Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.
Just about any engineer who isnt independently wealthy is:
- recovering from layoffs and a period of unemployment at a high-COL cost structure
- facing layoffs with the above salients
- facing an imperative to insulate their fucking house with cash for their turn in the above crosshairs
Competence and a willingness to work hard stopped equalling access to basic necessities in November of 2022 - February of 2023, depending on how you count, and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
"200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.
They’re a remote company. They’re not targeting HCOL metros.
> and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
> "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.
Claiming that $200k is not enough to live on is rich-guy talk. The majority of the country lives on well below $200K.
I agree that a single person living in a HCOL metro like SF Bay Area would not find this compensation attractive, but that person also has nearly infinite other jobs to choose from nearby.
Jobs like this (remote work for interesting startup) do not need to pay HCOL comp.
It's bad generally, this is a terrible time to be a working person in general. How SWEs stack up against profession X? Depends on profession X.
SWEs are in a job market where a bunch of folks who have been repeatedly prosecuted for wage fixing (most successfully/recently in 2012) are taking another swing at it in a much more lawless regime. That's as precarious as it gets when this cabal monopolizes the front row at the Inaugeration.
The median US income in 2023 was $39,982 for an individual, and $78,538 for a household.
My issue is with made-for-life, self-appointed elder statesmen on HN saying anything at all about other people's finances and imperatives from the comfort of a study in whatever isyllic community they're pontificating from.
Just, be grateful, and say nothing.
Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things. Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It’s not poverty wages!
“I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I’m passionate about” is such a normal thing that everyone serious I know in this industry says. Or like… even just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there’s a reason online casinos pay their software engineers so much!). Not everyone makes the choice (and I get people saying no) and but in a sense I gotta imagine it’s part of the calculus for making it work. “We won’t have to pay people half a mil in total comp like meta has to, because the mission is more straightforward”. I feel like an O&F ep mentioning someone from intel expecting _triple_ the comp. 600k!
And like… people saying it’s not enough and talking about equity. You’re not paying rent with equity!
Signed: a guy who was at a small startup and who would have been very happy with the inflation/CoL equivalent of 200k instead of what I had those early leaner years
At one point “joining the scrappy startup” does involve some scrappiness. Otherwise you’re just working in a division of Google that hasn’t been integrated into the borg yet.
The "we all get paid the same" is a dishonest by omission. They don't all get paid the same, and while the peanut gallery may think so, I sure as hell don't think the IRS thinks the same way.
I personally don't really care what they pay their engineers, but to pretend to have this egalitarian approach to compensation and then hide the equity numbers is dishonest.
Note that according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 200k in 2025 is equivalent to about 160k in 2020 when the pandemic began, and 160k would've been on the low end for an experienced software engineer at a Series A or B startup at that time, in the SF Bay Area.
My only reservation is that I’ve interviewed with or worked for multiple companies that made some claim about paying everyone the same and there was always some loophole: The company might have a fixed base pay but then use very different equity grants. One company claimed to give everyone the same base comp and equity but then it was discovered that some people were getting huge annual “guaranteed bonuses” that were effectively base compensation. It has left me tired of seeing companies push the idea of everyone being paid the same while not being open about the entire compensation structure.
EDIT: To be 100% clear, I don’t know what Oxide’s entire comp structure looks like. The examples above were for past companies I worked for.
Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an answer for.
Sure enough when that bonus was due to pay out, I got a heads up from a friend (who was being compensated because he was like CTO or something) that it was worthless, because of course they get to pick the numbers so they're going to pick zero. I don't care, because I was on a different scheme and anyway I work for salary, if you want to pay me to do something, you can pay me, don't fuck about with nonsense about a "bonus", but some people ended up stuck for a year or two believing they're getting a bonus to wait.
reminded - the "amateur" (vs. paid "professional") requirement in Olympic and other sports, i.e. participation for the sake of only pure sport spirit, back then came from the aristocracy who could invest a lot of time in those sports without having to take care of making a living.
And when wealthy execs and founders tell what they want people who is interested in the mission/vision/whatever other than money - well, it is the same class thing. The ones who need money naturally can't have the required purity of vision as it is clouded by that lowly need for money.
Because, you know, you better have the same amount of skin in the game as I do.
