Based on what I've seen/heard, they seem to follow a similar comp philosophy to Netflix -- pay top of market to get the best people.
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.
I read this here and there and don't doubt it, but then again I've never seen/met anyone IRL (outside of C-level) making this much money as an employee.
Are they just extremely rare cases or am I just not aware of the valley and their customs?
Yeah, I’ve worked at both FAANG and non-FAANG series C companies, and made between $450k-$550k between 2018 and 2021. And I wasn’t even staff level.
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.
I firmly believe you are off by an order of magnitude at least.
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.
I'm an L5 at Google and don't even remotely make $500k. About half that, depending on how GOOG stock does. Yes, that huge number is probably not unheard of, but "not unheard of" doesn't mean it's common. So either 1. I'm absolutely terrible at negotiation or 2. Online comp statistics suffer from bias where people excited about their salaries tend to report it and the majority don't. I know levels.fyi tries to correct for bias, but it's very, VERY hard to believe $500k is COMMON for L5. Yes they probably exist. Yes, HN commenters probably skew towards "highly skilled" so you're going to see a lot of high comps here. No, we're not all even within striking range of $500k.
And L6 is very, VERY senior. Not ridiculously senior like the aristocracy at L7+ but L6s are rare and there's probably one of them for every ten L5's. L5 to L6 is a major weed-out promo, and not many people get that far. I've been trying for 5 years.
Something is off here… are you based in the Bay Area?
I literally have PDF copies of offers I received in 2018 from both Facebook and Google for L5 roles in the $400k range, and things just went significantly crazier since then. And I am the most average engineer you can imagine, with most of my peers in a similar situation.
I cannot comprehend how your TC can just be $250k at Google after 5 years of refreshers. That’s like L3 comp in the pocket of the organization I’m at.
Yea, Bay Area. I believe you. Obviously there must be a very wide range for L5. I suspect all you see when people post online are the really great ones, because after all who wouldn't want to talk about their great comp?! So, when all you see are the very highest-earners sharing their comp, you might start to think that they're normal or "usual". I've got 20yrs experience in the industry too, but mostly in no-name companies.
In my experience, the discounted factor is that you don’t get promoted to the top of the next level band but people are hired into top of next level band quite frequently. This bias favors moving companies regularly.
however, in practice, few are able to land such positions when interviewed externally - I’d believe the pass rate for L6 is less than 1 in 10. Even after accounting for screening steps.
Ah, I really don't believe you now since much of that income is going to be from a once/year stock grant. There is no way you could tell how much they were making by looking at their paycheck (well, pay stub, who gets paychecks anymore?).
If you saw their w2 or 1040, your claim would be more credible, since that's when most of us learn how much we actually made in the previous year.
My "claim"? I don't know what else to say, buddy. You believe me if you want, I help my friend with taxes so I've seen everything relevant and simply called "paycheck".
I'm trying to be nice to you by sharing information you can use in your future negotiations, but it seems you're just angry you are not making as much as my friend. Maybe next time I should just let you leave 100K+ on the table and go on with my life.
Also, doesn't Google famously have an internal spreadsheet where people share their salary anonymously? You can check that too if it still exists.
The paycheck statements at my FAANG include the amount of RSU vested YTD, and each vesting event generates a separate paycheck as well. Vesting schedule is also typically monthly these days, with no initial cliff. What is yearly is any refresh grant, but then even those vest monthly.
If you look at one you have a pretty good way to extrapolate the expected TC for the year.
With a GDP per capita of just about 50k, that means each of those people earn no less than 10 shares of the nation's wealth...
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.
I have many times, the point is the same: They all get an absurd percent of the pie despite being less productive for the essential needs of society than the average construction laborer.
Reading anecdotes like this blows my mind. The most I've ever made is $129k. Granted, I don't live in the valley and I don't work at a FAANG, but still...
There's a very strange phenomenon in US cities where it seems every salary is slowly converging to the $110-140k range. People who used to make $80k for borderline unskilled work (cold calling to sell business internet, for example) are now in the $110-120k range but people who were already at $120k have barely had any upward mobility in their pay.
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.
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.
I made that much for 4 years and have a total of 10 years work experience. I’m nowhere near retired. And I’ve been single the entire time.
$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.
3% is a pretty reasonable amount to take each year out of a lump sum you're trying to use to live the rest of your life off, which for $1.3M would be $39k/yr.
$39k/yr may not give you a life of luxury anywhere in the US, but there's certainly people surviving on less - and surely if you were OK on $60k/yr cost of living in the Bay Area it wouldn't be hard to find parts of the US where $39k/yr stretches further than $60k does there?
