7 ms·

Analyzing AngelList Job Postings, Part 2: Salary and Equity Benchmarks

98 points by lpolovets 12y ago

angersock 12y ago
Goddamnit do I hate this city sometimes. Considering stapling this to the face of the next person in Houston that bitches about not being able to find engineering talent. EDIT: I lost two really good potential hires once they passed the tech interview and then we decided we couldn't pay them...which is fine initially, but if we can't shed that mindset when our next round closes, I will be sad (and likely available). If only there was some kind of proxy for salaries, some sort of thing we could offer in lieu of payment to potential employees, some kind of asset whose ownership we could offer with the expectation it'd be worth more later. Man, what a thing that could be.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Should you have not worked out if you could afforded to hire some one before doing the interviews?
  - angersock 12y ago
    So, hiring was possible, especially if people are willing to give away proper equity. At this point, I know what my next asking price, were it an employee position, would be--and sure, I expect haggling. The problem was that the fit wasn't good enough (for a few different reasons) to justify making it happen. There's a lot involved in hiring--not just technical aptitude, not just "does this person work with your engineering team?", not just "do we runway for this person?". There's also "does this person work with everyone in the company?", "do we value this person enough to give up equity to manage the salary differential?", "do we really need this person's skillset right now, or can we get by?" and many others. If I had my druthers, we'd hemorrhage out equity and cash to hire the best--the very best--and retain them by working on inspiring projects and helping them grow and help others grow into the best engineers the world has seen since Bell Labs in the mid 70s. Life is too fucking short not to focus on building awesome things with awesome people. Alas, that's kind of what Apple tried in the late 80s, early 90s, and it basically cost them the company until they were finally able to pay NeXT to acquire them. There are sad, annoying practicalities in running a business, and sometimes that changes hiring practices from the ideal. :( EDIT: The real issue is that the Internet has made it trivial to look at greener grass everywhere, and see how raw a deal one might be getting. Not good for morale, even at decent firms (such as mine). Worse, it means that hiring from local good schools is a pain in the ass because the graduates are all tuned to Google or Facebook or {{latestFundedSVStartup.compPackage}}. Unless you make it clear to them in an interview that no, they aren't actually worth 80k unless they can hit the ground running, they'll just say "lol, whatevs, I'll go elsewehre". Whether or not they get hired there is not important...I probably won't see them again (even with prodding from emails). We'll never see the true fallout of that side of the bubble, I think, but I suspect it's pretty rough. EDIT2: Just to clear up any misunderstandings: I'm the first engineering hire here, so while I handle a lot of team stuff and whatnot, final hiring authority does not rest with me. I'm not the one deciding whether we can afford a new hire--I just try to find good ones and get them interested. EDIT3: Removed "and genuinely do not deserve their asking price" from bit about students. Deserve was wrong word to use--better phrasing would've been "their asking price is based on a market which is not ours". The problem being, of course, that the standard reference market is SV as popularized by HN and other channels, not whatever their local market is.
    - patio11 12y ago
      genuinely do not deserve their asking price Deserve has fairly little to do with it. It's a market. There is a market clearing price. You appear to not want to pay it. That's fine. People do not want to work for you. That's also fine. You being surprised that people are not prioritizing your offers given that you do not pay market wages, that, that makes me scratch my head a little bit.
      - angersock 12y ago
        Dude, this comes as no surprise to me--I appreciate the market forces in action. For some others, there is continued surprise. I am a bit curious about the long-term effects of the market's actions here, evaluated from a "Did we really, truly, optimally allocate resources?".
        shostack 12y ago
        What do you think it would take to change their perception sufficiently to avoid this becoming a potentially business-killing factor? If you are a tech startup, and can't hire or retain decent talent, that's a pretty important thing for the person deciding these compensation maximums to consider in the context of any growth plans, no? Sounds like I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm curious how you are going about tackling this challenge internally.
        bduerst 12y ago
        Optimal is subjective. If both the company and employee are happy with (and agree to) the employment terms, then it's as optimal as it needs to be. Saying it should be a different type of optimal introduces Hume's guillotine.
    - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
