This is true in the abstract, but we're talking about a salary of $207,264 in this case. You don't need to be independently wealthy to make it on our salary.
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.
They’re a remote company. They’re not targeting HCOL metros.
> and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
> "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.
Claiming that $200k is not enough to live on is rich-guy talk. The majority of the country lives on well below $200K.
I agree that a single person living in a HCOL metro like SF Bay Area would not find this compensation attractive, but that person also has nearly infinite other jobs to choose from nearby.
Jobs like this (remote work for interesting startup) do not need to pay HCOL comp.
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.
> 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.
I think this is missing the point.
The target audience for remote jobs that pay $200K does not overlap with the target audience of people interested in working in SFBA at FAANG-level compensation.
If someone is interested in relocating to SFBA, they should do that and get a job there.
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.
That's not what I said, you know that's not what I said. I said people who talk like that on HN are doing so from an unrelated personal experience.
This sub-thread is about the habits of speech that make a certain breed of armchair public policy economist jump out like a lump on plate glass. Get Patek in here and we could start a convention.
Fair enough, this is a topic with a high and asymmetrical charge quotient and misunderstandings are a fact of life in such.
I also regret any degree to which I've singled you out for a generally regrettable trend among the long-time community members: it's very easy to see the world through the lens of one's own experience and I've been as guilty as anyone of doing just that on plenty of occasions.
We should all strive for empathy and understanding, that goes double for people like you and me (and Thomas) who have been around forever.
Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things. Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It’s not poverty wages!
“I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I’m passionate about” is such a normal thing that everyone serious I know in this industry says. Or like… even just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there’s a reason online casinos pay their software engineers so much!). Not everyone makes the choice (and I get people saying no) and but in a sense I gotta imagine it’s part of the calculus for making it work. “We won’t have to pay people half a mil in total comp like meta has to, because the mission is more straightforward”. I feel like an O&F ep mentioning someone from intel expecting _triple_ the comp. 600k!
And like… people saying it’s not enough and talking about equity. You’re not paying rent with equity!
Signed: a guy who was at a small startup and who would have been very happy with the inflation/CoL equivalent of 200k instead of what I had those early leaner years
At one point “joining the scrappy startup” does involve some scrappiness. Otherwise you’re just working in a division of Google that hasn’t been integrated into the borg yet.
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.
In other threads, the voice of HN tells us to consider equity in a startup as worthless and only ever count on base salary.
Here we instead hear that equity is as important as the air we breathe.
Yes, 200k is not life changing but at least it’s not pretending to be, like many other inflated equity schemes that never vest. It’s just an honest decent salary, better than what you can find in many places of the world.
Note that according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 200k in 2025 is equivalent to about 160k in 2020 when the pandemic began, and 160k would've been on the low end for an experienced software engineer at a Series A or B startup at that time, in the SF Bay Area.
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.
We have salary and equity, no bonuses. Salary is identical, equity is not. I certainly agree with you that that kind of shenanigans can be annoying; I had a former employer who hired people with "oh it's a bonus but you always get 100% of it" and then, we did not get 100% of it.
Because if you want to poach talent then you'll likely need to induce them to leave their existing employer and will need to match their existing equity grants that might soon vest.
Obviously that number is different for different people.
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 think there are tremendous benefits to having a flat salary structure, regardless of upside. My other friends in tech are envious of the lack of having to waste time doing perf, for example.
From your perspective of course it has benefits. From mine? Getting stack ranked wasn't even in my top 10 as concerns went, but I'm really good at my job, and I keep quality notes that make it easy to recap a quarter or half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.) I don't really see what that has to do with focusing your rhetoric on 10% of startup comp as though it were 100% - especially now that your tax discount on cash comp has been restored! - but you're welcome, of course.
> I keep quality notes that make it easy to recap a quarter or half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.)
The point is not that my friends don't do a good job, the point is that this is work that does not actually further the organization's goals directly, but is necessary in order to keep their job. They'd rather be doing the actual work they are hired to do.
Oh, come on. Administrative overhead is a reality of business everywhere and at every level; the idea that to manage an organization somehow necessarily impairs it is absurd. So is purporting falsely to eliminate that overhead on behalf of others, when basic professional competence instead involves for oneself learning to minimize it - to dispose of it, not by panicking or catastrophizing or sweeping it under a rug, but instead in a fashion such as that I described ie efficiently. To claim otherwise is infantilizing nonsense. It's fundamentally dishonest, though I grant you probably have never before so directly been told as much.
