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$900k Median Package for Engineers at OpenAI
- kappi 3y ago[flagged]
- zuhayeer 3y agoInstead of traditional equity, OpenAI issues PPUs which represent a share of the profits. More details on how it works here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
- almost_usual 3y ago> It’s important to reiterate that the PPUs inherently are not redeemable for value if OpenAI does not turn a profit. That said, there are investors that have been willing to pay for these PPUs and that’s where the value being told to candidates is derived from. > In conversations with recruiters we’ve heard from some candidates that OpenAI is communicating that they don’t expect to turn a profit until they reach their mission of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As with any startup, there are risks associated with equity and it’s important to consider the possibility that equity can be worth nothing. This is weird. They don’t expect to be profitable until AGI exists? Does the monetary system we have today even matter at that point?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- wmf 3y agoIf OpenAI has a monopoly on AGI within the current neoliberal capitalist framework they'll make trillions before the system collapses. It's like Aramco but bigger.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- almost_usual 3y agoWhich still sucks for PPUs because growth is capped 10x.
- boeingUH60 3y ago> The tax filings also reveal previously unreported details about one of the most valuable and well-known technology ventures operating today, including the level of investment by Reid Hoffman, free Teslas for early OpenAI engineers and the skyrocketing computing bill that may have prompted it to take a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/elon-musk-used-to-say-he-put-100m-in-openai-but-now-its-50m-here-are-the-receipts/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/elon-musk-used-to-say-he-p...
- wmf 3y agoA ~$100K signing bonus sounds kind of small for someone making $900K per year.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- almost_usual 3y agoBecause the PPU equity isn’t worth anything until they’re profitable.
- totallywrong 3y agoA 100k _signing_ bonus isn't small by any measure whatsoever.
- tehcheat418 3y agoWhat about CEO pay?
- bafe 3y agoA signing bonus the size of an average software engineer salary here...and I'm in a very wealthy country
- xboxnolifes 3y agoHow? It's over 10% of the yearly salary. That seems in-line if not better than most signing bonuses I've seen.
- rs999gti 3y ago300k salary + 600k stock
- almost_usual 3y agoNot stock PPUs which are only worth anything if they turn a profit and according to OpenAI that isn’t happening until AGI. https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
- kojeovo 3y agoWonder if we'll see many IPOs from any companies not turning a profit anytime soon
- wmf 3y agoOpenAI PPUs are no different than stock in a growing-but-unprofitable company like old Amazon. You don't have to wait for dividends; you can sell your PPUs to speculators who expect returns in the future.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- scarface_74 3y agoIt’s completely different. I can sell my RSUs in AMZN as soon as they vest on the public market at market price.
- wmf 3y agoFor pre-IPO companies you have things like SecondMarket.
- 3y ago
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoOther companies nickel and diming engineers think they are somehow getting something for free. All the highest performing companies in the world pay insane amounts to their programmers
- jdm2212 3y agoPaying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoRight you are correct. But true talent on any random team is easily worth 3x the average salary on that team. Im speaking about programmers here
- borroka 3y agoThe "real talent" is worth nx of the average salary when the work of the real talent makes the company better. If one (“talent") is a stellar runner, but when the team goes on a run the "talent" has to wait for their teammates to get to the finish line, most of whom go running once every two months, and the "talent" gets dress shoes instead of spikes etc., the "real talent" is worth, to the team or company, as much as the average employee on that team. An easy and naïve recommendation would be to remove the constraints that limit the work of talent, but it is much easier for talent to move to organizations that, for a variety of reasons, are more conducive to the expression of their abilities than to fight the inertia of organizations. Those very organizations which, for one reason or another, have existed for a long time and pay salaries to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoNo even on a highly paid team of engineers making 250-400k, half of them are actively producing technical debt. One good engineer can replace 2, and then leave the code base simpler and more maintainable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- marcopicentini 3y agoIt’s incredible that in some part of the world the programmers are called “nerds” but in San Francisco are millionaires.
- SCUSKU 3y agoThey're not mutually exclusive, I embrace the term, albeit I'm not a millionaire!
