Compensation Q&A and Videos

Right now I am helping out at a startup with 0 revenue. It's a fun group to work with, hence I am helping them out.

There's a CEO and CTO. CEO has been working on it for 1.5 years, CTO for like half a year. I have just started out for about a month. The company has 0 revenue and 0 investors yet. CEO is just giving a projection of equity sharing. There might be a CMO joining soon.

CEO is suggesting following equity share:

• Founder 1: Himself 57%
• Founder 2: CTO 16%
• Soon to be Founder 3: CMO 8%
• Investors Seed / Series A: 13 %
• Options Pool: 5%

I am like the first developer, and he's suggesting like 0.5% of the option pool. They claim it to be a fair amount since he and CTO have made way more sacrifice so far. Right now I make sacrifices too. I am spending my nights and time in my weekend on it without any pay. And I don't have the knowledge of CMO.

I don't know much about reasonable percentage for this kind of stuff it's new to me.

But right now we're not getting any profit and I am sacrificing nights and time in the weekend on the project so I think it would be fair for founder 1 and 2 to give me some of their percentage and give me like approximately 10% or something.

So far it's been fun: Thinking if things go well, we can all become millionaires. But this 0.5% percentage doesn't fit in with that. It's a rather demotivating percentage.

Hi All, I have a question on competing offers. Do recruiters ask to show the competing offer email or letters when I negotiate? I read it is not legal to ask for it or ask for the previous salary. I wanted to find out more on this, do they ask for more details of competing offers and should I plan to show any details for that?  Also, would you mind sharing your experience on how you handled negotiation when trying to switch teams within the same company and negotiating a better salary within same company with an competing offer from outside the company. Thank you!

Hi all,

In the next couple days (2-3 days) will be the deadline for my current job offer (let's call it "Company 1"). I already asked them for extension twice and they said next Monday (02/12) would be the final date and the offer cannot be extended further. The best thing about this offer is the company is fully remote, but it's a startup with unknown plan for IPO.

There is another company (publicly-traded company - let's call it "Company 2") that I already finished the interview with good feedbacks, but HR told me the hiring manager literally interviewed me as the very first candidate and would want to have 2 more weeks to interview other candidates too, but I'm in the pipeline for consideration.

Should I accept the offer from "Company 1" (the startup above)? WLB seems to be better than the "Company 2". Both companies offer "Unlimited PTO" (for better or worse) but at least the 1st is fully remote.

For comp number, the publicly-traded "Company 2" definitely has higher total comp and their stock is skyrocketing in the market right now. "Company 1" has higher base salary but paper stocks.

I wonder if the hiring manager for "Company 2" is interviewing further, does that mean my positive feedback was good but not great? Should I keep interviewing or just accepting 1st offer? Any thoughts on what to do next?

From what I have heard so far, Staff is: The person needs to be technically very sound, guide the folks, find projects, carve solutions, and lead without authority.

Engineering managers on other hand: Would work these folks to approve/disapprove these projects, get resources, manage the people (promotions, growth of team - product as well as people).

From this I derive that managerial role is subset of staff + people management. But I am sure I am missing something, what am I missing? Why do people choose to be staff over manager, expect for passion to stay IC (not manage people)? Also, is there a pay difference?

My question is: since I work for a big tech company, does the company pay the tax for my vested shares, or do I?

Do you guys have any resources that could help with this? I am worry about the the tax liability aspect. As well should I talk to a CPA to be safe in my decision.

Hi Taro community,

Seeking your help in evaluating two offers that I received from two start-up companies.

• (1) In general, in such situations how do you suggest researching about the companies and determining which company and offer is better.
• (2) I am also concerned how my future job potential will be affected and so I want to take the decision accordingly.
  (3) In this particular case, my offers are as follows,
• company A
  • Unicorn (post money valuation: $1B-$10B), Industry: Ad Tech (ML and cloud infra based), Last funding type: Series C, Total funding amount: $190M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2013 by ex-googler,
  • I have seen several folks joined from FAANG companies (eg, Google)
  • Offer: base $160K, bonus: 24K, Equity: $88K (not sellable now, but the company is expecting to go for IPO in one year)
• company B
  • Emerging Unicorn (post money valuation: $500M-$1B), Industry: Healthcare/AI, Last funding type: Series B, Total funding amount: $120M, Estimated revenue range: $1M - $10M, Founded in 2017
  • Among big techs, I have found just one person from AWS who joined this company
  • offer: base $190K, no bonus, Equity: 114K (not sellable now, the company is expecting to go for IPO in 2-4 years). I may be able to negotiate this offer.

Thanks in advance for any kind of suggestions/comments.

Hi, I was wondering how you deal with constantly changing stock prices from the company you work at. I saw a video from @Rahul where he talked about the mistake to check stock prices at the beginning of each day or something. Not sure anymore where he said it. @Rahul @Alex I was wondering how you dealt with your stocks constantly changing in value.

I've been experimenting with Big Tech stocks and find myself constantly looking at them. I wonder how people in Big Tech deal with that with the stocks they receive from the company. Do they sell when they think it's going bad and turn it into cash, or just keep them for the long run? How often do they check their stocks? How to they deal with the constantly fluctuating prices?

