I used to think (like 10 years ago) that $100k a year was all the money in the world and I'd be able to own a nice house and drive a nice car in Cali.

Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck.

I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but it's not to the "worry not about money."

$200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest? That person can probably retire early in a few years.

> For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions

I think if your kind of comfortable is needing to clear 500k or million in comp a year then you aren’t not in scrappy startup mode! This is fine but money out the door is money that then needs to get raised in early rounds

I dunno, I do think oxide for basically everyone who joins is asking for them to get pay cuts but I would really hope that people would still at least putting some stuff into savings.

And like … even if the equity is variable if people are getting even a bit of equity, that might end up as something in the end.

Saying this I think with the recent raise the comp could be made higher just to make the buffer even better. There’s definitely an opportunity cost

That heavily depends on where you live and your life situation (young kids? older kids? No kids?).

It's still a class thing. With the CoL in most SWE-heavy metros and the outright war on engineer pricing power over the last few years?

Just about any engineer who isnt independently wealthy is:

- recovering from layoffs and a period of unemployment at a high-COL cost structure

- facing layoffs with the above salients

- facing an imperative to insulate their fucking house with cash for their turn in the above crosshairs

Competence and a willingness to work hard stopped equalling access to basic necessities in November of 2022 - February of 2023, depending on how you count, and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.

"200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.

Exactly. It’s also important to know that they support remote work, so these salaries really are not bad at all. For someone in a non-tech city who doesn’t want to move this would be a great startup job.

My only reservation is that I’ve interviewed with or worked for multiple companies that made some claim about paying everyone the same and there was always some loophole: The company might have a fixed base pay but then use very different equity grants. One company claimed to give everyone the same base comp and equity but then it was discovered that some people were getting huge annual “guaranteed bonuses” that were effectively base compensation. It has left me tired of seeing companies push the idea of everyone being paid the same while not being open about the entire compensation structure.

EDIT: To be 100% clear, I don’t know what Oxide’s entire comp structure looks like. The examples above were for past companies I worked for.

> For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business.

Yeah, I guess I've been lucky to be able to chose daily jobs in the past that basically gives me what you would create outside of work, except I got a fixed payment each month for doing something I really enjoyed. So I never had the need to do that stuff outside of work to derive enjoyment of most of my time, which I guess is my top priority and been most of my life.

That's reasonable, but signalling this to a startup during hiring is going to be a negative. There are three kinds of capital they get to play with, cash, equity, and culture. Cash is the least pliable of the three to them, equity the least liquid, but culture is actually something they can control.

If you have a team full of people who are just there for the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is increasing the paycheck. Which startups can't do in a crunch.

> In my comment above I did not call it a "red flag".

The person I was responding did, you are right that you did not.

> It also dodges the question that keeps getting asked:

This question gets asked in every thread about this, nobody is trying to dodge anything. The equity portion is variable, and the salary is identical. We do not do bonuses.

Fair. At least one of the two should broach it pretty early in the process, and if the other doesn’t then the remaining party should.

For anyone talented and in-demand, there are attractive and unattractive total comp numbers.

If the company and the potential employee are too far apart on those, why should both waste their time on an interview process?

> Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts.

I don't even know if we can.

Yes, you can measure the number of deals signed they called dibs on. But:

1. You don't know if the salesperson earned it, or the whole product. There's a baseline demand driven by the whole company. This is the whole old argument that nobody can prove that ads work; you just can't pinpoint the purchase decision to exposure to an ad. So yeah I guess you can make your salespeople compete against each other and reward the one who stochastically floats to the top while punishing others. Sounds like such a fun workplace, I thought everyone agreed Microsoft's rank system sucked.

2. Several times I have witnessed salespeople selling non-existent, non-planned, functionality and forcing the rest of the company into crunch mode to not have a major client semi-publicly end the contract early. You're often just rewarding the biggest liar while everyone else has to cover up for their shit. Once again, sounds like such a fun workplace.

It comes down to, competitive sales is a cancer, and you're choosing to have it.

> Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts.

This is the fairest form of compensation. It's unfortunate that engineering contribution cannot be measured the same way. If we could engineers would all be getting a nice pay hike.

>, how come sales people are unable to do things for a fixed monthly salary?

