Item — HN Reader

My 2 cents as a Zellenial:

1. I've spent an hour trying to find this survey but cannot. My hunch is it's an online survey with questionable reproducibility (especially after looking at similar research produced by Clever)

2. I'm not too surprised by my college aged peers overestimataing average starting salaries. With the increase in CS/ECE students and a relatively small but vocal minority talking about 200K TC out of college, the rest of us assume assume this is a common entry level salary, when in reality compensation is well below that (on a separate note - I HATE the TC designation. that 200k TC is more like 140k/year when you factor in vesting). Heck, the CS program I went to is one of the best programs in the world and even they vocalized that their AVERAGE starting salary was in the 80-90k range, yet most of my peers never realized this.

3 comments

For public companies with monthly vesting without a cliff (FB, Goog), TC is actually a good model for what the company deposits in your bank account at the end of the month.

For private startups, it's obviously a less good measure both because you don't get the incremental liquidity over the course of the year and also because even when you get that big chunk of shares at the end of the year, it isn't liquid.

An interesting middle case is public companies that have a 1 year cliff. I've heard Amazon has this. Anyone care to chime in about how TC is calculated there?

When NCGs say "TC" (or at least the NCGs I've interacted with) they calculate it as Base_Salary+Total_Equity_Grant, when in reality it should be Base_Salary+(Total_Equity_Grant/Vesting). I've seen a couple experienced (10+ YoE) people do the same mistake as well, but this is all anecdotal of course

TC does factor in vesting, at least in typical form. It does assume you at least last the year, though.

What it isn't is recurring, though. At the same time, recurring pay is also inaccurate especially for junior roles since many companies L3 - L5 (Google definitions) equivalent are mandatory within certain time frames, eg up level or be fired.

> I HATE the TC designation. that 200k TC is more like 140k/year when you factor in vesting

Can you explain this calculation?

He’s saying 60k of the compensation is equity and other fringe benefits

Startup equity can be completely worthless, but shares of Apple/Google? Seems pretty solid...

NCGs at Apple are hourly their first year (not sure if they are granted stock on date of hiring w/ a 1 year cliff or if it's granted after the probationary period), and Google has unoffically stopped hiring NCGs w/ stock (almost every single NCG at Google I know who's been recruited since 2018 has been recruited through the ER program)

Yep! Exactly this! Apparently I need coffee to be coherent!

What's wrong with 60k of equity each year? Most engineers are Google are vesting their equity monthly, so if they sell it into the open market immediately it's as good as salary.