Of course there's many people who wouldn't want to move to a cheaper area, and especially anyone who is able to earn $500k/yr is likely to choose to work longer before retiring to not have to be as frugal - but "nowhere close to retirement money anywhere in the US" seems way off. I'd even be surprised if $1.3M wasn't significantly greater than the median amount of pension + savings owned by Americans at the point of their retiring.
edit: Actual numbers back up my assumptions above, for example "According to the Fed data, the median net worth for Americans in their late 60s and early 70s is $266,400. The average (or mean) net worth for this age bracket is $1,217,700, but since averages tend to skew higher due to high net-worth households, the median is a much more representational amount." from https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-of-americans-a... or similar at https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewrosen/2022/06/16/are-you-... etc.
No this is not rare at all. Meta offers E5 ("senior" level) new hires a 400-500k total package in the US (given that you negotiate, I know the levels.fyi numbers are a bit lower), and this isn't some exception. If your performance is good and/or stock appreciation happens, then that number goes even higher.
I'm a very average engineer (probably way below average amongst the HN crowd) and I'm in that range.
Mix of the above. It’s not dissimilar to investment banking or other highly compensated field. You need to get to the top of the top firms. The top of the top comes from the population of peer companies. The population of peer companies come from the population of lesser peers and top schools.
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.
I think there's a few other factors that impact visibility.
* 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.
> Are they just extremely rare cases or am I just not aware of the valley and their customs?
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.
You are not aware. I have many personal friends, Engineers, making 600K+. These are old friends who have no reason to lie. I know a senior engineer who manages a small team who had a lucky take-home of over a million in a good year.
To be realistic ... 300K in the bay is barely livable if you're targeting a middle class life with kids and targeting retiring at 65.
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 get what you're saying, but the median income for SFO is way below what tech people get paid. "barely livable" is perhaps a bridge too far for the $300k+ crowd. :)
Maybe. But I had a big house in the “good school system” in the Atlanta burbs built in 2016 for $335K. Even today that would cost around $550K. It would take more than $300K to duplicate our lifestyle in the Bay Area.
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.
You spend on a lot of things beyond housing, and most things outside of housing are about the same price between regions, so even if your housing costs is half as cheap, you are still falling behind on half as much salary. This is especially true for retirement savings, since you don’t have retire in a HCOL where you earned that money, and that expensive house can be sold, perhaps with some kind of profit to offset the extra interest paid, later.
Gas, property insurance, car insurance for your home (especially since insurance companies are starting to refuse to sell in the state) and even food is more expensive.
To put some real numbers on it.
My 30 year fixed 3.5% mortgage all in from 2016 - 2021 was $2185 and that included the FHA PMI since I only put 3.5% down. I refinanced in 2021 to a 15 year mortgage and bought points and got rid of the PMI. My house is now worth close to twice that.
My mortgage? 1.97% fixed 15 year - $2550 and $1575 of that goes toward principal. My total household expenses as of March 2020 when I was making “only” $150K with my wife working part time making $25K was around $6000. We were bringing home after taxes and before retirement savings about $10500 after maxing out my retirement savings it was about $9300 a month.
And if you haven’t noticed, people are moving away from the west coast and office occupancy is down - that doesn’t bode well for home prices long term.
Our lifestyle is a little different now (see below). But out of my base income which is still only $160K - and my wife no longer works -with the rest coming from RSUs, we still manage to pay all of our expenses and I’m able to max out my 401K.
I don’t think people who have been in the tech bubble understand how easy it is for a two income earning family to accumulate wealth where one is making your standard enterprise dev tech salaries in a major non west coast city.
Most couples I know our ages where one is a mid career developer also has a spouse working making at least $70K (the average salary of a college grad). You can do quite well in most cities with a household income of $220K.
If you’re younger and single making $135 to $170K - typical for a developer with 5 years of experience outside of the west coast - you can find an apartment or buy a condo in the city for $2500/month.
Are we comparing with Atlanta? Food is more expensive maybe, but not 2X! Insurance is usually not more expensive, especially in mild weather west coast cities. Electricity can be cheaper (Seattle where I’m at). I’m not in California, but still an HCOL. But if I were in LA, food would be cheaper than even Atlanta. Gas is expensive, not that I notice much (I have an EV, and our electricity is cheap).
> And if you haven’t noticed, people are moving away from the west coast and office occupancy is down - that doesn’t bode well for home prices long term.
I wish, but it’s just a dream. The traffic is bad, rents are up, the housing market is insane. You are betting that the “it’s too crowded so no one comes here anymore” will regress so much that housing prices will drop, but that’s not how equilibriums work.
Everyone in our industry should be maxing out their 401k’s, no matter where they are living. However, those who survive in a HCOL will have a lot more assets and money at the end of it than a LCOL, simply because their house is worth more and they made more money (same percentage of savings even with higher expenses).
There are good reasons to live in an LCOL, especially if you like the place and you have friends and family there. But making more money overall than a HCOL isn’t one of them unless the jobs you can get in the HCOL don’t really pay much more than the LCOL (then get out of dodge as fast as you can).
> Population is decreasing in all four of California’s largest cities.