- locusofself 3y agomore like tens or hundreds of millions-aires
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nomilk 3y agoSam Altman said something to the effect of 'OpenAI has the highest talent density of any company'. OpenAI is modest in employee count and extreme in employee talent, with its employees rewarded commensurately.
- Solvency 3y agoCan we define talent. Also context matters. Some companies have lower "talent density" because their size requires some level of operational headcount.
- ericlewis 3y agoI know more than half a dozen extremely top of their field for sure engineers who work there. Even having them would be an insane concentration of talent imo.
- poisonborz 3y agoTalent is not universal though. A great product/team/workplace can turn unmotivated middling knowledge people into heroes. Not only is massively more worth to raise talent in-house, heterogenous teams are way more healthy. Early Googlers wrote litanies on this. They can pay it, it sounds good for investors/general public, but if you take away the brand/hype fapping on "we only have the best" would sounds like a red flag to an experienced engineer.
- IshKebab 3y agoMaybe for its size but I bet there are lots of smaller companies with higher talent density, e.g. Oxide Computer.
- giantg2 3y agoIt's always interesting to think about how someone somewhere is earning as much as you earn in a decade or lifetime in a single year. Also that you are that person for someone else.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI find it interesting too. Also interesting to see how I measure with regard to my parents.
- antisthenes 3y agoIs it interesting? I am that person for myself, for my first year in the workforce. I am also that person for myself when I was studying in college. I think it is only interesting in the case when you are performing the exact same job, and yet the compensation varies by an order of magnitude or more.
- rr808 3y agoI think the point is people earning $8/hr 40 hrs/wk 40 years = $665k total for a lifetime's work. Of course most people in the world earn much less than this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Solvency 3y agoWhat I find more interesting is this: A sole proprietor landscaper making $45-50K a year in California is paying $675 a year in annual registration fees just to keep his newish pickup truck on the road. Why newish? Because the people he's servicing trust a guy with a nicer work vehicle than a beaten down 30 year old Tacoma. A $900k developer with the same pickup is also paying $675 a year. Extrapolate this seemingly trivial example across literally EVERYTHING in life.
- weaksauce 3y ago
- sidcool 3y agoIsn't it for member of technical staff? It's a high level position.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoIs it? At some companies that’s the baseline title for engineers, data scientists etc.
- jedberg 3y agoEveryone is a member of technical staff.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asimpletune 3y agoMTS is usually what a recent college graduate gets promoted to, once they've passed their sort of 1 year trial period. You can +/- that timeline about a year, but more or less that's what it is, at least from what I've seen in SF.
- sieabahlpark 3y ago[dead]
- seattle_spring 3y agoThe [dead] comment replying to you doesn’t seem to understand that “Staff Engineer” is not typically the same as “Member of the Technical Staff.” Not sure why they had to express that misunderstanding in such a tone. Usually it’s better to approach a situation with curiosity when you don’t know what you’re talking about, rather than anger.
- ironrabbit 3y agoAll engineers and researchers, even junior, are "Member of Technical Staff" at OAI
- sidcool 3y agoWhat should I know to get a job there?
- InCityDreams 3y agoI rather suspect, they'll know you.
- Trasmatta 3y agoLooks like they don't hire remote, otherwise I would absolutely be applying right now...no way am I moving to SF. (Not that I think I would have a realistic chance, since I'm sure they're getting the best of the best applicants right now. But still.)
- danielvaughn 3y agoSame, and the base salaries from their actual job listings were mostly 200-270K per year. Definitely not a bad salary, but not worth it given the cost of SF living.
- MichaelRazum 3y agoDo you guys know some good companies that offer interesting remote ML jobs? The package is competitive for sure. I don't care that much about the pay, more about interesting stuff.
- sebzim4500 3y agoThey do hire remote in some cases, but normally only for up to a year and only if it's someone they really want. They hope that the person will be willing to move after working there for a year, I guess.
