
4 Year Compensation Packages Comparison - zuhayeer
https://www.levels.fyi/calculator/?co=Facebook&bs=160000&sg=350000&sbone=20000&bp=10&gr=10&co-2=Square&bs-2=145000&sg-2=275000&gr-2=48
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dsr_
Free food provided by the company is for the company's benefit. If they asked
you to stay another hour each day and improve your relationships with
coworkers, talk about projects and possibly stay within a few hundred yards
just in case of a pageable emergency, you would ask for a significant bonus.
But providing $5-25 worth of food changes your attitude to "might as well eat
lunch here, the food is good and it's free!".

It makes good economic sense.

~~~
cletus
Why can't it be mutually beneficial?

I really dislike this "us vs them" attitude. Sure the company has free food
and sure you _can_ have lunch with your colleagues and _sure_ that's more
likely to happen than if you had to find your own lunch but...

\- you don't _have to_ have lunch with your colleagues

\- you don't _have to_ eat at your desk or work through lunch

\- you don't _have to_ have a short lunch

I love the food simply because it's something I don't want to have to think
about. I'm certainly not going to make my own lunch. It's not even about the
money of going out and buying lunch. I just don't want to think about what I
want for lunch today, where should I get it from, when should I go, how long
will I have to queue, will it be a pain getting out of and back into the
building (eg elevator queues) and so on. I just eat whatever is on offer that
day.

So while the company may benefit from you being more likely to eat with your
colleagues and that undeniably helps build culture overall, it's also of clear
benefit to me and many others.

Why does this have to be a zero-sum game?

~~~
iamkroot
Yes, this very much so! Getting food provided for me at the office has more
personal value than just the strict monetary benefit. Eating food that someone
else bought for you just feels better than eating food you bought for
yourself.

Try this experiment: pick a friend that you eat out with a lot and set up a
system where you each alternate picking up the whole bill. You'll each spend
the same amount of money on aggregate, but I am confident each of you will
feel better every time you go out.

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cgb223
Is this suggesting the standard stock package is $275,000?? Or is that just a
default value.

If so I’m just now realizing I’m massively under compensated...

~~~
tdeck
My stock comp for Google was $400k/4y in SF, so it's definitely not outside
the realm. Once I started to look around I was amazed at how much I'd been
leaving on the table.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
How much experience did you have when you were offered $400k/4y?

~~~
tdeck
About 2.5 years out of school, plus a couple of big-name internships (Adobe
and Microsoft). I also had offers from some other great companies which
certainly helped. Google only negotiates when you have other offers.

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greenbay20
I don't think people should try to price in stock value "growth" into the
equation. The fair value today of the stock you're promised on the nth year is
just the price of the stock today (for publicly traded companies).

~~~
arcticbull
Why on earth would it estimate a 48% y/y growth forever for Square stock.
That's insane. Past performance != future performance, yeesh. At that rate by
the end of the 4 year estimation here, Square will be worth $240B (4.8X) -- or
the market cap of Tesla. By year 2028, $1.150 TRILLION (23X) dollars, or just
shy of an Apple.

Keeping in mind that they just divested a major business unit, point to where
in [1] you think this is justified haha.

It's downright negligent to suggest people consider a 48% y/y growth in equity
when figuring their future compensation. I mean Square's down 6% since _July
2_. Not to mention, Square stock saw zero or negative equity total return from
_September 2018_ until _this week_. It trades like a penny stock. Can confirm,
am shareholder.

If we're moving up 48% y/y forever, I'll quit my job as I'm going to be a
billionaire by the turn of the decade.

I think it's also important to consider that at a company like Facebook, you
won't stay an IC4 forever, and you will start seeing IC5 refresh grants that
will be much more substantial. I don't know how Square's handling leveling
these days, but comparing my time at both, Facebook's going to be much more
structured. It's not enough to compare without factoring in expected time to
next level and next level refresh grants, and promotion grants. And, of
course, grounding your expectations for equity appreciation in something
approaching reality.

[1]
[https://s21.q4cdn.com/114365585/files/doc_financials/2020/Q1...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/114365585/files/doc_financials/2020/Q1/2020-Q1-Shareholder-
Letter-Square.pdf)

~~~
sushshshsh
This is the problem of using a website/front-end created by some arbitrary
person (Peter Levels in this case) to view what is essentially a read only
copy of some crowdsourced data

~~~
jamestimmins
I'm almost 100% positive that Pieter Levels is not the creator of this

~~~
sushshshsh
I believe you are correct and I misspoke. I could have sworn I remembered
seeing that site on his twitter bio as something he created, but now it seems
to me that I have mistakenly identified him as the arbitrary creator :(

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eekfuh
It would be a better overall comparison if you could factor in stock
refreshers and the cadence of which they are given.

------
Rebelgecko
It would be great if I could autopopulate the default values by entering a
Level/location

~~~
zuhayeer
Great suggestion, definitely something we can do – will work on it!

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scarface74
Just a random slightly off topic rant.

I’m of two minds seeing the comments below.

For context: I only started taking my career seriously about a decade ago and
I’ve spent the last ten years jumping between 5 companies as your standard
Enterprise CRUD developer/team lead/architect in a relatively low cost of
living city in the south east.

Before my current job working remotely for Amazon (AWS Consulting), I was
making about the median for my local market for level of experience $140K -
$160K and with my wife working. We were comfortably able to meet our short and
long term goals.

Then the local market tanked post Covid, and my former employer did an across
the board pay cut.

My emotional mind is saying all of these folks graduating and within three to
five years are getting more than I am even now that “I am working for a
FAANG”. What did I do wrong? That’s a rhetorical question - a series of
$bad_life_decisions for the first decade of my adult life.

On the other hand, my logical mind knows how fortunate I am that I am making
what I make now, I am able to work remotely from a low cost of living area,
and that I was able to do it without “grinding leetCode” and without a
whiteboard coding interview.