Again, this is a "It's too crowded so no one comes here anymore" problem, not a "California sucks, let's leave" problem. If you can't make it economically in SF or LA, move to somewhere like Atlanta where making it economically is easier. Housing prices fall a bit, from $2 million for a starter house to $1.9 million, but they just as quickly go back up as well. If you look at a population chart for California, you'll see this huge increase in the last 80 years that is finally tapering off. Did everyone honestly believe that California would or could grow forever? Equilibrium means that SF will shrink and grow around some stable population point.
> And house prices are declining in Seattle.
Read the article. They went up 20% last year and are now down 2-5% this year. And again, you are doing a lot of wishful thinking, since inventory is super low right now and people are struggling to buy houses even if they have the money. I actually wish your story was true, but it simply isn't.
> Why live in a high cost city when more jobs are remote?
I work remote in Seattle and love it (but my wife has to RTO, so we still need to be here). But I guess if someone isn't great at math, an LCOL city is probably a better choice anyways, since they don't have to think so hard about the math and can justify their choices with simple click-bait-style narratives.
> work remote in Seattle and love it (but my wife has to RTO, so we still need to be here). But I guess if someone isn't great at math, an LCOL city is probably a better choice anyways, since they don't have to think so hard about the math and can justify their choices with simple click-bait-style narratives.
So exactly how does it make more financial sense to live somewhere that is more expensive than somewhere much less expensive making the same money?
What’s the mortgage on that 2 million dollar home compared to mine?
And I’ve been to Seattle a number of times. That’s where my employer’s headquarters is located. It’s a dreary place.
Eh, you'd be surprised how much being able to walk to things, and generally being in a major international city improves your quality of life if that's the kind of thing you prefer...
I’ve been to San Francisco and I’ve been to Ohio. I would much rather be a median income earner in any part of Ohio than a median income earner on the west coast.
How many people making the median income in San Francisco are living in a walkable area?
I lived in SF for 9 years. Good memories. And during peak tech boom you could easily shield yourself from the worst of the city. Ubers were cheap, office perks kept you from venturing out, and foot traffic was high enough to make the open air drug use less visible.
But since 2020, it became absolute misery.
I moved to NYC, and I’m much happier here. So your point about being in a walkable city still stands.
For literally anyone raising a family, a "good life" isn't actively trying to minimize the loss of every penny of your money to outrageous cost of living, childcare, etc -- all while trying to justify the existence of a "diverse cultural experience" while dodging crack addicts, crime, and other increasingly untenable issues.
Can’t reply to the comment below inquiring about odor, but people smoking crack are easy to spot as you don’t roll crack in a cigarette, you smoke it out of a heated glass pipe. It looks entirely different. So it’s easy to notice when done in the open. As far as odor… I think it smells a lot like meth that, when smoked, smells like an odd laundry detergent that you have never smelled before. Sort of like a decaying air freshener. That’s the best I can do.
> people smoking crack are easy to spot as you don’t roll crack in a cigarette, you smoke it out of a heated glass pipe. It looks entirely different.
This isn't entirely accurate, as crack isn't the only drug people use "crack pipes" for. I couldn't tell you what, if anything, crack smells like because I'm not aware of having every been in the vicinity of it being consumed, but I have been around people using what look like crack pipes and I've used them myself too.
In my case: a few times I tried vaping weed with them (though for weed an electric dry herb vape is better, and if wanting to use glass pipe and a flame there are designed-for-weed vapes which are better than generic crack-type pipes), and DMT is another illegal drug that needs (when in pure form, rather than changa) to be vaped rather than smoked - so a crack pipe can be useful for that too. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other drugs that sort of pipe can be used for, too.
Personally I wouldn't use that sort of "crack" pipe in public, partly because many people think like you that it must be crack that's being used, and partly because even people who dont have that incorrect belief could still rightly (or at least, almost always rightly) deduce that something illegal is being consumed.
Cigarettes I know. Marijuana is a bit funky, but it's easy because--by process of elimination--it's not a cancer stick. But now I have to squirrel away a third possibility.
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.
> Having roommates in late 30s out of necessity rather than choice
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.
To be realistic, even in the Bay, 300k is more than livable if you're targeting a middle class lifestyle with kids and retiring at 65.
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).)
What SF family with children are paying 4K a month on "rent" and what exactly do you envision this rented abode to be that is even remotely liveable with children? Are you living in anything close to reality?
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.
> 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.
What complex do you live in?
I'm actually looking to move apartments, want something a bit more modern, and I'm seeing mostly 1-bedrooms for $3500 and 2-bedrooms for $4500 in south bay for anything modern (e.g. anything from Prometheus) and located in a safe area (e.g. not East Palo Alto).
Yeah, take home of $13.5k a month can get a little tight if you're looking at an $8k mortgage on a crappy little shithole condo
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
And I on the other hand had a 3200 square foot house, two cars, in the good school system and my wife and I had date nights and the occasional vacation with a household income of $170K in north metro Atlanta in 2020…
How do you find yourself not saving enough for early retirement when you are saving $8k per month? Only a a tiny fraction of your condo is being consumed within a month. Far less than 8k.
