https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Titles are by far the biggest influence on discussion so this rule is pretty important. There are borderline cases, but I don't think this was one.
Q: How do I make a link in a text submission?
A: You can't. This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.
On HN, the idea is that submitters shouldn't have any special right to frame the story for others. They're welcome to express their opinion, of course, but it should be done in a comment, because then it's on a level playing field with everyone else's opinion.
So, look. I completely agree with this, and it’s an admirable ideal. If I were in a position to make this kind of decision, I’d make the same decision or one that looks a lot like it.
But if you’re anticipating counter-arguments, this glosses over a pretty important one. Regardless of geography, higher income brackets tend to have outsized influence on prices across all income brackets in that region. The more it deviates from the median, the more it distorts local pricing. All of this “rising tide” might eventually “lift boats”, but it depends where all that new capital is flowing and even in the best cases it doesn’t keep up with price inflation.
For a small company, that impact is pretty minimal and the rest of the admirable aspects of this surely outweigh it. And surely that falls into their “doesn’t scale” bucket, but deferring this analysis is different when the scale is external.
I’m not sure how best to mitigate that or whether mitigations are currently appropriate for Oxide. I have some vague ideas, but I’m not in any position to do anything other than comment. But I do think this impact should be part of the discussion, because the discussion is already poised for public impact.
Are rich people so destructive to neighborhoods?
Please reread what I posted and recognize that I did not remotely suggest this. I expressly supported the policy, and want to add a frank recognition of its trade offs because its absence seemed important in the post.
> Are rich people so destructive to neighborhoods?
Disproportionately large influxes of money into a local economy cause distortion to the incentives of that economy. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the individual people with said money or their individual impact, and often it doesn’t.
The reason I think it should be part of the discussion is specifically because decisions like this don’t tend to account for externalization. If 100 companies like this are fully equitable internally, that’s awesome! But if their impact is pricing people out of housing, that sucks! If you care mostly about the former, that’s cool! I care about both, and I want to include both in the conversation.
Okay this is only the second response I’ve gotten to but we’re batting 1000 on misrepresenting what I was very careful to not say, and contradicting what I was very careful to say. I understand my comment is likely to elicit some debate but I’m hoping not every response is like this.
Furthermore, not all jobs are equal. If Google moves their headquarters to Detroit they won’t suddenly pay Detroit wages.
And finally there is another force at play here - companies need to fill the position and what they pay HCOL candidates establishes what they’re willing to pay for the work. Living in Beverly Hills doesn’t make you a better engineer. This isn’t a bargaining chip you can use, but it’s a fact you can benefit from if you’re persistent.
The markets just arent siloed as much as people want to pretend.
The more interesting part of the quote from the article for me was this:
"Companies spin this by explaining they are merely paying people based on their cost of living, but this is absurd: do we increase someone’s salary when their spouse loses their job or when their kid goes to college? Do we slash it when they inherit money from their deceased parent or move in with someone? The answer to all of these is no, of course not: we pay people based on their work, not their costs."
In practice I think that motivated people are fine with non-wild salaries, but with early stage stuff it’s way too common to see people try to use equity as a replacement for salary. Your employees stressing out over money will cause them to perform less well.
Edit: I’m aware of the VC backed share structure. My thesis is if you want more ownership in your dream from your employees, give them more equitable ownership in the enterprise.
They're a cool tech company doing cool tech stuff, so folks want to work there and are willing to make salary tradeoffs to make it happen.
Interviewing is a game of generalizations without any one-size-fits-all solutions. If you're a startup doing something ambitious, such as a from the ground up hyperscaler rack and software system, you want to attract extremely experienced and qualified people. Experienced and qualified people with a track record are likely on decent enough financial footing that they can get by on a salary with potential for future upside and an interesting problem to solve and mission.
Also later in your career you can't put a dollar amount on looking around at your co-workers and being thankful for working with high caliber people.
Interviews were gamified for thousands of years, there are private tutors that will teach your child how to pass interviews into the most elite institutios.
Leetcode just made it accessible to unwashed masses.
I hope to make this much annually sometime before I die, but I am not totally confident I will get there.
If we look at Amazon, they do something very similar as they have a salary cap which most employees hit at L6. They can then say 'Even the CEO hits this same salary cap' when in reality the former CEO was the wealthiest person in the world.
Oxide is clever in being provocative here but this is part of a totally normal compensation model.
Oxide can offer RSU. It just wouldn't make financial sense for anyone to take those.
>Some will say that this narrows the kind of roles that we can hire for. In particular, different roles can have very different comp models (sales often has a significant commission component in exchange for a lower base, for example). There is truth to this too – but for the moment we’re going to put this in the "but-this-can’t-scale" bucket.
I think all do nothing but confirm the very first sentence:
"Compensation: the word alone is enough to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction in many".
There's literally nothing you can say about it without floods of negativity.
People are very bitter about comp right now, so it's spilling over into this discussion.
The transparency is great and is clearly a value-add for candidates, IMO.
But the salary simply does not compete with HCOL Startup Senior+ Engineers (around 20- 40% lower than Staff level).
That said, Oxide is in a unique class of startups that can still hire strong talent despite this pay deficit (whether due to an exceptional product, team, technical challenge, or other rare attribute). I know a Software Engineer who just took a 25% pay cut to join a construction analytics SaaS startup because he has heard his brother (a Surveyor) complain specifically about problems this company's solving!
I confess I read TFA just to see when the other shoe would drop, and there it is: compensation varies depending on number of dependents. Yes it's hidden from the paycheck but insurance premiums are absolutely part of compensation. Yet the author openly praises this discriminatory compensation decision.
