[jreese]

And yet it can also be haphazard and misguided too. My experience has mostly been that the general comp level is high enough across the board, but discretionary/additional equity is almost exclusively thrown at high visibility/pet projects of the moment rather than the most important/impactful work that supports all of those fancy projects. Ie, working on infra has some of largest/widest impact in the company, but rarely merits AE/DE because everything is too incremental, difficult to explain the benefits to non-technical partners, or otherwise invisible to leadership at the levels necessary to grant equity. Losing a core, senior engineer from the database or network team can have a much larger technical impact than a random frontend engineer, and yet the bulk of AE/DE goes to flashy frontend product launches.