      Have you considered that you simply aren't willing to pay compensation commensurate to the skills you think you need? Or, alternatively, have you considered that you are seriously overestimating how interesting, challenging, or complex your problems are (and therefore are not looking for the correct kind of talent)? To me a "hit the ground running" salary is about double that, because that's what I got when I started my current job "hitting the ground running." I don't have a CS degree and have absolutely no formal training in algorithms or data structures, either, but I manage to do quite well in my research oriented role. Edit: I also am not working for any of the well known major tech companies.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  > Considering stapling this to the face of the next person in Houston that bitches about not being able to find engineering talent. What kind of work do you do? I work for a non-enterprise Java shop (NLP) up in Dallas. We have trouble finding people worth interviewing, but since I started 2.5 years ago have only had one offer extended and rejected. EDIT: On the flip side, I have had major trouble trying to get places in Dallas, Austin, and Houston to even talk to me when I have been looking. It took me two years to get what I have now, and my testing of the market recently has been met with silence.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    I'm looking for a full-time position, in/from a top-20 (but not top-5) city, and experience the complete fuckup of software recruiting weekly. Voodoo and witchcraft. That's the state of the art in software interviewing.
arenaninja 12y ago
A question I genuinely have is whether these figures are something to go by or only relevant if you're in SF/SV, and I suspect it's the latter. It would be nice to work out a scale to more-or-less approximate how far these numbers take you in other cities (though I suppose you could just use a cost-of-living calculator, but there are other considerations in tech IMO). But even adjusting for the cost of living, I'm glad I see figures like this because it shows how ridiculous some offers are. I got an invitation to apply in Los Angeles last week for webdev, with the bottom set at $40k and the max set at $70k
- jboggan 12y ago
  LA is cheaper to live in than San Francisco but it's not that much cheaper. Silicon Beach in particular (Santa Monica/Venice area) has been experiencing some pretty steep rent inflation in the last two years. Even $70k isn't that much to thrive on in Los Angeles. I would love to see some sort of cost-of-living analysis that didn't just look at average costs of housing and food but also incorporated some mental measure of "being well-off" that used the area's Gini coefficient [0]. I say this because I have lived frugally in Santa Monica, CA and I have lived frugally in Atlanta, GA at approximately the same standard of living but being surrounded by conspicuous outliers definitely made me feel much poorer in Santa Monica. See [1] for academic discussion. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient [1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503742 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503742
- lpolovets 12y ago
  (I'm the post's author.) This analysis is not hard to do for a specific job. If you're looking at a job at a 10-person startup in LA, go to AngelList and look up job postings at 5-10 other LA startups that are a similar size. You'll get a great sense of what a typical offer looks like, and then you can compare that to your own offer.
  - arenaninja 12y ago
    Hey, thanks! I was about to start fishing for the data myself, I thought it might come from some API. Definitely some interesting insights, particularly from your previous submission on the same topic (which sadly didn't make front page), that shows the declining popularity of PHP among startups. Definitely going to slice the data myself, thanks!
optimiz3 12y ago
If you're a halfway decent engineer, you can make north of 180k/yr at Google/MSFT/Facebook. You can also do this in a market like Seattle where there is no income tax. Serious question, who in their right mind would take a paltry 1.5% equity and <= 130k/yr for these salary numbers at the level of talent these startups are seeking?
- opendais 12y ago
  People Google/MSFT/Facebook won't hire. People who wouldn't want to work at #LargeCorp.
  - optimiz3 12y ago
    I suspect this is a small demographic - chances are startups don't want to hire people that wouldn't make it through a Google/MSFT/Facebook tech-screen. The people who would make it through are going to demand founder-level equity to compensate for the risk associated with the lack of money being offered.
    - opendais 12y ago
      > I suspect this is a small demographic - chances are startups don't want to hire people that wouldn't make it through a Google/MSFT/Facebook tech-screen. I basically told a #LargeCorp to fuck off, politely, when they told me they wanted to do a tech screen during business hours [which would mean taking PTO off for it]. I've never had that issue with startups and/or small companies. They've been willing to cooperate and start things off at 4pm. I highly suspect I'm not the only person that isn't willing to take time off "for the chance to work at #LargeCorp".
      - seivan 12y ago
        I see that way as well. Good to see I am not alone.
      - chillacy 12y ago
        To be fair, nobody at LargeCorp wants to stay late to interview someone who probably won't even be on their team. It's a chore at that scale
ambrood 12y ago