I'm with you there. You can sell a condo to collect your $600k or whatever in equity, go buy a normal house in a normal city, and retire on $40k a year between that and your other savings.
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
A few years ago, I bought a 3-bedroom house in East Bay area, with a nice backyard (which looks distinctly less nice now, but hey, programming is a time-consuming job), and a decent public high school in walking distance for my two kids, all the while getting a whooping <$250K salary. Still had enough money left to invest in mutual funds and enjoy trips to Hawaii every other year or so.
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.
You're getting mercilessly downvoted by people suffering from extreme cognitive dissonance. Even the very idea of trying to save money for future medical catastrophes that are statistically bound to happen (parents, etc) are financial ticking time bombs.
You might want to check what the difference between mean and marginal tax rate is. For somebody with a lifestyle in which $162k a year is considered "barey livable" that should be sth very easy to understand.
>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.
- 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.
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
They don't; it's like a whole big thing in city planning and urban development where people who work in the city don't actually live there and have to commute huge distances each day, and how that has a profound negative impact on the spaces where that happens.
A) Donating illiquid assets to your own non-profit helps a lot. I typically have acquired or bought or created something in prior years that can offset this year's income.
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.
=======
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.
> Donating illiquid assets to your own non-profit helps a lot.
What sort of non-profit is this? Can you just register a 501(c)(3) with the sole purpose of giving yourself charity and then use it to pay for food and housing for yourself? Trying to honestly learn here as I have a massive W-2 tax bill.
> requires you to pay it back across an interval over 5 years. So in future years you're doing that
This sounds like you're just deferring tax to the next 5 years? Don't you have to use after-tax money to repay the 401k loan?
> Your various side project pursuits just have to make revenue in 5 years to prove that its not a hobby
My understanding of the IRS rule is you have to profit in 3 out of 5 consecutive years if you want to claim tax losses in the other 2 years. Not revenue. (IRC 183).
Private foundation, and no the money is not yours anymore, just under your control, you have to actually plan on doing something charitable for this to be of interest. But importantly, foundations and charities can invest in nearly anything. And yes you can get a salary from them, which is taxed normally.
Yes, everything here is just deferring. What you’re really doing is staggering the tax events across different years.
Like, it’s not important that something increases a tax footprint in year 5 if you have already planned on reducing tax footprints another way that year. More Net Operating Losses, more thing to carry forwards, more and bigger real estate depreciation, offsetting the increase in income.
Or eventually just paying taxes. Its not controversial to do.
Another aspect is the time value of money. With strategies like this you can go to your employer and file an exemption from employer withholding. So you get your full salary now instead of hoping for a tax refund next year , and that lets you employ these strategies at all and invest and live your life. Take a chance on having more capital gains, so you start getting taxed at the lower Long term capitals rate and phase out your W-2 work when this exceeds your income.
yeah, you have to get a third party appraiser but they’re mostly just checking a box
and you can use the last known price as well, the real beauty is that it is not volume weighted
so you get the last price for 1 of that thing, and use that to donate 1,000 of that thing to keep more of your cash, even if it was not possible to realize it for cash
(for the 20% deduction in my example that one relies on cost basis, unless the price has gone down, then its current value)
I guess the first part of that is like netflix, but as you know the second part is not since netflix is 100% cash unless you want to participate some portion of that in the employee stock plan.
Yes, the first part of the philosophy, pay top of market. Not the second part, where they employee gets to choose their level of exposure to investment risk. But Netflix is a public company, and OpenAI is not.
No, Netflix pays top of market like you said “in cash”. Paying “profit sharing” in a company that isn’t profitable isn’t nearly as valuable.
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 feel like person you're replying to specifically implied that OpenAI does it differently in that aspect, and they were also high up at Netflix so is likely very familiar :)
> 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.
Do you think the next funding round or when it goes public will increase its valuation?
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.
Beware of taxes though. If you leave the company before it's public, and the stock has increased in value, you have to pay capital gains taxes when exercising and there's the possibility that stock may end up worthless.
There have been many startup employees that have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes only to see their paper gains eventually disappear.
I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Useless to say they loved him and the next summer they tried to get him back, even offering a signing bonus for an internship (something they considered unheard of) but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. You can guess the comp was probably already 3x what his previous job was offering. Of course, he wouldn't return.
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.
I don't understand why people think sam has magic powers. He started one failed company and has no technical ability to make openai into anything more than it is.
yeah, Netflix is almost all cash in comparison. No clue what kind of liquidity OpenAI provides to cash out. Since it's "profit based" it actually seems even riskier, Microsoft could prevent OpenAI from showing any profit if they really want to
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
even if there was, while it might take a decade before IPO and market price discovery, it's almost expected that they would make a private tender offer sometime before that, letting employees realize some value of their shares long before 10 years is up.
or you could just sell and take the $900k or so, and plop it into some PE funds where you’ll be a preferred investor in a variety of high quality, lower valued, offerings and don't have to waste a decade of your life on the graciousness of one employer’s management and prospects
fingers crossed. don't forget to buy some of the S&P too.