Healthcare in this country comes from employers, and so if you've got kids, you've mostly gotta get it from your employer, and everyone with kids needs healthcare for those kids. So if you cover healthcare for your employees, that includes their family. Good system? Hell no. But it's not a trick's trying to punish the folks without kids.
For more information on that topic and how it's frequently used in arguments like these, I highly recommend _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ by Daniel Kahneman.
Netflix does. Or at least did. They set aside money for insurance, and paid out whatever you didn't use as cash. People with spouses could just opt for the cash.
In this case employee AND dependent premiums are paid by the company, so you could say that single people "get less." They get $500 worth of health insurance instead of the $1000 that other employees get.
(Not making a judgement on GP's argument, just adding context.)
Let's simplify and say that: everyone at the company, and their families, are entitled to 100% of monthly premiums covered.
Someone choosing not to use that benefit as much as someone else by having fewer dependents is not discrimination.
It's like saying "I don't have a gym membership, I'm not using the wellness benefit each month, this is discrimination and others are getting paid more than me!"
Where the real variation is is in the stock comp, which seems to be variable.
And housing costs are quite different between the peninsula south of SF and the East Bay, so it's not easy to answer your question.
But if the expectation is that a family of 5 owns a home and the 3 kids are in public school, I'd say a household income (base salary) of $200-$250k is where you get into the "I can afford the basics and still save for retirement" starts.
Of course, it's easy to look at that and say "Oh, I'm coming out way ahead by making 150k in $NormalCity instead", but realistically _everything_ after that base 200k is going straight into liquid net worth. So if you're choosing between 400k in Mountain View and 300k in $NormalCity it's an interesting decision, but 400k in Mountain View means you're going to retire way earlier than you would with 200k in $NormalCity
But I take issue with this part:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
I don't think it's correct. Someone who joins with 25 years of experience is taking a lot more risk than someone who joins with 5 years of experience. The first person is most likely on their last job or close to it -- they don't have a lot of runway left to "take another chance". The person early in their career will have many chances to take new risks.
OP didn't get into it, but I hope they consider that when the look at the equity part of compensation.
The article very conveniently skips that whole discussion.
There's an entire bullet point dedicated to it. They even used the same words you used, so searching the page should have gotten you to this section.
If you don't agree with the specifics of their argument here, then that would be an interesting addition to the conversation.
AKA skipping the discussion
I'm just an HN user who was browsing jobs, found this one that listed the exact salary (with this link to their philosophy) - I had never seen this approach before and wanted to hear what HN felt about it.
You might enjoy their podcast on Next:
That was an interesting take on geographic pay differences.
Well, they WOULD pay $190K...
More importantly Oxide is only (AFAIK) employing senior people who could make more at another company. They don't have Junior programmers or Helpdesk people on $191k.
It seems to very much be instead of a startup paying "minimum/ramen wage" plus options etc they are paying "middle class bay area wage" + options.
https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal/teaser
4 Nov 2019
I wonder how the workers whose relative pay is much lower think about this.
We'd need to keep having attractive enough work and environment, and promising enough equity lottery ticket, that others can't just hire away our people by paying 2x to 5x more TC.
What's the lowest margin a company could most likely have to be able to pay all of it's employees $200k/yr?
Feels a little publicity stunty / PR-ish.
-elromulous the curmudgeon
Or at least it did, until I found this buried in paragraphs and paragraphs of text:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
So they're still stratifying employees, but by equity, not cash comp. Likewise, they're still hiding information about the thing that is most likely to benefit the founders of the company more than its employees. If Oxide sells to $bigco for $1 billion, employees 1-5 might get $100 million each, and employee 100 might get less than that yearly "sustainable for everyone" salary.
How equitable and fair will that (for some positions, relatively low) cash compensation seem then?
I get the idea: Do the traditional startup thing, but instead of competing on cash, just make it clear everyone will make a living wage and should be in it for the equity. But if you do that and then aren't being transparent about what the equity is, you're not really being particularly transparent at all. You're just making a big splash.
All the other stuff about values, etc., is bullshit. The point of a startup is to get rich.
Putting aside the fact that is terrible way to determine the rate of pay for anyone, let alone every single person in a company - how on earth did they come up with such a lower number for such a high cost of living area?
Comment shows how warped our expectations really are. It's still a 90th percentile household income in the SFBA: https://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/income
Edit: This was a reference to Akerlof's "A Market for Lemons"!
But I can admire their reasoning (empathy, equality) and the fact that they are sticking by a principle. If I had "f you" money I might simply join just cause what they're doing is so damn cool.
Salary? Easily? Where?
I've been browsing a lot of staff and principal jobs on LinkedIn recently. Some Crypto firms are around $300k, and I've seen one or two Fintech with specialized knowledge at $400k, but by far the majority are in the $200k region.
- Netflix pays over $500k
- ByteDance pays $530k (they were willing to do all cash at the time, but they may have changed it to 90% cash recently)
- 2 HFTs, both above $750k
Signing bonuses not included. Some companies had >$100k signing.
I'm not a rockstar and I have around 5 YoE.
If you're okay with stock comp (which historically does better than an all-cash offer due to the massive initial equity grant and refreshers), there are plenty of big tech companies offering around the $500k+ mark today.
Netflix recently advertised an eng mgr role for appsec with a published TC ceiling of 900k, for instance. They even wrote that into the linkedin JD.
That said, the higher you go on TC, the higher the risk that the company doesn't have much of a social contract with its staff and may in fact have a deleterious relationship with society at large - e.g Meta. Not always true, but generally yes.
levels.fyi is pretty comprehensive.
That's $691.66 pcm - what standards are you using as a reference to the 'not bad' NK ones?
