Assuming equity is worthless the base salary has to be north of 200K to match the market rate (for low level software engineers) for public tech companies. In most Unicorns that's definitely not the case. In fact when I interviewed for Uber they explicitly said that their base salary is low compared to Google/FB but they make it up in equity.
Is the market rate really >$200k for "low level software engineers"? I know a lot of them, even some that are working at Google, and my impression is that $200k is quite high for someone in that category.
It is very high, of course, but this is HN, where everyone knows some friend's roommate's brother who makes $200K at Google--therefore $200K must be the going rate for software engineers everywhere in the valley. I highly doubt that there is a significant number of engineers outside these few outlier companies making those figures.
At Google, assuming what I saw was representative, 220+ k$/yr in total comp (salary + bonus + RSUs) was the standard last year for one promotion up from new grad (SDE IIIs).
(Note that Google RSUs, unlike Uber's, are convertible to cash immediately upon vesting.)
The point is that an entry-level engineer can make $200K at e.g. Uber (think $120K base + $80K equity), so for a newish company (with near-worthless equity, per the advice in this thread) to match that, they would have to pay $200K base.
> In most Unicorns that's definitely not the case.
It's only true because the market allows them to do that. The reason those unicorns lowball on salary is because they can.
If workers keep saying "yes, I'll take tulips in lieu of salary," the market will adjust and pay lower salary.
If workers say "nope, it's a good market out there, I either want salary or very good protections against dilution," then they'll have to pay market wages.
By "low level software engineers" do you mean low level in the sense of relatively low experience or low level in the sense of working on embedded systems etc?
Where are you living where entry level software engineer salaries are north of 200k? I'm in the bay area and base salaries for software engineering with a bachelor's degree range from 90-115k from what I've seen (generally with some stock options and bonus potential added on top but I've never met anyone who's come even close to 200k starting out)
He's talking about total comp, not just base salary. If you're looking at total comp, there's many many late stage unicorns and large public companies that have comp packages north of $200k for entry level engineers straight out of college. I've seen comp packages for many of these companies.
In total compensation, sure. But base salary that high is unlikely. Consider also that Uber isn't public, so the non-salary comp isn't worth anything yet.