- jedberg 3y agoBased on what I've seen/heard, they seem to follow a similar comp philosophy to Netflix -- pay top of market to get the best people. But it's also important to note that only $300K of that is in cash. The other $600K is in profit participation, which could take years (maybe even a decade!) to be realized. It could also be worth $6M a year when it's realized. But ultimately it's an investment of your time. Or to think of it another way, you're getting paid $900K a year but you're also investing $600K a year in OpenAI, which may end up being an amazing return or nothing at all, just like any startup investment. Although with Sam at the helm, my guess is it will probably be worth more than $600K a year.
- ed25519FUUU 3y agoI guess the first part of that is like netflix, but as you know the second part is not since netflix is 100% cash unless you want to participate some portion of that in the employee stock plan.
- jedberg 3y agoYes, the first part of the philosophy, pay top of market. Not the second part, where they employee gets to choose their level of exposure to investment risk. But Netflix is a public company, and OpenAI is not.
- scarface_74 3y agoIf I can’t use “the pay” to exchange for goods and services when I earn it, it’s not “pay”
- atlasunshrugged 3y agoDo the PPU's create an alignment issue? I mean, theoretically these folks are supposed to be working towards AGI, but doing it safely... but I can imagine that an extra 500K+ is a pretty big incentive to hurry up and create something that can help you make a profit so that they can get their payout. Of course, with the outside investment from Microsoft, maybe this is somewhat moot anyways as MSFT definitely has a very strong incentive to get OpenAI to build fast.
- wmf 3y agoEngineers don't control the strategy. If Altman decides to reinvest all free cash flow into growth and safety instead of profits (which is not unusual in tech) the employees can't/won't stop him.
- atlasunshrugged 3y agoMaybe not, but if as others have mentioned in the thread that there is very high talent density and these are top folks, then surely engineers have some say in the strategy -- if only through mass defection and quitting, right?
- wmf 3y agoThe other part that everyone is getting wrong is that OpenAI's future profits are already priced in to the PPUs so employees can sell them today to unlock that value. They don't have to wait.
- m3kw9 3y agoYou better perform with that pay
- biztos 3y agoOr...? I mean, Netflix-style hunger-games management might be their thing, and if I got in there at $900K (I did apply!) -- then sure, I'd be working nights and weekends just to shine. But even at infinite comp, above a certain size there will be dead weight.
- chris11 3y agoIs Netflix really that bad? They aggressively state they quickly fire people. But I've also seen reports that their turnover rate is low, and they don't have a PIP culture. It looks to me like people are reasonably happy there for the most part.
- scarface_74 3y agoLet’s say that I work at another company known for its PIP culture. If I only last 4 years through my initial offer - I both made more than I would have made anywhere else for my skills and experience and now I have that company on my resume. How is that a bad thing assuming I didn’t blow the extra money on coke and strippers.
- alberth 3y agoHow do you objectively measure the performance of an engineer? Genuinely curious.
- hinkley 3y agoThere’s been a couple times in my career where my income needs were low enough that for one more raise I could afford to hire an assistant. For that kind of money I could hire several. And an apprentice.
- nsxwolf 3y agoSo do you gotta grind leetcode for this or what
- JKCalhoun 3y agoGuessing they're looking at degrees and/or experience.
- sunk1st 3y agoyou grinding leetcode is how they built this in the first place
- bugglebeetle 3y agoIf by Leetcode, you mean publish highly-cited ML papers, then yes.
- heyoni 3y agoAccording to another poster, be a famous ML engineer…
- glup 3y agoNah, you have to write cute little LLMs that grind leetcode for you...
- a_t48 3y agoTheir job postings are (were?) certainly...a thing. I can't find the page (maybe I hallucinated it), but I remember reading a line that was essentially "we only want famous ML/AI researchers and engineers, others need not apply". When I read it a few months ago I said "yeah, that makes sense, everyone wants to work for you right now" and closed the page. It looks like they are casting a wider net now, though.
- markus_zhang 3y agoNow the problem is how to get into this kind of companies. Is LC hard mandatory for junior-senior (below lead) IC job?
- locusofself 3y agoI've never looked into their interview process, but considering what they have created I would guess that their coding problems go way beyond leetcode.
- markus_zhang 3y agoDefinitely. But do they hire people who can immediately start groking those problems or grow them? I guess they are also picky about colleges too?
