> Yes, I would much rather get more cash than a bunch of... benefits I have to manually keep track of and optimize. I've worked at a few large financial instit

> Yes, I would much rather get more cash than a bunch of... benefits I have to manually keep track of and optimize. I've worked at a few large financial institutions that pay technical employees significantly below market rate, but aggressively and publicly boast about how competitive they are because of "total compensation". It's absurd, and often results in large dysfunctional teams where they have to hire 10+ junior people, for ~60k each, because they're unwilling to hire 1-2 experienced people, for ~150k each.