Can the self reported figures by companies on angel list really be trusted? From personal experience companies (YC backed no less) inflate the equity offering on angel list!
msoad 12y ago
Startup jobs after they raise series A are more of a fraud than a realistic job positing.
- rgovind 12y ago
  Can you please elaborate on this?
  - owyn 12y ago
    Not the original commenter, but I'd say... Imagine you've been given some VC and you are in the Bay Area and you have to compete for hiring with large established/stable companies, and you only have a year or two of runway to build your product. You're going to pay well for good engineers. So this creates an artificially inflated market for engineering talent that doesn't necessarily translate to other areas or countries that don't have the same injection of VC capital (you could also call this "desperation" or a "labor friendly" market). There are definitely enough engineers here who are willing to take the gamble of salary vs equity to keep the startup companies bootstrapping, but increasingly I've met more people who want salary and stability, and that may be due to the increasing expense of living in this place. So, the spiral continues.
jacalata 12y ago
I recently interviewed at a startup that also happened to have a job posting on AngelList at the time, and the salary/equity offer they gave me was actually below the range proposed on the AngelList posting (I hadn't applied through that posting). When I brought this up their HR contact attempted to explain that the posting was meant to be for a Senior Engineer, which I'm not...presumably hoping I hadn't noticed that they had a separate posting up with an even higher salary range titled "Senior Engineer". I declined their offer, but the negotiation was a very valuable learning experience (as in, I did everything wrong starting by being the first one to give a number, and learned not to do that!)
- elmyraduff 12y ago
  I read a lot of salary-related articles and discussions(due to my startup) and I've seen many examples like yours. This is nothing other than a click-bait scam. It is very unfortunate. You think upfront-listed salaries are a way of eliminate unmet expectations during the interview process. And all you get is companies listing high salaries to attract the top talent and then not honoring the promise.
  - 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
    Don't be so negative. They'll pay you $1xx,000/year...once they raise funding in 3 months. In all seriousness, I'm not sure why so many people assume that the salaries posted on AngelList should be taken at face value. With minimal due diligence, it's clear that a lot of the startups are unlikely to have enough funding or traction (in the form of revenue) to support the salaries that they purport to be offering. As you pointed out, they're just trying to get warm bodies through the door and hoping a few of them will drink the kool-aid.
    - x0x0 12y ago
      Getting someone in the door by lying to them doesn't seem like good round on which to start a relationship. Unless you're desperate, it's stupid to accept an offer where one party started the negotiation by misleading you.
eli 12y ago
AngelList weirdly doesn't let you list a job that offers zero equity, so any jobs in the minimum range might actually be pure salary.
bjoernlasseh 12y ago
We are currently doing a survey to get more detailed data on Salaries for engineers & co. If you have a few minutes please help and contribute :)! http://blog.startupcompass.co/ http://blog.startupcompass.co/
- danielweber 12y ago
  You want me to fill out a survey about my salary, using my work email, and will then send the results to my work email. I'm missing something.
  - bjoernlasseh 12y ago
    lol, great point - fixed that
coldcode 12y ago
The question I find more interesting is what % of people in the early stages mentioned here ever collect on their equity?
- walshemj 12y ago
  You would need to measure that against what stock options are worth at a big stable company FTSE 100 DOW or S&P 500 For example in the UK BT's latest 5 year share save returned over £70k tax free - and that is open to every one.
Blackthorn 12y ago
I remember taking a glance at AngelList about a month ago and having a good laugh at how badly lowballed all of the salaries on it were. Hope they get better in the future.
joshkpeterson 12y ago
FWIW, Robert Half's salary calculator for Seattle gives the following salary hierarchy (their job titles, not mine): Web Designer < Web Developer < Software Developer < Software Engineer There is some overlap between Software Dev & Eng with PM's and Senior Web Dev. http://www.roberthalf.com/technology/it-salary-center?lobId=roberthalftechnology http://www.roberthalf.com/technology/it-salary-center?lobId=...
biggerbox 12y ago
Does anyone know what typical equity grants translate into on average. I.E. 1% typically will payout in the range of y to z, etc.
melvinmt 12y ago
" If the founder gives away 10% more than they should to the first 10 employees, then that's 10% less that's available for fundraising and future equity grants -- and that might break the company." This is not how stocks work. Exceptions aside, every previous round gets diluted by the next round where the 10% eventually becomes 1%. Also, not every employee will stay on for 4 years to vest their stock options completely. You do have the risk to burn through your allocated employee stock option pool if you're too generous (this is the point after which the investors and founders start to dilute their shares).

