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But ~$500K is the market rate right now. Several people I know got that amount at Google, Facebook, and Oracle here in Seattle with ~10 years experience in clou

But ~$500K is the market rate right now. Several people I know got that amount at Google, Facebook, and Oracle here in Seattle with ~10 years experience in cloud or AI/ML. Amazon’s stock increase has inflated the market rates because other companies had to pay so much in the last 3 years for people to leave Amazon. Obviously there’s no guarantee that this will last forever, but I was pretty confident I would have continued to make $500K/year as long as the market conditions remained the same. I also had enough unvested RSUs until end of 2020 to make that much.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
I understand what you are saying, and when you sell stock that vests it is completely reasonable to count it as income as it shows up on your W2. My point was that just prior to the dot com crash I had over $6M in "RSUs" (well restricted stock which was a better deal since the number can't be fudged but what ever) and when it "vested" it was worth less than $12K. It showed up on my W2 because I used an 83b election to vest it all up front (and get in on a lower tax rate when it unlocked) only to have it generate losses when it unlocked. Where I was going was that there is 'base pay' which you are going to get if you show up every day and don't get fired, and there is 'variable pay' which can come in the format of annual bonuses and or vesting equity. The annual bonuses tend to be something of a beauty contest and so can be hard to predict, and the market can swing wildly (hopefully nobody with RSUs today has to experience a 99.9% drop in value that I did during the dot com crash but it can happen, you could have had Theranos RSUs for example). The original author went out of their way to stick with just base pay and I understood their reasons for doing so as I largely agree with them on the lack of predictability of other remuneration options.
- DVassallo 8y ago
  At these levels it's all variable since practically all compensation is in stock. If you're not good enough to be given stock, you'll likely get fired. Everyone's base at Amazon is capped at $160K, including the CEO and the execs making $20M/year. When the stock dipped from $400 to $290 in 2014, Amazon topped us up mid-year to make up for the shortfall. Otherwise people would have left. Obviously if another bubble/recession like 2001 or 2008 happened again, the whole market would likely shrink and people would get less RSUs and they would be worth less. But they'd have to settle for that since the opportunities elsewhere would also presumably go away.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I understand what you are saying, and when you sell stock that vests it is completely reasonable to count it as income as it shows up on your W2. My point was that just prior to the dot com crash I had over $6M in "RSUs" (well restricted stock which was a better deal since the number can't be fudged but what ever) and when it "vested" it was worth less than $12K. It showed up on my W2 because I used an 83b election to vest it all up front (and get in on a lower tax rate when it unlocked) only to have it generate losses when it unlocked. Where I was going was that there is 'base pay' which you are going to get if you show up every day and don't get fired, and there is 'variable pay' which can come in the format of annual bonuses and or vesting equity. The annual bonuses tend to be something of a beauty contest and so can be hard to predict, and the market can swing wildly (hopefully nobody with RSUs today has to experience a 99.9% drop in value that I did during the dot com crash but it can happen, you could have had Theranos RSUs for example). The original author went out of their way to stick with just base pay and I understood their reasons for doing so as I largely agree with them on the lack of predictability of other remuneration options.

DVassallo 8y ago
At these levels it's all variable since practically all compensation is in stock. If you're not good enough to be given stock, you'll likely get fired. Everyone's base at Amazon is capped at $160K, including the CEO and the execs making $20M/year. When the stock dipped from $400 to $290 in 2014, Amazon topped us up mid-year to make up for the shortfall. Otherwise people would have left. Obviously if another bubble/recession like 2001 or 2008 happened again, the whole market would likely shrink and people would get less RSUs and they would be worth less. But they'd have to settle for that since the opportunities elsewhere would also presumably go away.