It's always interesting to think about how someone somewhere is earning as much as you earn in a decade or lifetime in a single year. Also that you are that person for someone else.
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.
I do not find that interesting. If the goal is wealth redistribution, then either a marginal income/wealth (property)/sales tax accomplishes that.
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.
Does anywhere in the world have a marginal property tax?
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).
UK has council tax bands based loosely on property value, but it's not very regularly reassessed so it's not very progressive.
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.
and speeding tickets! In parts of Scandinavia, the speeding tickets fine is based on your income, not a flat fee, so if you're a bank manager you pay more for the parking ticket vs if you're a poor student. The record is €121,000 for being caught going 20 over the limit by a multimillionaire.
>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.
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.
We already have to appraise most of that anyhow, for capital gains tax purposes.
Though not really for the population as a whole: the majority of people don’t have all that much in the way assets. The proposals that get floated in the US don’t kick in until your wealth is in the tens of millions.
Capital gains taxes do not require any appraisal. They only apply when a gain is recognized, so is simply sale price minus purchase price times tax rate.
Capital gains taxes are income taxes. Property/wealth taxes are taxes paid based on the “market” price of an asset just for owning it (presumably society provides for its security and environment in which it became valuable and will continue to be valuable).
There's tiered levels of what's called "stamp duty" in Australia (at least some states anyway), which is a tax charged on all property purchases paid by the buyer. And some council rates (effectively a type of property tax) are differential, based on the type & value of your property.
Does it? how do you even price a gallon milk of organic raw unpasteurized fresh from the grass-fed cow that the billionaire has on the estate comapred to a gallon of milk a poor person would buy from something as pedestrian as a supermarket?
Don't forget, however, that the $45K landscaper probably pays zero in Federal taxes, while the 900K dev (assuming it was all cash, which it isn't) is losing a third of that to Fed taxes alone, and tons more to State and local.
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.
Vehicle registration fees, like many others, are 100% a blunt money collection mechanism imposed by the government. This has nothing to do with a poor or wealthy person buying a new Playstation 5.
Vehicle registration fees are a way of offsetting a small part of the massive subsidies the government gives to vehicles. If anything, they should be much higher for everyone.
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.
They pay for the cost of that service. This is an optional service for those who choose to register a vehicle. Charging people things based on yearly income means the richest people will pay nothing as the bulk of their income isn't realized yearly. Maybe you want to charge people by total wealth but in those cases the richest have wealth available under different names in parts of the world unauditable by a state agency. Add in the cost to determine these figures now it costs a few thousand to register a vehicle.
I don't think that's a fair example. I'm not sure what it's like to run a small business in California. But the answer to that situation is progressive taxation, and California has one of the most progressive tax systems in the US. https://taxfoundation.org/which-states-have-most-progressive...
Punitively high static costs of living and costs of doing business have profoundly cascading effects on people. Progressive tax rates have absolutely nothing to do with that.
People have different thresholds and capabilities. IME even if they could grind through the learning curves most don't have the desire or logical reasoning skills to be even mediocre programmers. Keep in mind too that it's still culturally uncool, despite a few bubbles of nerd hype.
There is an intellectual horsepower that is needed that not everyone has. The position that I'm stating is that not everyone is smart enough to learn to do, say, Calculus. It's not a matter of motivation and discipline, some people simply are smarter than others. There are other kinds of smarts than logic and spacial reasoning though, and people that are good in one area aren't always good in all the others.
But you're absolutely right - don't gatekeep writing software. It's not that hard and everyone should have access to that realm, even if they don't use it.
Only if he uses it for work (exclusively for work, if you ask the IRS). And he’s paying double in payroll taxes - sole proprietors/self-employed workers pay 15%, employees pay 7.5%.
Yes, it would have to be a full time work vehicle.
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).
Billionaires have a whole novel extra layer above this, as their taxable income and investment preferences can be significant for local (and sometimes national) governments.
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.
I want to get to the point where I can pay $10k for a first class cubicle on international flights and show up well-rested instead of having to lose a whole day to feeling like crap
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 think the point is people earning $8/hr 40 hrs/wk 40 years = $665k total for a lifetime's work. Of course most people in the world earn much less than this.
One of the most compelling lyrics I've ever heard, that has stuck with me for about a decade now, is Chris Brown's, "I get what you get in 10 years in 2 days."
If you don't increase your standard of living, it will. (Or the other caveats of course; assuming you're not already close to retirement, impending economic catastrophe or whatever).
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.
