[burlesona]

It doesn’t happen via salary, it happens via stock. Work at a big co over the last decade or so and you’ve seen salary increase at 10% year or so and stock increase much faster. It’s very common for senior engineers in the Bay Area to be earning 175k salary, ~30k bonus, and another 150+ in stock vesting per year. High performers and/or workers at FAANGs do better than that. See levels.fyi for concrete examples.

The whole thing here is stock, which takes a couple years to really stack up, but once it does, you’re making a lot of money.

[jdright]

This is the problem, stock from a few years doesn't house my family or feed my kids. Stock to me is almost as fairly tales as it can be, the few times I received stock as part of my salary it basically evaporated. In the real life, to people that need money each month to survive, stock is a bad joke.

[cmcd]

What do you mean? Unless you are living paycheck to paycheck stock is just as real as cash.

[jdright]

Or almost paycheck to paycheck, which is not as uncommon as one may think. And normally stock come with restrictions on when you can liquidate. This is basically money I don't have now and a promise in the future that may very well go wrong.

[wikibob]

Normal valley vesting schedule is:

- A grant of a specific number of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)

- Vesting over 4 years

- You get nothing for 12 months

- On the 12th month you get 25%. You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose

One of the following:

A. Each month you vest 1/36th of the remaining stock

B. Each quarter you vest 1/12th of the remaining stock You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose

Some terrible companies like Amazon have abusive vesting schedules such as 5% the first year, 15% the second year, then 40% the final two years.

[cmcd]

If you are living "almost" paycheck to paycheck as a engineer with 200k+ total comp you are doing something seriously wrong.

[mrep]

My stock vests monthly and I have it set to autosell at vest so I get cold hard cash direct deposited into my account every month.