98 points by lpolovets 12y ago

Goddamnit do I hate this city sometimes. Considering stapling this to the face of the next person in Houston that bitches about not being able to find engineering talent. EDIT: I lost two really good potential hires once they passed the tech interview and then we decided we couldn't pay them...which is fine initially, but if we can't shed that mindset when our next round closes, I will be sad (and likely available). If only there was some kind of proxy for salaries, some sort of thing we could offer in lieu of payment to potential employees, some kind of asset whose ownership we could offer with the expectation it'd be worth more later. Man, what a thing that could be.

walshemj 12y ago
Should you have not worked out if you could afforded to hire some one before doing the interviews?
- angersock 12y ago
  So, hiring was possible, especially if people are willing to give away proper equity. At this point, I know what my next asking price, were it an employee position, would be--and sure, I expect haggling. The problem was that the fit wasn't good enough (for a few different reasons) to justify making it happen. There's a lot involved in hiring--not just technical aptitude, not just "does this person work with your engineering team?", not just "do we runway for this person?". There's also "does this person work with everyone in the company?", "do we value this person enough to give up equity to manage the salary differential?", "do we really need this person's skillset right now, or can we get by?" and many others. If I had my druthers, we'd hemorrhage out equity and cash to hire the best--the very best--and retain them by working on inspiring projects and helping them grow and help others grow into the best engineers the world has seen since Bell Labs in the mid 70s. Life is too fucking short not to focus on building awesome things with awesome people. Alas, that's kind of what Apple tried in the late 80s, early 90s, and it basically cost them the company until they were finally able to pay NeXT to acquire them. There are sad, annoying practicalities in running a business, and sometimes that changes hiring practices from the ideal. :( EDIT: The real issue is that the Internet has made it trivial to look at greener grass everywhere, and see how raw a deal one might be getting. Not good for morale, even at decent firms (such as mine). Worse, it means that hiring from local good schools is a pain in the ass because the graduates are all tuned to Google or Facebook or {{latestFundedSVStartup.compPackage}}. Unless you make it clear to them in an interview that no, they aren't actually worth 80k unless they can hit the ground running, they'll just say "lol, whatevs, I'll go elsewehre". Whether or not they get hired there is not important...I probably won't see them again (even with prodding from emails). We'll never see the true fallout of that side of the bubble, I think, but I suspect it's pretty rough. EDIT2: Just to clear up any misunderstandings: I'm the first engineering hire here, so while I handle a lot of team stuff and whatnot, final hiring authority does not rest with me. I'm not the one deciding whether we can afford a new hire--I just try to find good ones and get them interested. EDIT3: Removed "and genuinely do not deserve their asking price" from bit about students. Deserve was wrong word to use--better phrasing would've been "their asking price is based on a market which is not ours". The problem being, of course, that the standard reference market is SV as popularized by HN and other channels, not whatever their local market is.
  - patio11 12y ago
    genuinely do not deserve their asking price Deserve has fairly little to do with it. It's a market. There is a market clearing price. You appear to not want to pay it. That's fine. People do not want to work for you. That's also fine. You being surprised that people are not prioritizing your offers given that you do not pay market wages, that, that makes me scratch my head a little bit.
    - angersock 12y ago
      Dude, this comes as no surprise to me--I appreciate the market forces in action. For some others, there is continued surprise. I am a bit curious about the long-term effects of the market's actions here, evaluated from a "Did we really, truly, optimally allocate resources?".
      - shostack 12y ago
        What do you think it would take to change their perception sufficiently to avoid this becoming a potentially business-killing factor? If you are a tech startup, and can't hire or retain decent talent, that's a pretty important thing for the person deciding these compensation maximums to consider in the context of any growth plans, no? Sounds like I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm curious how you are going about tackling this challenge internally.
      - bduerst 12y ago
        Optimal is subjective. If both the company and employee are happy with (and agree to) the employment terms, then it's as optimal as it needs to be. Saying it should be a different type of optimal introduces Hume's guillotine.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Have you considered that you simply aren't willing to pay compensation commensurate to the skills you think you need? Or, alternatively, have you considered that you are seriously overestimating how interesting, challenging, or complex your problems are (and therefore are not looking for the correct kind of talent)? To me a "hit the ground running" salary is about double that, because that's what I got when I started my current job "hitting the ground running." I don't have a CS degree and have absolutely no formal training in algorithms or data structures, either, but I manage to do quite well in my research oriented role. Edit: I also am not working for any of the well known major tech companies.
vonmoltke 12y ago
> Considering stapling this to the face of the next person in Houston that bitches about not being able to find engineering talent. What kind of work do you do? I work for a non-enterprise Java shop (NLP) up in Dallas. We have trouble finding people worth interviewing, but since I started 2.5 years ago have only had one offer extended and rejected. EDIT: On the flip side, I have had major trouble trying to get places in Dallas, Austin, and Houston to even talk to me when I have been looking. It took me two years to get what I have now, and my testing of the market recently has been met with silence.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I'm looking for a full-time position, in/from a top-20 (but not top-5) city, and experience the complete fuckup of software recruiting weekly. Voodoo and witchcraft. That's the state of the art in software interviewing.