For people not living there but curious about trying it out: What's a reasonable range for "very well paid job in France"? Is it all cash or is there equity?
For a entry-level developer in a large French company you would aim a 50k€.
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, ...)
> For a entry-level developer in a large French company you would aim a 50k€.
> 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.
Brag about what? Please take a moment to read my comment with understanding.
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).
Dollar sign goes before the number, cent sign goes after, other units go after: $7, 7¢, 7 lbs. You can’t pretend convention doesn’t exist just because it’s weird! That’s why it’s convention and not common sense.
Other companies nickel and diming engineers think they are somehow getting something for free. All the highest performing companies in the world pay insane amounts to their programmers
Paying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, because I know both low-quality and high-quality engineers at most FAANGs, but in principle isn't offering a lot of money a good way to attract talent?
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.
I worked with the enterprise sales team for awhile when I worked at Udacity and we did some research on job motivations to help answer questions about recruiting & retaining good engineers. We found that salary needs to be “enough” (varies by local market) but that people will literally relocate their families and lives to work on problems that they find interesting and that are a unique opportunity. The salary bump needs to be very large to achieve the same effect as “amazing opportunity”.
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”.
Sort of, you will probably attract the best talent by having the hardest problems, fostering a culture of bottom-up innovation, and giving your engineers a lot of freedom rather than micro-managing them. The pay is closely related, but you also get a lot of people trying to game the system and optimize for max pay, without necessarily the skill or creativity you're looking for. Said another way: top pay attracts people looking for top pay, for better or worse. There's probably a strong correlation between "best" people and high pay, but it's also hard to quantify "best".
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.
Right, but you have to be in a position where you get to do the work in the first place, which requires passing some reputational and skill bar. Or, you could do something which is cool to you personally and someone might not share that feeling and be unimpressed.
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.
convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU
Seems silly enough to get you somewhere cool. Though the best pass is recommendation. Impress your colleagues so bad, they will recommend you somewhere one day.
than for impactful work at my actual job
Oh you have to fight hard to get one of those. You cant just do what you're told. Ive got a cool story to tell from my time at amazon but I fought heroically to get it (I was younger though).
I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy
Careful what you believe because your belief becomes your reality.
If you want to be great, you cant just act and think like anybody else. Work on yourself and be great. Get the mindset first.
This is honestly kind of motivational, thank you. Currently building a GPU rig to get back into deep learning, I want to hack on the open-source end of AI efforts, and we'll see what comes of it.
It's both things. Offering more money increases the inbound applicants dramatically. You want this because top talent is disproportionately likely to have better options and may have a high floor. This does, however, create a non-trivial filtering problem, and one that is hard to scale because recruiters can't reliably differentiate real talent from good talkers. The key here is to make sure your best people are active engaged in recruiting and to minimize the type 1 and type 2 errors in hiring. This is hard to sustain at scale, and I think places like Google and Facebook have been losing the battle on this for many years—also due to engineering brand dilution because they don't actually have that much impactful work relative to the headcount—but OpenAI is small and focused enough that they ought to be able to manage pretty effectively.
not everyone. There are motivations other than money, and if someone has a dislike of Sam Altman for whatever reason, they could be the best person in the world for a job and still not want to work there. If some has moral or ethical reasons against something, they won't be swayed by money.
The "real talent" is worth nx of the average salary when the work of the real talent makes the company better.
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.
No even on a highly paid team of engineers making 250-400k, half of them are actively producing technical debt. One good engineer can replace 2, and then leave the code base simpler and more maintainable.
You are correct in terms of raw talent. And I agree, there are a significant number of NNPPs in many teams who could be culled for a net increase in productivity.
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.
Sure, a great team lead can boost productivity of other engineers. But you dont end up with world changing products that way, you just end up completing some incremental project on time. Probably alot of the core innovations at OpenAI were done by < 10 people.
Way to move the goal posts and waltz right past my point without meaningfully engaging. I thought we were talking about engineers making $250k-$400k at big tech companies and what makes people productive. Now you're talking about the impact of small teams with the right talent in the right place at the right time. That's great, if you were at OpenAI over the last few years, or Google in 1998-2004, or Facebook from 2005-2009, I'd love to hear your thoughts on those moments that teams caught lightning in a bottle. For the rest of the 99.99% of industry, a reductive view of "fire your underperformers" is not necessarily going to net them better results.
This seems like a broad generalization that has little support beyond -- perhaps -- the personal experience of the commenter, who, I suspect, considers themselves one of the "good engineers" and not one of the overpaid and decidedly less competent engineers, annoying producers of technical debt.
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.
I've got over ten years experience, working in "highly regarded" tech companies. Most of the time, management is both incapable of recognizing who is truly writing the best code and politically their hands are tied in terms of firing half the team. This is why startups like OpenAI can take on companies like Google. I've seen dozens of products fail because engineers making 400k+ could not handle the complexity of some code base.