~~~
loldongs242
How did you land your current job with AWS Consulting without grinding
leetcode for a whiteboard coding interview, though?

~~~
scarface74
Dumb luck.

Working for small companies all of my career forced me to wear a lot of hats.
So I could answer questions about “the Leadership Principles”.

Consulting is more about helping “big enterprise” move to AWS. They cared
about a few things - could I deal with customers, solve business problems,
juggle tasks, and did I know how to do your standard “enterprise development”.
It even seem to be an afterthought whether I had any experience with AWS - I
did.

The interview process was a little more intense, but it was mostly just like
all of the other soft skill interviews I had with my last two jobs as “adult
supervision” for companies that were trying to move past the “move fast and
break things” phase to the “how can we stabilize all of this stuff and have
good processes”.

A recruiter first reached out to me about an SDE role - I knew I would fail
miserably plus I didn’t want to relocate. She told me about the consulting
role.

------
0xy
Free food to me is worth more than $10 per meal. It's the time that kills you.
If you work out your rough hourly salary and calculate how much money you
waste making food then it's worth thousands of dollars a month.

~~~
Pfhreak
Measuring non work activities by how much opportunity cost there is in salary
is a losing game, imo. Cooking isn't time that I can be paid for. (And
besides, shouldn't we all be considering that time ours and not our employers
anyhow?)

~~~
TacticalTable
If you'd prefer to think of it as 'X company will give you 40 more minutes of
leisure per day' or however much you cook, it's probably the closest financial
approximation you can get.

Another way to calculate it would be to try and figure out what you would pay
for another 40 minutes in a day, but that starts getting very subjective very
quickly.

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thundergolfer
Pretty slick tool. I look forward to using it in the event I manage to stumble
my way through the interview grind and into multiple offers.

For now it looks like it treats stock compensation in private companies (eg.
Stripe) as equivalent to public companies. Would be pretty damn helpful if it
could expose some knob that could adjust for liquidity risk.

My current approach (working for private Unicorn) is to heavily discount the
face-value, operating on received wisdom that most of the time you'll get next
to nothing.

However anecdotally, this has proved far too pessimistic (like off by a factor
of 10).

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rhipitr
Seems like location should be a toggle on this page as well, as I imagine that
can contribute to a large variation in compensation figures (fairly or not).

------
cletus
That's a pretty decent calculator. Good points:

\- It correctly showed Amazon's (crappy) vesting schedule (5/15/40/40%);

\- I like the attention to detail with showing round dollar numbers on the Y
axis

Areas for improvement:

\- I believe Amazon's offer factors in stock growth in their quoted dollar
value for your initial grant. It looks like the calculator is working on the
nominal value (which is what Amazon should do too as their method inflates
their grant value);

\- I see no mention of 401k matches or vesting.

\- No mention of cliffs or the lack thereof

\- I'd probably show PTO days and company holidays too

\- It might be worth showing vesting schedules as it can matter if it's
monthly vs annually;

UI/UX suggestions:

\- This site has enough information where you could pick a level on many
company's job ladders and it will correctly fill out bonus targets, grant
ranges and so forth. Likewise it could show salary bands. For the big tech
companies it'll probably be pretty accurate;

\- Arguably you can drop the table entirely

\- I'd make the company names more prominent above the total 4 year
compensation figures. The font is too small. This should be highlighted

\- UI-wise I'd probably put the chart at the top and the offers side by side.
It's weighted very much to the left column such that I get line wrap even on a
32" monitor (with the capped width). Even without the line wrap there's way
more on the left column than the right.

\- The top heading is (IMHO) too big. Reduce this.

\- I'd move the Reset Form button, certainly from the top. Maybe next to the
share link?

\- I think you need a clearer breakdown of each bar between salary and stock.
I'd even add a third category of bonus. Put them in this order from top to
bottom: stock, bonus, salary.

So my suggested layout is:

    
    
        +---------+---------+
        |  Chart  |  Table  |
        +---------+---------+
        | Offer 1 | Offer 2 |
        +---------+---------+
    

If you ditch the table put the summaries to each side of the chart. I think
the share link below the chart makes the most sense.

The last thing I have to say is for anyone comparing offers, I would advise
you to consider the growth in the company value to be 0. It may well be more.
It certainly has been for the last decade but this has also been the longest
bull market in modern history. It can also go down. Zero-growth assumed IMHO
is a safer course of action.

Put it this way: if you're putting in, say, that a company will grow 20% y/y
why wouldn't you put all your money into it?

~~~
scarface74
Two things about Amazon:

I was quoted salary + bonus + shares of stock.

I know Amazon’s stock vesting schedule is back end heavy. But the first two
years are made up by the bonus. Even if I assume 0% stock growth, signing
bonus/RSUs balance each other out over four years. What am I missing?

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kjgkjhfkjf
This is not really very useful. How are we supposed to know what the
companies' future growth rates will be?

~~~
lumost
The major tech players have been _consistently_ growing for decades. The major
tech players before them likewise grew for decades.

It's hard to know if you're joining IBM in 2010 or Google/Apple in 2000
though. You can simplify the problem if you're comparing 150k in equity from a
top-5 tech company by market cap with a 5+ year history of > 15% YoY stock
growth vs. 150k in startup options. How much money are you potentially leaving
on the table by not working at the large company? What does the return rate
need to be on a 4 year time horizon for the startup equity to be worth it?

