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> There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t i

> There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically. I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels. The cognitive dissonance is amazing. Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it, and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment. If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them. But somehow, I'm supposed to not care about money at the same time caring about money.

diggan 1y ago
> If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them. That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the same. When I transitioned to software development (from basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my first software job, they were all because I liked the particular product in some way or another, and what the compensation was is basically the least interesting thing for me. Of course, some level of base payment is needed, because I still needed to pay rent, but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. And no, I'm just an individual contributor who wants to like what I work with, not an executive, manager or similar.
- mystraline 1y ago
  The hypothetical situation you set up is interesting, in that past a base amount of money to survive and thrive, that you would choose the more intellectually stimulating position. And I do get that. For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business. And, enough money can buy independenance in that you can get this flexibility of doing as you choose.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business. Yeah, I guess I've been lucky to be able to chose daily jobs in the past that basically gives me what you would create outside of work, except I got a fixed payment each month for doing something I really enjoyed. So I never had the need to do that stuff outside of work to derive enjoyment of most of my time, which I guess is my top priority and been most of my life.
  - duped 1y ago
    That's reasonable, but signalling this to a startup during hiring is going to be a negative. There are three kinds of capital they get to play with, cash, equity, and culture. Cash is the least pliable of the three to them, equity the least liquid, but culture is actually something they can control. If you have a team full of people who are just there for the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is increasing the paycheck. Which startups can't do in a crunch.
    - baq 1y ago
      Culture is smoke and mirrors. When investors say frog, founders jump and guess who gets the cultural shaft then. Better to be thinking in transactional terms from the get go especially in early startups, where majority of total comp is an illiquid call option.
      - duped 1y ago
        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.
    - mystraline 1y ago
      [dead]
- evantbyrne 1y ago
  > but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. I chose my current job against competing offers because it was a good thing for the world, but I would not have taken significantly reduced pay for it. Let me tell you why: nobody that insists on paying you below market rates is going to treat you right. Some of the worst professional interactions I've ever dealt with involved high ranking individuals at nonprofits. These were orgs may have had genuinely good missions, but also paid rank and file employees quite poorly. On the other side, the 3x above market rate job is just a fantasy. I could believe it if you were talking about a 20% bonus.
- matwood 1y ago
  I hear you, and I've never solely chased money either. But, we unfortunately live in world driven by money, and if I'm going to pour myself into work I want to be compensated appropriately. I also have a huge issue with feeling like I'm getting taken advantage of. So, what I have done is try to find jobs where those things align somewhat.
dpritchett 1y ago
It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it? Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.
- steveklabnik 1y ago
  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.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    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.
    - steveklabnik 1y ago
      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.
      - Aurornis 1y ago
        > Salary is identical, equity is not. Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an answer for.
mlyle 1y ago
I think we live in a better world when the primary motivator for how we spend half of most of our working day isn't doing what's necessary to get strips of paper for survival. That is, the work itself should be interesting and fulfilling. Yes, we need money, but when the work relationship approaches being purely transactional the whole thing is demeaning for everyone and less effective. Boy, it takes a lot of luck and skill and privilege to be able to shop for (or offer) work like this, and money is still important.
Keyframe 1y ago
If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them. While this is true for most of the cases, it's not the case always. There are definitely jobs I'd work for less than I make at the job now and there are jobs which are considered "dream jobs", but ultimately there needs to be a solid base to make you and your family feel comfortable if you're spending at least 1/3 of your day on.
inerte 1y ago
They know it's a lie but still need to say it. I used to have a manager that gave me this line. He left this company to join another one, had multiple offers, and told me he accepted the highest one because "it's all about the money". They know, we know, everybody knows, but that's not the playbook.
rtpg 1y ago
Back when my salary was shitty I cared about the money a lot. I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much. Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a year? Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some people will just take “offer with most money” every time. Hell of a lot of people don’t. I do think that C suite folks might not have the right vision of what “normal/comfortable” is for employees though. So they might offer a low number thinking it’s actually a “comfortable to live with at this stage of life” number and then get confused why they can’t recruit good talent and think people are obsessed with money. First offer has gotta be within the ballpark of the right number if you don’t want your interviewee to immediately come back to you with a much higher number!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bobsomers 1y ago
  > I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much. I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying. For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.
  - mbreese 1y ago
    That heavily depends on where you live and your life situation (young kids? older kids? No kids?).
  - abustamam 1y ago
    I used to think (like 10 years ago) that $100k a year was all the money in the world and I'd be able to own a nice house and drive a nice car in Cali. Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck. I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but it's not to the "worry not about money." $200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest? That person can probably retire early in a few years.
deleted 1y ago
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diggan 1y ago