- saddd 3y agoProbably not true for their front-end positions.
- WinLychee 3y agoHard part is getting an interview. It helps a lot to know someone already inside, and this is pretty much standard for all companies regardless of prestige. If you're really well-known, they'll come to you. Otherwise, get an insider referral.
- markus_zhang 3y agoTrue. I need to work on my connections.
- yuliyp 3y agoLC hard shouldn't be needed for almost any companies except ones which are delusional. LC hard are there as practice for programming contests.
- markus_zhang 3y ago
- seattle_spring 3y agoIt's too bad about their outdated stance on remote work. They could pay $2m and many of the best engineers still wouldn't consider working there on that point alone.
- euiq 3y agoOh no, I will let Sam know right away!
- Ihateyouall1234 3y ago[dead]
- scarface_74 3y ago$600K of that is “equity” in a private company. You never know when the company will go public or with what valuation. I can’t sell equity in a private company to exchange for goods and services like I can stock that gets deposited in my brokerage account every six months.
- opmelogy 3y agoThere are exceptions right? Stripe isn't public yet I'm pretty sure there are ways to sell the stock that's accrued. I remember something about them opening up a way to sell your shares and since I get pinged on LinkedIn every so often about it I'm assuming it's a thing.
- scarface_74 3y agoOnly at a deep “we buy ugly houses” type of discount and only if the company allows it and if there is a market for it. Like I said earlier, I know the value of my “equity” in a publicly held company: =GOOGLEFINANCE("AMZN", "price")* (number of shares). I can log into Fidelity and sell my shares during hours when the market is open and not at a discount.
- kortilla 3y ago> Only at a deep “we buy ugly houses” type of discount and only if the company allows it and if there is a market for it. This is incorrect. There is often significant unmet demand for private successful companies. Employees can often sell at close to what investors end up paying for it.
- scarface_74 3y agoA startup that isn’t making a profit is by definition “not successful”.
- kortilla 3y agoThis is also incorrect. Uber private shares sold for more than their IPO price when private while they weren’t making a profit.
- zerr 3y ago7-figure total comp is common for E6 and very common for E7 engineers at Meta. A stock being a significant part of course.
- Panini_Jones 3y agoWhy does levels.fyi say US$542,547 for E6? I count only 6 figures.
- ironrabbit 3y agoNew hires' comp is much higher than existing employees', especially if you've hit your cliff. 7 figures for E6 can happen if you joined recently, have good counter-offers, and negotiate. It's not super uncommon but it's also not the median E6 comp.
- Panini_Jones 3y agoYou can filter the results on levels.fyi. New offers going back a few years are less than 7 figures (even including sign-on bonus).
- ironrabbit 3y agoThe median OAI employee with a 900k comp is probably L5, not L6 or L7
- _ugfj 3y ago"yes, i produce automated plagiarism which can only function on the backs of exploited Kenyan workers, encodes and furthers every systemic bias imaginable and endangers society -- but at least I am paid well" That's getting close to some Nuremberg level shit. Not yet there of course but consider when the next pandemic rolls around and the anti science propaganda will be produced by these how many will die? We know manually produced anti vaxx propaganda killed about 300 000 people in the United States (source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071284/this-is-how-many-lives-could-have-been-saved-with-covid-vaccinations-in-each-sta https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... ) , what it'll be next time?
- sylware 3y agoThis is excessive. It is high-school level (in the worst case scenario 1 or 2 college/uni years). Yeah, a bit higher than the minimum wage. It seems to be inflated wages not based on skills but on technical fashion trends. Mafia?
- sebzim4500 3y agoI am very confused by your comment. Are you claiming that $900k median compensation is only a bit higher than minimum wage? Or are you claiming that some of the smartest AI researchers in the world are only slightly more qualified than the average high-schooler? Either claim is roughly equally absurd.
