concrete example, I've gotten more accolades for silly personal projects that sound impressive, like training a convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU, than for impactful work at my actual job, which was a lot less challenging.
I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy, and I think companies could really get far hiring less than the best people, and just squeezing good quality work out of them (I believe Amazon is known for this).
Obviously OpenAI should not hire subpar people lol, they should keep doing what works for them, just grumbling loudly here.
offering a lot of money attracts everyone including in-demand talent.
offering less turns away in-demand talent.
If one (“talent") is a stellar runner, but when the team goes on a run the "talent" has to wait for their teammates to get to the finish line, most of whom go running once every two months, and the "talent" gets dress shoes instead of spikes etc., the "real talent" is worth, to the team or company, as much as the average employee on that team.
An easy and naïve recommendation would be to remove the constraints that limit the work of talent, but it is much easier for talent to move to organizations that, for a variety of reasons, are more conducive to the expression of their abilities than to fight the inertia of organizations. Those very organizations which, for one reason or another, have existed for a long time and pay salaries to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
However what this viewpoint doesn't account for are team dynamics. A strong TL can turn NNPPs into incremental positive contributors. A great programmer without leadership capabilities will not be able to outpace the technical debt. There are also more subtle dynamics depending on the structure and personality traits of the individuals. Ultimately programmer productivity is not an absolute value, it depends on the whole ecosystem (including other functions, leadership stance, etc). After doing this for 25 years (IC, TL, EM, CTO), I strongly believe a healthy team is about harnessing and orchestrating different individuals unique strengths rather than trying to set too high a bar—the latter will lead to counter-productive competition and ultimately burn out your best folks.
Comments of this nature would be much more informative if were they to begin with "what I've seen is in my professional life", "in the three or four teams I've worked on", or "according to some friends, who consider themselves to be top engineers, working in teams similar in size and scope."
Otherwise, we are left with the sometimes realistic and sometimes much more fairy tale-like story of incompetent leadership holding back talent for no other reason than incompetence or nepotism or envy of those who are smarter and more accomplished.
I have been in similar situations and considered myself a top professional, which may well be true, but in large, mature organizations, regression to average performance is largely an inevitable consequence of size and the need for coordination, a problem whose solution is not to be found in a redistribution of salaries.
How else, with a few exceptions, do employees at Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. think that back in the day things were so much better, that talent was treated better, that there was a real engineering culture, whereas now it's all about sitting in chairs, people in finance having the most power, interviews were so much harder, and we have so much technical debt?
OpenAI is, at this point, a research organization, in spirit and in purpose. If and when it becomes a "normal company," the logics of scale and scope will lead the early employees to complain about how things have evolved. But I suspect that the "let's get rid of the makers of technical debt and use the budget to give top talent more money" will not produce the expected and desired result of a renewed engineering culture, because top talent will not be as useful as it once was.
Whenever a top executive leaves a mature company (or dies, see Apple), the risk of catastrophe is aired, but catastrophe rarely occurs. There is a lesson there.
* have a set of interview questions that help clarify they have the "right" kind of person
* have a performance review process that ensures that hired individuals continue to engage in ways that are understood to be most useful to the company; i.e. that validate (or invalidate, as the case may be) hiring practices
At that point, they are not hiring you, me or anyone who directly applies themselves via the job form.
They are hiring their friends from elite circles.
But keep in mind that Google regularly launches new products and features that are more profitable than many startups, and then shutters them, and regularly launches individual features or pieces of infra that are industry leading (or defining, as in the case of k8s). They just aren't new consumer products.
OpenAI is modest in employee count and extreme in employee talent, with its employees rewarded commensurately.
They can pay it, it sounds good for investors/general public, but if you take away the brand/hype fapping on "we only have the best" would sounds like a red flag to an experienced engineer.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/elon-musk-used-to-say-he-p...
Common advice is to value earlier stage equity at zero anyway, so how the heck are people credibly calling that worth 600k...
