[72mena]

> And he makes in a year what I make in 10.

Question about your last statement (I may need this clarification because English is not my first language). The statement might mean that he makes 10x more money than you, or that his output is 10x greater than yours (or both!). Based on the context of your reply, I think it means his output is 10x greater than yours. Is that correct?

[mushbino]

One of my friends who worked there as an engineer made $500k cash and my other friend who works there makes $3M/yr. The latter is pretty high up, but those are serious numbers.

[huseyinkeles]

$3M/yr is not a SWE, right? right?

[arcticbull]

Netflix famously doesn't offer stock based compensation as part of their comp arrangements. They offer you a non-trivial cash salary though, that would easily be the sum of cash and equity at a similarly situated company. At least, that's my understanding, anyways.

Now, if they opted into the ESPP and stock options programs with a $1M TC, remember NFLX has 5-6X'd in the last 3 years. Someone who allocated a lot of their TC towards equity could easily be making $3M/yr today.

[jedberg]

Probably not. The SWEs top out around $600K a year. $3M/yr is on the high end for a VP.

Unless they're counting stock gains. In which case that could easily be a SWE. Netflix lets you choose your stock/cash ratio in your comp, and if you went stock heavy you could be at $3M a year if you've been there a while.

[ecmascript]

If I were to make $600k I would only have to work about 1-3 years then I could live of my savings for the rest of my life with my current expenses.

I don't get how people in SV can make this much and not be financially set after a few years of working.

[jedberg]

Usually if you're making that much, you're fairly mid to late career. That means you probably have kids. Which means you probably want a house in an area with good schools.

That house will cost $2M at least if you want to be near the office, which means, assuming you can collect the $400,000 down payment, will leave with a mortgage/tax/insurance payment of about $9,000 a month, or $108,000 a year. The tax man will also take about 1/2 of your earnings.

That leaves you with less than $200,000 a year. You'll spend probably at least $50,000 on food, clothes, activities, etc for the kids and yourself.

So now you're saving $150,000 a year, if you're super frugal.

Let's assume you're ok with retiring out of the Bay Area. You'll still need a couple million to retire on. At that rate, it will still take you decade to do it.

All that being said, I have a friend who did exactly that. He worked as a senior/principal engineer for about a decade, was single the whole time, lived super frugal, and retired back to Kansas. I hear he just sits at home working on open source, going to the bars every night.

[chrisjarvis]

a large amount of this is taxed away. California's top tax bracket is an additional 13.3% per year. High cost of living here also. Although I generally agree with your sentiment, it may not work out to as much money as you think in the end.

[G4BB3R]

What is their age?

[paloaltokid]

Your confusion is understandable especially if English isn't your first language. That leads me to believe you don't live in the Bay Area. But no, the parent is really saying that the friend makes ten times more money. That's not literally true but Netflix is known for paying extremely generously. The tradeoff is that you give your lifeblood in return.

[Aeolun]

Meh, my lifeblood is regenerated. As long as they don’t suck too quickly it should be ok.

My firstborn however, now that went a bit too far.

[jedberg]

No, OP means that their friend at Netflix has a salary that is 10 times greater than their own. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but with the stock compensation, probably not much of an exaggeration.

[gpapilion]

Netflix’s comp model is weird, similar to google but all cash.

The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price. You could direct between 0-100% of your salary to it.

If you can wait it’s a great way to make a lot of money.

[jedberg]

> The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price.

Unless they changed it, the option price was 40% of the strike and the strike was the current price on purchase day, which was monthly. Gave a nice dollar cost average. But you could only put in up to 50% of your salary, plus you got an automatic 5% of your salary put into the stock program.

When I worked there the price was 20% of the strike and you could do 100% of your salary. I had friends who did 100% of their salary, which are now worth tens of millions.