I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just doesn't exist here.
By the way, I received every rating from Greatly Exceeds (including an additional equity grant) down to Meets Most, and the rating I got overall had very little correlation with either effort or impact. I got Meets Most for some of the most valuable and industry-impactful work I've done in my career, and Greatly Exceeds for something that got replaced in a year.
>I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just doesn't exist here.
The culture difference between Meta and any startup will be night and day. People who are self interested min-maxxers don't join startups. Not dealing with "corporate politics" has to be in the top 5 reasons anyone leaves FAANG to join a startup. That has nothing to do with Oxide's comp structure.
> People who are self interested min-maxxers don't join startups. Not dealing with "corporate politics" has to be in the top 5 reasons...
Oh, sure! Now tell me another one. The idea that startups don't have politics is - well, I'll say it is extremely comedic, and we'll leave it at that.
Think about it for a minute. I'm not questioning the existence of the pipeline here described, and no one is questioning the existence of many pressing reasons for anyone at the FAANG "top of funnel" to want to flow along that pipeline about as quickly as is achievable.
But those "reasons" have effects on the people who experience them, because humans have emotions and psychologies and other such inconvenient externalities, and for like cause those effects are not instantly and perfectly ameliorated in every case by a simple change of environment.
Can you not straightforwardly see how this might produce some extremely adverse results, in a social and sociological sense? And how overt, documented, attributable, and discoverable personnel processes, far from some unreasonable burden, might serve a broadly beneficial role in such circumstances?
This is a reasonable argument. But look, I have my views based on my experiences and things I've heard from colleagues and friends, and you have yours.
Well, sure. That's Meta, the model for much of the industry, where that isn't the likewise and just as deservedly infamous Amazon. So when you say Oxide is better, I'm sure I can believe you that it is, but can you see why that still might not convince? It's like if I say I'd rather be beaten than stabbed. Obviously this is the sensible choice to make among the selection given, but still the question might reasonably be asked: can there really be no third option?
The issue is, you're speaking from the position of the organization itself. Yes, staff work is just as important as line work. The issue with perf isn't that it's staff work, it's that people who are ostensibly hired to do line work are forced to do staff work just to keep their jobs. And sure, you can argue "tough, that's just life," but it's not hard to see why people resent it. They want to be writing code, not putting together promo packets.
Anyway this is mostly just one example, it's just one that comes up often when I speak with my peers about how Oxide works vs other companies.
I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish to do so. Why should I not seek involvement in staff work that determines so much of my future? Why should I not make myself responsible for the conduct of the business within the scope of my role, rather than just the parts which I happen to like and enjoy?
And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide, I really can't see how I'm meant to take any of what you're saying at face value. Instead it seems something much akin to "don't worry your clever little head about the boring ol' money stuff, darlin'! Don't you trust me to take good care of you?"
> I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish to do so.
Okay, sure. I am also not a "I only want to put my head down and code" person either.
> And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide,
Not formally, no. Because there are no levels, no corresponding salary bands, there's no need to have a formal process, with all of the justification work that has to go in from the employee, and all of the reading and evaluating all of that stuff from management.
It is true that if you don't do your job, you'll be let go. However, that's a conversation that would happen between you and Bryan/Steve, not an annual or quarterly process with all of the paperwork and such that those formal processes demand.
Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our salary.
It sounds like it isn't an environment for you, and that's okay.
> Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our salary.
And some of "us" have an ownership stake, and some of "us" do not. But "we" like to talk about how everyone's working on a level playing field, anyway.
You're quite right. It isn't an environment for me.
The clarification is welcome, inasmuch at least as it's good to know there are no missing grants. It doesn't really surprise to hear some are larger than others, which is invariably the case, usually by one or two orders of magnitude. I assume you're satisfied with yours.
I wouldn't wish to be taken as saying no employee is ever more valuable to the business than another. That would also be absurd. What I don't understand is why all the circumlocution.
I'm good enough at my job to see that when it's happening. That's one reason why I didn't say 'I think.' Another is because I know the way to bet is that, with this weapon forbidden, others will be found to replace it. Why go into any of that without even the promise of hazard pay? I'd rather just do honest work.