- sylware 3y agoThere is little maths to show off "AI skills", then there are many scammers. If there is so much money, which is where the "absurd" is, better target people with validated maths PHDs. Moreover, those researchers will need access to super computers in order to test at scale their work (because it all about stability at scale), and that's a limiting parameter. Additionally, "AI" is just a set of empirical algorithms attempting to mimic human cognition. The trick is to find mathematical stability (production, training, etc) for large scale simulated connectomes: I am still surprised there is still not a "sleep" regime for those articial connectomes, which we know is critical for brain stability, maybe it is a part of the new "training" regimes. I am still waiting for the educational material which will let people picture a connectome based on the latest "transformers". Because, in the end, nobody understands anything about this, it is beyond us. It will be hard to tell apart the scammers looking to steal fundings from the others.
- nextworddev 3y agoUnpopular opinion: OpenAI is severely underpaying these folks at 900k considering so many asset managers / PMs in finance basically hug S&P 500 and get 1.5m+
- bugglebeetle 3y agoYes, but this is just because tech industry people are far more susceptible to fantasies and bullshit than those in finance. In fact, they seem to largely enjoy the fantasies and bullshit, as this whole AGI rigamarole has shown. They’ll take a pay cut because the enjoy the make-believe over the cold, naked logic of market movements.
- umeshunni 3y agoAnother way to think about is that finance attracts people who care about money, tech does not.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoTech people care about money. This whole thread wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s just that they also derive some part of their identities from the cult-like, eschatological fantasies that are very much a part of Silicon Valley culture. By contrast, people in finance would never try to claim that they’re building a god. They already know the only god is money.
- scarface_74 3y agoYou haven’t been on Blind or r/cscareerquestions: “I feel like such a failure because I’m 30 years old and only make $300K”
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoAny engineer holding equity before November of 2022 is surely going to be worth > 10M
- pcurve 3y agoAnother unpopular opinion: If I think about the reasons why asset managers PMs in finance are overpaid, it's because they created elaborate rent seeking structure in society and industry, with disequilibrium in penalty vs reward. Same thing for lawyers in big firms. I would argue the engineers in big techs also have benefited from the rent seeking structure. The only reason why they're not enjoying bigger payout is because the actual structure was created by the big tech companies, and not through coordinated effort by engineers. As a result, they reap less reward as they're just highly paid henchmen, and not the bosses.
- Blackthorn 3y agoSome made up new equity class that isn't actually equity, and caps your upside? Are we seeing a new level of startup management greed? That smells pretty scammy. Common advice is to value earlier stage equity at zero anyway, so how the heck are people credibly calling that worth 600k...
- choppaface 3y agoThere are a handful of unicorns / decacorns that went poof and the BS equity turned out to indeed be BS. That’s why they have to do $300k base salary, because that’s low end of total comp at competing mega caps, without it they couldn’t sign anybody from there. OpenAI will probably end up like UberATG where Microsoft bails out a handful of $10m-plus equity packages, some engineers transfer into MS and get partial recognition, and a bunch of engineers get laid off or sent to a competitor for basically zero. Good chance of this happening when sama has to scale up aggressively and flops.
- 2devnull 3y agoIs that how they’ll build a moat? Good luck I guess.
- phendrenad2 3y agoUnpopular opinion: Paying more does not get you better code, or faster code, or cleaner code. It does get you valuable things, but they're unrelated to code. I'll get to that. Some of the best all-around programmers I've met, and also the best programmers at some specific metric (rapid development, good at unraveling complex problems, good at big-picture stuff, good at architecture, good at maths/algorithms, etc.) make market rate or below market rate. Probably because they either (A) don't know their value (B) didn't go to a top CS school (C) value things other than raw income (D) aren't good at playing the political game at work (E) aren't good at self-promotion. What paying high salaries does get you is... the widely-publicized knowledge that you pay high salaries. Sites like levels.fyi and HN will viralize this knowledge. Like your neighbor who has a shiny new BMW M3 in their driveway, you assume that they must be doing well, and must be a good investment.
- idlewords 3y agoBut it's all in paper clips...
- EddieJLSH 3y agoEvery job I checked has a cap of $370k TC https://openai.com/careers/search https://openai.com/careers/search
- zuhayeer 3y agoThat's not TC, it's just the salary. From the job listing: "Total compensation also includes generous equity and benefits"
- lwhalen 3y agoNow if only they would hire remote...