OpenAI will probably end up like UberATG where Microsoft bails out a handful of $10m-plus equity packages, some engineers transfer into MS and get partial recognition, and a bunch of engineers get laid off or sent to a competitor for basically zero. Good chance of this happening when sama has to scale up aggressively and flops.
Some of the best all-around programmers I've met, and also the best programmers at some specific metric (rapid development, good at unraveling complex problems, good at big-picture stuff, good at architecture, good at maths/algorithms, etc.) make market rate or below market rate. Probably because they either (A) don't know their value (B) didn't go to a top CS school (C) value things other than raw income (D) aren't good at playing the political game at work (E) aren't good at self-promotion.
What paying high salaries does get you is... the widely-publicized knowledge that you pay high salaries. Sites like levels.fyi and HN will viralize this knowledge. Like your neighbor who has a shiny new BMW M3 in their driveway, you assume that they must be doing well, and must be a good investment.
I know exactly how much my shares are worth on my spreadsheet -
=GOOGLEFINANCE("AMZN", "price") * number of shares
> In conversations with recruiters we’ve heard from some candidates that OpenAI is communicating that they don’t expect to turn a profit until they reach their mission of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As with any startup, there are risks associated with equity and it’s important to consider the possibility that equity can be worth nothing.
This is weird. They don’t expect to be profitable until AGI exists? Does the monetary system we have today even matter at that point?
I can’t sell equity in a private company to exchange for goods and services like I can stock that gets deposited in my brokerage account every six months.
=GOOGLEFINANCE("AMZN", "price")* (number of shares).
I can log into Fidelity and sell my shares during hours when the market is open and not at a discount.
This is incorrect. There is often significant unmet demand for private successful companies. Employees can often sell at close to what investors end up paying for it.
What type of market do you think there was to buy my options in the 60 person startup that no one ever heard of at my previous company? I was paid in cash at market value so it wasn’t a big deal - and “market” for your standard enterprise CRUD developer architect was nothing to write home about compared to tech company salaries.
(Not that I think I would have a realistic chance, since I'm sure they're getting the best of the best applicants right now. But still.)
I mean, Netflix-style hunger-games management might be their thing, and if I got in there at $900K (I did apply!) -- then sure, I'd be working nights and weekends just to shine.
But even at infinite comp, above a certain size there will be dead weight.
Genuinely curious.
If you're really well-known, they'll come to you. Otherwise, get an insider referral.
That's getting close to some Nuremberg level shit. Not yet there of course but consider when the next pandemic rolls around and the anti science propaganda will be produced by these how many will die?
We know manually produced anti vaxx propaganda killed about 300 000 people in the United States (source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... ) , what it'll be next time?
I would argue the engineers in big techs also have benefited from the rent seeking structure. The only reason why they're not enjoying bigger payout is because the actual structure was created by the big tech companies, and not through coordinated effort by engineers. As a result, they reap less reward as they're just highly paid henchmen, and not the bosses.
“I feel like such a failure because I’m 30 years old and only make $300K”
Yeah, a bit higher than the minimum wage.
It seems to be inflated wages not based on skills but on technical fashion trends.
Mafia?
Or are you claiming that some of the smartest AI researchers in the world are only slightly more qualified than the average high-schooler?
Either claim is roughly equally absurd.
If there is so much money, which is where the "absurd" is, better target people with validated maths PHDs. Moreover, those researchers will need access to super computers in order to test at scale their work (because it all about stability at scale), and that's a limiting parameter.
Additionally, "AI" is just a set of empirical algorithms attempting to mimic human cognition. The trick is to find mathematical stability (production, training, etc) for large scale simulated connectomes: I am still surprised there is still not a "sleep" regime for those articial connectomes, which we know is critical for brain stability, maybe it is a part of the new "training" regimes.
I am still waiting for the educational material which will let people picture a connectome based on the latest "transformers". Because, in the end, nobody understands anything about this, it is beyond us. It will be hard to tell apart the scammers looking to steal fundings from the others.