arenaninja 12y ago

A question I genuinely have is whether these figures are something to go by or only relevant if you're in SF/SV, and I suspect it's the latter. It would be nice to work out a scale to more-or-less approximate how far these numbers take you in other cities (though I suppose you could just use a cost-of-living calculator, but there are other considerations in tech IMO). But even adjusting for the cost of living, I'm glad I see figures like this because it shows how ridiculous some offers are. I got an invitation to apply in Los Angeles last week for webdev, with the bottom set at $40k and the max set at $70k

jboggan 12y ago
LA is cheaper to live in than San Francisco but it's not that much cheaper. Silicon Beach in particular (Santa Monica/Venice area) has been experiencing some pretty steep rent inflation in the last two years. Even $70k isn't that much to thrive on in Los Angeles. I would love to see some sort of cost-of-living analysis that didn't just look at average costs of housing and food but also incorporated some mental measure of "being well-off" that used the area's Gini coefficient [0]. I say this because I have lived frugally in Santa Monica, CA and I have lived frugally in Atlanta, GA at approximately the same standard of living but being surrounded by conspicuous outliers definitely made me feel much poorer in Santa Monica. See [1] for academic discussion. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient [1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503742 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503742
lpolovets 12y ago
(I'm the post's author.) This analysis is not hard to do for a specific job. If you're looking at a job at a 10-person startup in LA, go to AngelList and look up job postings at 5-10 other LA startups that are a similar size. You'll get a great sense of what a typical offer looks like, and then you can compare that to your own offer.
- arenaninja 12y ago
  Hey, thanks! I was about to start fishing for the data myself, I thought it might come from some API. Definitely some interesting insights, particularly from your previous submission on the same topic (which sadly didn't make front page), that shows the declining popularity of PHP among startups. Definitely going to slice the data myself, thanks!

optimiz3 12y ago

If you're a halfway decent engineer, you can make north of 180k/yr at Google/MSFT/Facebook. You can also do this in a market like Seattle where there is no income tax. Serious question, who in their right mind would take a paltry 1.5% equity and <= 130k/yr for these salary numbers at the level of talent these startups are seeking?

opendais 12y ago
People Google/MSFT/Facebook won't hire. People who wouldn't want to work at #LargeCorp.
- optimiz3 12y ago
  I suspect this is a small demographic - chances are startups don't want to hire people that wouldn't make it through a Google/MSFT/Facebook tech-screen. The people who would make it through are going to demand founder-level equity to compensate for the risk associated with the lack of money being offered.
  - opendais 12y ago
    > I suspect this is a small demographic - chances are startups don't want to hire people that wouldn't make it through a Google/MSFT/Facebook tech-screen. I basically told a #LargeCorp to fuck off, politely, when they told me they wanted to do a tech screen during business hours [which would mean taking PTO off for it]. I've never had that issue with startups and/or small companies. They've been willing to cooperate and start things off at 4pm. I highly suspect I'm not the only person that isn't willing to take time off "for the chance to work at #LargeCorp".
    - seivan 12y ago
      I see that way as well. Good to see I am not alone.
    - chillacy 12y ago
      To be fair, nobody at LargeCorp wants to stay late to interview someone who probably won't even be on their team. It's a chore at that scale

ambrood 12y ago

Can the self reported figures by companies on angel list really be trusted? From personal experience companies (YC backed no less) inflate the equity offering on angel list!