Assuming what you say is true ("50% of team members in mature organizations are a net negative on team performance, we should get rid of them and pay more the top talent"), what I gather from your comments is that you think the problem lies in incompetent management in mature organizations -- it is a miracle that all those companies are still alive and somehow making money -- or their inability for political or reputational reasons (let's conveniently forget the very large layoffs that have occurred in the last year), to lay off incompetent people (who hired those hundreds or thousands of incompetent people, given the notoriously difficult interview process of top tech companies? ).
Personally, from my life in tech, I do not feel that OpenAI has done a great job (and rather frankly, work that has been supported by both "press" and popular sentiment, because who doesn't like the heroic effort of a group of smart people facing poor odds against the Goliaths?) because management in Google or Meta cannot recognize who is writing great code.
Think about the problem of "hallucinations" with GPT. After all, it was considered a minor hiccup on the road to the AGI, a path opened by a team of mavericks. But if Google, had it been first to market, had delivered such a product, the press would have gone from "oh, that's funny, it will get better with time" to a more worrying "Google is destroying humanity with those hallucinations."
It is much easier to be innovative when you are small, hungry, with little to lose and much to gain, rather than when you are worried about your current salary or equity or reputation. It's not just a matter of paying top talent more and getting rid of more average people; I'm sure there are enough brilliant, highly paid people who have enough capital to build small, high-IQ teams in any of the major technology companies to get to GPT-like models before OpenAI. But incentives, reputation, the nature of public companies play a role in being slower, less innovative, less risk-taking.
Paying someone more also doesn’t mean you can charge your customers more. A budget is a budget. There’s a reason McDonald’s pays employees differently in India vs NYC, the work maybe the same but the market is different
Meta cut back on everything: microkitchens, wellness cash, assigned->shared desks, WfH->RTO, and looking for excuses to lay people off. I wouldn't take a job at Google, Amazon, Apple, or Meta. Netflix and Microsoft seem doable. Target and Costco are also decent non-tech companies.
I think this is often, but not always true. I think it's not true (and rational for employers) if they:
* 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
The unfortunate reality is that those elite circles usually do have the best among them. And having worked in FAANGs, there is some aspect of meritocracy, the code doesnt lie
FAANG employees sure are full of themselves considering they've worked at companies that have failed to innovate for two decades. What was the last successful product that Google launched with all their highly paid engineers?
I always see this and it always rubs me the wrong way. You're presuming that the only form of innovation is an entirely new consumer product.
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.
Hmm I’ve worked at “elite” startups and “elite” big cos, all jobs of which I’ve gotten by directly applying. At several points have exceeded 7 figures too.
Talent is not universal though. A great product/team/workplace can turn unmotivated middling knowledge people into heroes. Not only is massively more worth to raise talent in-house, heterogenous teams are way more healthy. Early Googlers wrote litanies on this.
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.
Can we define talent. Also context matters. Some companies have lower "talent density" because their size requires some level of operational headcount.
I know more than half a dozen extremely top of their field for sure engineers who work there. Even having them would be an insane concentration of talent imo.
> The tax filings also reveal previously unreported details about one of the most valuable and well-known technology ventures operating today, including the level of investment by Reid Hoffman, free Teslas for early OpenAI engineers and the skyrocketing computing bill that may have prompted it to take a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
New hires' comp is much higher than existing employees', especially if you've hit your cliff. 7 figures for E6 can happen if you joined recently, have good counter-offers, and negotiate. It's not super uncommon but it's also not the median E6 comp.
Some made up new equity class that isn't actually equity, and caps your upside? Are we seeing a new level of startup management greed? That smells pretty scammy.
Common advice is to value earlier stage equity at zero anyway, so how the heck are people credibly calling that worth 600k...
There are a handful of unicorns / decacorns that went poof and the BS equity turned out to indeed be BS. That’s why they have to do $300k base salary, because that’s low end of total comp at competing mega caps, without it they couldn’t sign anybody from there.
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.
Unpopular opinion: Paying more does not get you better code, or faster code, or cleaner code. It does get you valuable things, but they're unrelated to code. I'll get to that.
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.
OpenAI PPUs are no different than stock in a growing-but-unprofitable company like old Amazon. You don't have to wait for dividends; you can sell your PPUs to speculators who expect returns in the future.
Only if your company allows you to sell your shares and only if you work for a company where there is and interest and even then you’re going to be required to sell at a discount.
I know exactly how much my shares are worth on my spreadsheet -
=GOOGLEFINANCE("AMZN", "price") * number of shares
> It’s important to reiterate that the PPUs inherently are not redeemable for value if OpenAI does not turn a profit. That said, there are investors that have been willing to pay for these PPUs and that’s where the value being told to candidates is derived from.
> 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?
If OpenAI has a monopoly on AGI within the current neoliberal capitalist framework they'll make trillions before the system collapses. It's like Aramco but bigger.
