Wandering Adventure Party

@datarama A tool like https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Stripe%2CBox%2CDropbox with location set to US will give you an idea.

@datarama @xgranade Yes, the US tech labor-market is highly distorted. Ex-employer was actively trying to shift their tech workforce OUT of the US to make their costs easier. A friend moved to the UK to follow his wife and a professorship she got, and saw a 65% pay cut.

@xgranade One thing I noticed is people didn't see themselves as a bezos or a musk, they saw themselves as a up and coming VC, which is the gateway to musk/bezos money. The more labor conscious folk understood they were *labor* same as the people in the upscale HQ cafeteria/coffee-shop. The rest saw more fine gradations in class that were more based on surface level definitions like "can afford to own anything at all in the bay area," and "spends four weeks a year working remotely from somewhere in Europe," even though the actual fundamentals has them more akin to their Lyft-driver.

@datarama @xgranade My last three years of working had my total comp between $400K and $500K, mostly due to the stock component. Flat salary was low $200s. Bonus added a chunk, and stock made up the rest. My employer was trying to compete with the top dogs and paid like it, with the effect that I was surrounded by people who spent a lot of time in companies 10x our size and downsized to a mere 1000-programmer place to be more agile.

Comp like that was the top tier of the tech class-system. I spent most of my career much closer to the bottom, where total comp is more like $150K. Getting into the half-million comp companies is *extremely* hard, and I only managed it because my company got bought.