That's true, but I still consider 3-6mos emergency fund to be a basic necessity, since living in the startup world you never know when you may need to use it.

A while back I interviewed for a startup that was asking me to work from 6am to 8pm for about 75% of what I make right now working regular 9-5 at a different startup. It was super early stage so that level of commitment was understandable but I can't imagine very many engineers with families willing to take that much of a paycut. But that's the name of the game, right? When you're early stage you can't afford to pay much but you need your product done yesterday. Thats probably why most startups fail. Cheap quality talent is hard to come by, at least stateside. Offshore developers can be cheap and amazing (someone living in India making $100k USD would probably be considered royalty) but if you don't have someone from that part of the world to vet the devs it could end up being more expensive in the long run.

That's fair. I think what I'm trying to get at is that the typical suggested middle class American budget is exactly that — save a bit for emergency fund, save a bit for buying a house / home repairs, save a bit for an annual vacation. Maybe not giving money to family, but charity in general. Considering that a middle class family in CA would not be able to do all of these. I don't think I'm commenting on the salary itself; rather, the cost of maintaining status quo is rapidly outpacing middle class. A teacher on a middle class salary would be able to do all of these on a single income just a few decades ago. I shouldn't need to earn triple the median income to do that.

Nothing about a remote gig in one job affects the imperstives I highlighted about past layoffs or future uncertainty: pricing relocation into or out of e.g. SFBA at zero is another conversational gambit popular with the out-of-touch. You don't teleport.

It's bad generally, this is a terrible time to be a working person in general. How SWEs stack up against profession X? Depends on profession X.

SWEs are in a job market where a bunch of folks who have been repeatedly prosecuted for wage fixing (most successfully/recently in 2012) are taking another swing at it in a much more lawless regime. That's as precarious as it gets when this cabal monopolizes the front row at the Inaugeration.

My issue isn't with Oxide's comp steucture which I neither understand nor care about.

My issue is with made-for-life, self-appointed elder statesmen on HN saying anything at all about other people's finances and imperatives from the comfort of a study in whatever isyllic community they're pontificating from.

Just, be grateful, and say nothing.

Focusing on the raw dollar amount is a red-herring that always comes up in these conversations. 200k is plenty! is a sleight of hand. If I am building something with 10s of millions of value and you give me 200k and expect me to shut up cause it's plenty, you are deceiving me, full stop.

The "we all get paid the same" is a dishonest by omission. They don't all get paid the same, and while the peanut gallery may think so, I sure as hell don't think the IRS thinks the same way.

I personally don't really care what they pay their engineers, but to pretend to have this egalitarian approach to compensation and then hide the equity numbers is dishonest.

> Salary is identical, equity is not.

Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an answer for.

Bonuses are bullshit. When the first startup I worked for was acquired they asked everybody to basically agree they won't quit for a period of time - transition. Fair enough. However for the ordinary staff (like me) this agreement had no actual carrot, they're offering a so-called "Bonus scheme", but it's clearly designed so that they decide what it pays, whereas execs are getting an up-front specific financial inducement to stay. So I explain to colleagues that if you might want to quit you should not sign, the "bonus" is worthless but you're locked in by signing - however I did get some pushback from people who could not see this or haven't done this before.

Sure enough when that bonus was due to pay out, I got a heads up from a friend (who was being compensated because he was like CTO or something) that it was worthless, because of course they get to pick the numbers so they're going to pick zero. I don't care, because I was on a different scheme and anyway I work for salary, if you want to pay me to do something, you can pay me, don't fuck about with nonsense about a "bonus", but some people ended up stuck for a year or two believing they're getting a bonus to wait.

It's bullshit to talk about salary equality as though that mattered when equity is the real upside, and you know it. The claim to strive for a "generational company" is just "we're a family here" in other terms. Congrats on the raise.

I mean it's not smoke and mirrors, when I'm picking between jobs I'm strongly considering the people I'm spending 35-40% of my waking hours interacting with. If I cared solely about maximizing personal returns I wouldn't work for startups.