If you joined Meta at the end of 2022, 1.5 years ago, your equity grant has seen a 4x increase 🤯 So a Staff Engineer with a $800K equity grant over 4 years is sitting on $3.2M. Obviously, very few people get this lucky, but Big Tech is pretty reliable in creating millionaires.

I'm very tempted to sell my remaining Meta stock holdings now... (I joined in 2017 with a stock price of $170/share).

I'm contemplating moving from Canada to the US, hoping to secure a Staff role. My sole reason is money but I do not want to sacrifice work-life balance or mental health for that. A few extra hours of work each week in the initial few months of transition are expected and acceptable.

1. Is it a pipe dream to expect work-life balance at Staff+ roles that pay $0.5mil/year?
2. How stressful are these roles? I understand that ability to handle stress varies by individual, but it speaks volumes if most folks at Staff+ roles feel very stressed.

Context:

• Opportunity:- A month ago, I interviewed at a recently IPO'd startup for a senior SWE position and did well.
• Uplevelling:- The interviews apparently went so well that they suggested I was a good fit for a staff SWE position on the team and made a verbal offer for that.
• Subsequent Downlevelling:- The actual offer was delayed by 2-3 weeks only for the final offer to be a senior SWE offer.
• Compenstion Issue:- The final offer is a bit (~10%) lower than all my current offers on all compensation components (cash, stock, sign on). Also, I'm still awaiting a couple of more offers that could be even better paying ones.
• Recruiter Constraints:- The recruiter stated that this is the best offer they can do for the senior SWE level. This might be true given the ranges available on Glassdoor but I'm not too sure since there was only 1 data point available.
• My Opinions:- I really liked the team, the manager and the kind of work for this opportunity. But I don't want to leave out on a meaningful amount of money being offered by other opportunities.

Questions:-

• Assuming that the offer is genuinely at the top range, can I still attempt to negotiate given that the team believed I'm suitable for a staff SWE uplevelling?
• If I should negotiate, how do I approach it given that they've stated it's the best they can do?
• Do companies offer compensation beyond the high-senior SWE but below the low-staff SWE ranges to good candidates?

Hi folks, I need your help to understand if any action can be taken from my side here.

I gave Stripe interviews recently for SSE (Bangalore) and here is the feedback I received.

Round1 (LLD) - Strong yes

Round2 (Bug Squash) - No

Round3 (Integration Round) - yes

Round4 (Systems Design) - Strong yes

Round5 (Manager Round) - yes

I am aligned with this feedback except Round 2 (Bug Squash). I thought I had a strong yes in that. I was very easily able to navigate the code, find out the bug, fix it, and explain it. We were left with 15 more minutes so she gave me another bug to solve. I reached halfway on that, was able to partially figure out the bug. Didn't solve it but I think the expectation is to solve just one bug.

I have communicated the above with HR with a positive outlook.

Also, I felt that the interviewer wasn't very present and interested from the beginning so I think that the interviewer hasn't given much thought to this.

Current status: They have sent the case to the hiring committee for SSE but the HR mentioned that I might get downleveled. But I have been pretty vocal that I want to be considered for SSE only. Another factor she mentioned is I have a borderline work ex of 5.5/6 years so that might also contribute to this.

I asked the HR if I could reinterview for this round but she mentioned that's not possible and is not part of company policy.

Anything that I can do here?

I'm a software engineer with a few years of experience. I can choose to join a Big Tech company or a well-backed Series A startup.

What's a reasonable ask for the salary when negotiating with the startup? In percentage terms, how much lower salary can I expect at a startup compared to Big Tech?

Of course, I expect to receive equity/stock options at the startup.

Hi, I am at the team match stage at meta for E4 (MLE) role at the bay area loc. What could be a decent TC range (checked levels, I know avg is around 300k?)?

Also, how could I maximize it considering I don’t have a competing FAANG level offer at the moment, but I do have an offer from a tier 2 company of ML in terms of comp? note, I believe I did pretty well in all the interview rounds, the team I am hoping to join has a member who was my labmate in my Phd group and recommended me to the hiring manager, who is quite interested to hire me (as mentioned by the hm himself). Furthermore, I already have my green card, so the company doesn’t need to spend for my immigration. How (if at all) can I leverage these to negotiate?

I have looked at Taro's course on , but looking for more case-specific suggestions, thanks in advance.

I recently got an offer for a senior SWE backend role.

A little about my background: Sr backend SWE, 8 yrs of experience

Offer:

• Big city in the Midwest
• 190k base
• 152k RSU (38k a yr)
• 12k bonus flat (they don't do performance bonuses)
• 3 days a week hybrid
• unlimited pto

Total: 240k TC

I was told the base goes up to 225k pre-offer so I'm thinking of asking how we can bridge the gap or land somewhere in between. Planning on using the no-performance bonus as a talking point to get more base pay. Overall my interview performances were definitely strong from my perspective. Company and role-wise everything lines up for what I'm looking for in my career. The initial offer exceeds my expectations but I definitely want to maximize my comp.

Any recommendations or tips?