You have to separate out 2 different ideas of the "theoretical idealized salesperson that works for fixed salary" -vs- "real-world salesperson that works for variable commissions".

The businesses that have attempted to pay fixed salaries for salespeople end up attracting incompetent salespeople who can't sell. They become a negative cost on the company's payroll because they can't bring in any revenue. In contrast, the high-performance salespeople (the "rainmakers") are attracted to the variable high-commission, because they know they have the hard-to-find skills to actually sell and bring in the money. If a salesperson has the skills to get a customer to sign a contract and pay money, they have the leverage to get a percentage of that.

Developers, db sysadmins, tech support staff, etc are not in situations to directly influence and shake the hand of a new potential customer and convince them to write a check.

Sales works that way in every industry.

A top salesman can make more than the CEO from commission. Many top salespeople have a zero base salary.

The pressure is pretty crazy, though. I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.

It's not that they're unable to; it's that the field attracts people who are financially motivated and other companies have compensation structures that reward personal performance.

Top salespeople generally won't work for a fixed salary because they want to make as much as they can, and the way they do that is by having as much of their compensation tied to personal performance as possible.

I personally think more engineers/developers should think the same way, but it's also much harder to directly tie job performance to compensation when contributing to a product.

Sales is unique because the monetary benefit to the company is mostly objective: If someone closes a $10 million sales contract, that becomes $10 million in revenue.

If a team of developers work together to fix a bug, how would you calculate the revenue value of the bug and how would you distribute that to the team that solved it? Technically the value of a bug is negative because it costs the company, so do you subtract that from the pay of the engineers he worked on it? If 5 people implement a feature that uses a library developed by 5 other people, which was built on the platform team's infrastructure, how do you divide up the commission? It doesn't work.

Because sales are quantifiable and directly mapped to performance.

To get that kind of proportional payback in engineering you'd need very clear financial objectives for a project. I could see that happening in optimization scenarios where consultants are brought in and get paid for whatever they can trim from operational costs.

> How come it works for basically every other job on this planet?

In sales it is uniquely easy to identify your contribution since it's literally measured in dollars coming in.

There's no way to quantify that for feature implemented/bug fixed, it would devolve into endless politics.

> how come sales people are unable to do things for a fixed monthly salary?

Sure they are able, but no good sales person is interested. Presumably you'd want to hire the good ones. You can certainly staff a mediocre sales team on a fixed salary, they just won't do much selling.

Freelancers and consultants do absolutely have the option to get paid by the feature. It’s exceedingly rare for internal employees or contract employees though. That means there’s no market competition based on it yet. Some places do have bonuses or even profit sharing. Some senior ICs and many managers across the industry can get equity through either grants or options.

Sales professionals have a lot of different places they can sell things. The market-rate compensation for sales includes commissions. So to get the best sales people, you want something easy and exciting to sell with a good commission structure tied to the sales.

No, it's just how sales works, it's almost always on commission.

Ask a local real estate agent or real estate broker how much base pay they make. Or, heck, a car salesperson or an ad salesperson at your local TV or radio station. It’s all commission-based. In some of these fields in the US the norm is 100% commission-based with no base pay. In others someone might make one to three times minimum wage, but will end up being some of the highest-paid people in the company based on commissions of anywhere from 1% to 50%, depending on the industry.

Sales has been commission-based everywhere I’ve worked, including companies based in other countries.

Commission based sales was definitely not a Silicon Valley invention.

One famous example is Igalia, doing Open Source consulting for various companies, including Google, Apple, and others.

They're a worker owned co-op and have grown very nicely over the years.

Agriculture has a lot, utility services including fiber internet, electrical, and natural gas, many credit unions, there are a few retail stores like REI, mutual insurances, a number of pharmacies and homecare and other health services are co-op, many other worker co-ops, and there are a decent number of housing co-ops. Other than maybe a few rural fiber co-ops most are not super fast growing businesses, and they lack attention seeking rich owners, so they don't get a lot of attention, but co-ops as a whole has steadily gained more market presence nearly across the board over the decades.

There is no mysticism in incentive structures. My point was rather that if you provide strictly below market compensation (as most startup equity is positioned these days). You are likely to get below average talent, or below average results from poor incentives.