> If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them. That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the same. When I transitioned to software development (from basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my first software job, they were all because I liked the particular product in some way or another, and what the compensation was is basically the least interesting thing for me. Of course, some level of base payment is needed, because I still needed to pay rent, but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. And no, I'm just an individual contributor who wants to like what I work with, not an executive, manager or similar.

mystraline 1y ago
The hypothetical situation you set up is interesting, in that past a base amount of money to survive and thrive, that you would choose the more intellectually stimulating position. And I do get that. For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business. And, enough money can buy independenance in that you can get this flexibility of doing as you choose.
- diggan 1y ago
  > For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business. Yeah, I guess I've been lucky to be able to chose daily jobs in the past that basically gives me what you would create outside of work, except I got a fixed payment each month for doing something I really enjoyed. So I never had the need to do that stuff outside of work to derive enjoyment of most of my time, which I guess is my top priority and been most of my life.
- duped 1y ago
  That's reasonable, but signalling this to a startup during hiring is going to be a negative. There are three kinds of capital they get to play with, cash, equity, and culture. Cash is the least pliable of the three to them, equity the least liquid, but culture is actually something they can control. If you have a team full of people who are just there for the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is increasing the paycheck. Which startups can't do in a crunch.
  - baq 1y ago
    Culture is smoke and mirrors. When investors say frog, founders jump and guess who gets the cultural shaft then. Better to be thinking in transactional terms from the get go especially in early startups, where majority of total comp is an illiquid call option.
    - duped 1y ago
      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.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    [dead]
evantbyrne 1y ago
> but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. I chose my current job against competing offers because it was a good thing for the world, but I would not have taken significantly reduced pay for it. Let me tell you why: nobody that insists on paying you below market rates is going to treat you right. Some of the worst professional interactions I've ever dealt with involved high ranking individuals at nonprofits. These were orgs may have had genuinely good missions, but also paid rank and file employees quite poorly. On the other side, the 3x above market rate job is just a fantasy. I could believe it if you were talking about a 20% bonus.
matwood 1y ago
I hear you, and I've never solely chased money either. But, we unfortunately live in world driven by money, and if I'm going to pour myself into work I want to be compensated appropriately. I also have a huge issue with feeling like I'm getting taken advantage of. So, what I have done is try to find jobs where those things align somewhat.

dpritchett 1y ago

It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it? Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.

steveklabnik 1y ago
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.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  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.
  - steveklabnik 1y ago
    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.
    - Aurornis 1y ago
      > Salary is identical, equity is not. Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an answer for.

mlyle 1y ago

I think we live in a better world when the primary motivator for how we spend half of most of our working day isn't doing what's necessary to get strips of paper for survival. That is, the work itself should be interesting and fulfilling. Yes, we need money, but when the work relationship approaches being purely transactional the whole thing is demeaning for everyone and less effective. Boy, it takes a lot of luck and skill and privilege to be able to shop for (or offer) work like this, and money is still important.

Keyframe 1y ago

If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them. While this is true for most of the cases, it's not the case always. There are definitely jobs I'd work for less than I make at the job now and there are jobs which are considered "dream jobs", but ultimately there needs to be a solid base to make you and your family feel comfortable if you're spending at least 1/3 of your day on.

inerte 1y ago

They know it's a lie but still need to say it. I used to have a manager that gave me this line. He left this company to join another one, had multiple offers, and told me he accepted the highest one because "it's all about the money". They know, we know, everybody knows, but that's not the playbook.

rtpg 1y ago

Back when my salary was shitty I cared about the money a lot. I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much. Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a year? Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some people will just take “offer with most money” every time. Hell of a lot of people don’t. I do think that C suite folks might not have the right vision of what “normal/comfortable” is for employees though. So they might offer a low number thinking it’s actually a “comfortable to live with at this stage of life” number and then get confused why they can’t recruit good talent and think people are obsessed with money. First offer has gotta be within the ballpark of the right number if you don’t want your interviewee to immediately come back to you with a much higher number!

deleted 1y ago
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bobsomers 1y ago
> I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much. I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying. For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.
- mbreese 1y ago
  That heavily depends on where you live and your life situation (young kids? older kids? No kids?).
- abustamam 1y ago
  I used to think (like 10 years ago) that $100k a year was all the money in the world and I'd be able to own a nice house and drive a nice car in Cali. Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck. I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but it's not to the "worry not about money." $200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest? That person can probably retire early in a few years.

deleted 1y ago

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