msoad 12y ago

Startup jobs after they raise series A are more of a fraud than a realistic job positing.

rgovind 12y ago
Can you please elaborate on this?
- owyn 12y ago
  Not the original commenter, but I'd say... Imagine you've been given some VC and you are in the Bay Area and you have to compete for hiring with large established/stable companies, and you only have a year or two of runway to build your product. You're going to pay well for good engineers. So this creates an artificially inflated market for engineering talent that doesn't necessarily translate to other areas or countries that don't have the same injection of VC capital (you could also call this "desperation" or a "labor friendly" market). There are definitely enough engineers here who are willing to take the gamble of salary vs equity to keep the startup companies bootstrapping, but increasingly I've met more people who want salary and stability, and that may be due to the increasing expense of living in this place. So, the spiral continues.

jacalata 12y ago

I recently interviewed at a startup that also happened to have a job posting on AngelList at the time, and the salary/equity offer they gave me was actually below the range proposed on the AngelList posting (I hadn't applied through that posting). When I brought this up their HR contact attempted to explain that the posting was meant to be for a Senior Engineer, which I'm not...presumably hoping I hadn't noticed that they had a separate posting up with an even higher salary range titled "Senior Engineer". I declined their offer, but the negotiation was a very valuable learning experience (as in, I did everything wrong starting by being the first one to give a number, and learned not to do that!)

elmyraduff 12y ago
I read a lot of salary-related articles and discussions(due to my startup) and I've seen many examples like yours. This is nothing other than a click-bait scam. It is very unfortunate. You think upfront-listed salaries are a way of eliminate unmet expectations during the interview process. And all you get is companies listing high salaries to attract the top talent and then not honoring the promise.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  Don't be so negative. They'll pay you $1xx,000/year...once they raise funding in 3 months. In all seriousness, I'm not sure why so many people assume that the salaries posted on AngelList should be taken at face value. With minimal due diligence, it's clear that a lot of the startups are unlikely to have enough funding or traction (in the form of revenue) to support the salaries that they purport to be offering. As you pointed out, they're just trying to get warm bodies through the door and hoping a few of them will drink the kool-aid.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    Getting someone in the door by lying to them doesn't seem like good round on which to start a relationship. Unless you're desperate, it's stupid to accept an offer where one party started the negotiation by misleading you.

eli 12y ago

AngelList weirdly doesn't let you list a job that offers zero equity, so any jobs in the minimum range might actually be pure salary.

bjoernlasseh 12y ago

We are currently doing a survey to get more detailed data on Salaries for engineers & co. If you have a few minutes please help and contribute :)! http://blog.startupcompass.co/ http://blog.startupcompass.co/

danielweber 12y ago
You want me to fill out a survey about my salary, using my work email, and will then send the results to my work email. I'm missing something.
- bjoernlasseh 12y ago
  lol, great point - fixed that

coldcode 12y ago

The question I find more interesting is what % of people in the early stages mentioned here ever collect on their equity?

walshemj 12y ago
You would need to measure that against what stock options are worth at a big stable company FTSE 100 DOW or S&P 500 For example in the UK BT's latest 5 year share save returned over £70k tax free - and that is open to every one.

Blackthorn 12y ago

I remember taking a glance at AngelList about a month ago and having a good laugh at how badly lowballed all of the salaries on it were. Hope they get better in the future.

joshkpeterson 12y ago

FWIW, Robert Half's salary calculator for Seattle gives the following salary hierarchy (their job titles, not mine): Web Designer < Web Developer < Software Developer < Software Engineer There is some overlap between Software Dev & Eng with PM's and Senior Web Dev. http://www.roberthalf.com/technology/it-salary-center?lobId=roberthalftechnology http://www.roberthalf.com/technology/it-salary-center?lobId=...

biggerbox 12y ago

Does anyone know what typical equity grants translate into on average. I.E. 1% typically will payout in the range of y to z, etc.

melvinmt 12y ago

" If the founder gives away 10% more than they should to the first 10 employees, then that's 10% less that's available for fundraising and future equity grants -- and that might break the company." This is not how stocks work. Exceptions aside, every previous round gets diluted by the next round where the 10% eventually becomes 1%. Also, not every employee will stay on for 4 years to vest their stock options completely. You do have the risk to burn through your allocated employee stock option pool if you're too generous (this is the point after which the investors and founders start to dilute their shares).