Do the PPU's create an alignment issue? I mean, theoretically these folks are supposed to be working towards AGI, but doing it safely... but I can imagine that an extra 500K+ is a pretty big incentive to hurry up and create something that can help you make a profit so that they can get their payout. Of course, with the outside investment from Microsoft, maybe this is somewhat moot anyways as MSFT definitely has a very strong incentive to get OpenAI to build fast.
Engineers don't control the strategy. If Altman decides to reinvest all free cash flow into growth and safety instead of profits (which is not unusual in tech) the employees can't/won't stop him.
Maybe not, but if as others have mentioned in the thread that there is very high talent density and these are top folks, then surely engineers have some say in the strategy -- if only through mass defection and quitting, right?
The other part that everyone is getting wrong is that OpenAI's future profits are already priced in to the PPUs so employees can sell them today to unlock that value. They don't have to wait.
Their job postings are (were?) certainly...a thing. I can't find the page (maybe I hallucinated it), but I remember reading a line that was essentially "we only want famous ML/AI researchers and engineers, others need not apply". When I read it a few months ago I said "yeah, that makes sense, everyone wants to work for you right now" and closed the page. It looks like they are casting a wider net now, though.
$600K of that is “equity” in a private company. You never know when the company will go public or with what valuation.
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.
There are exceptions right? Stripe isn't public yet I'm pretty sure there are ways to sell the stock that's accrued. I remember something about them opening up a way to sell your shares and since I get pinged on LinkedIn every so often about it I'm assuming it's a thing.
Only at a deep “we buy ugly houses” type of discount and only if the company allows it and if there is a market for it. Like I said earlier, I know the value of my “equity” in a publicly held company:
=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.
> Only at a deep “we buy ugly houses” type of discount and only if the company allows it and if there is a market for it.
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.
If it is “equity” in a private company, any employees can certainly sell that stock to a venture buyer on the secondary market. However the share price will likely be discounted.
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.
They do hire remote in some cases, but normally only for up to a year and only if it's someone they really want. They hope that the person will be willing to move after working there for a year, I guess.
Do you guys know some good companies that offer interesting remote ML jobs? The package is competitive for sure. I don't care that much about the pay, more about interesting stuff.
Same, and the base salaries from their actual job listings were mostly 200-270K per year. Definitely not a bad salary, but not worth it given the cost of SF living.
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.
Is Netflix really that bad? They aggressively state they quickly fire people. But I've also seen reports that their turnover rate is low, and they don't have a PIP culture. It looks to me like people are reasonably happy there for the most part.
Let’s say that I work at another company known for its PIP culture. If I only last 4 years through my initial offer - I both made more than I would have made anywhere else for my skills and experience and now I have that company on my resume. How is that a bad thing assuming I didn’t blow the extra money on coke and strippers.
There’s been a couple times in my career where my income needs were low enough that for one more raise I could afford to hire an assistant. For that kind of money I could hire several. And an apprentice.
I've never looked into their interview process, but considering what they have created I would guess that their coding problems go way beyond leetcode.
Hard part is getting an interview. It helps a lot to know someone already inside, and this is pretty much standard for all companies regardless of prestige.
If you're really well-known, they'll come to you. Otherwise, get an insider referral.
MTS is usually what a recent college graduate gets promoted to, once they've passed their sort of 1 year trial period. You can +/- that timeline about a year, but more or less that's what it is, at least from what I've seen in SF.
The [dead] comment replying to you doesn’t seem to understand that “Staff Engineer” is not typically the same as “Member of the Technical Staff.” Not sure why they had to express that misunderstanding in such a tone. Usually it’s better to approach a situation with curiosity when you don’t know what you’re talking about, rather than anger.
"yes, i produce automated plagiarism which can only function on the backs of exploited Kenyan workers, encodes and furthers every systemic bias imaginable and endangers society -- but at least I am paid well"
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?
Unpopular opinion: OpenAI is severely underpaying these folks at 900k considering so many asset managers / PMs in finance basically hug S&P 500 and get 1.5m+
Another unpopular opinion: If I think about the reasons why asset managers PMs in finance are overpaid, it's because they created elaborate rent seeking structure in society and industry, with disequilibrium in penalty vs reward. Same thing for lawyers in big firms.
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.
Yes, but this is just because tech industry people are far more susceptible to fantasies and bullshit than those in finance. In fact, they seem to largely enjoy the fantasies and bullshit, as this whole AGI rigamarole has shown. They’ll take a pay cut because the enjoy the make-believe over the cold, naked logic of market movements.
Tech people care about money. This whole thread wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s just that they also derive some part of their identities from the cult-like, eschatological fantasies that are very much a part of Silicon Valley culture. By contrast, people in finance would never try to claim that they’re building a god. They already know the only god is money.
It's too bad about their outdated stance on remote work. They could pay $2m and many of the best engineers still wouldn't consider working there on that point alone.
There is little maths to show off "AI skills", then there are many scammers.
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.
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.