[benreesman]

It's still a class thing. With the CoL in most SWE-heavy metros and the outright war on engineer pricing power over the last few years?

Just about any engineer who isnt independently wealthy is:

- recovering from layoffs and a period of unemployment at a high-COL cost structure

- facing layoffs with the above salients

- facing an imperative to insulate their fucking house with cash for their turn in the above crosshairs

Competence and a willingness to work hard stopped equalling access to basic necessities in November of 2022 - February of 2023, depending on how you count, and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.

"200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.

[Aurornis]

> With the CoL in most SWE-heavy metros

They’re a remote company. They’re not targeting HCOL metros.

> and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.

> "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.

Claiming that $200k is not enough to live on is rich-guy talk. The majority of the country lives on well below $200K.

I agree that a single person living in a HCOL metro like SF Bay Area would not find this compensation attractive, but that person also has nearly infinite other jobs to choose from nearby.

Jobs like this (remote work for interesting startup) do not need to pay HCOL comp.

[benreesman]

Nothing about a remote gig in one job affects the imperstives I highlighted about past layoffs or future uncertainty: pricing relocation into or out of e.g. SFBA at zero is another conversational gambit popular with the out-of-touch. You don't teleport.

It's bad generally, this is a terrible time to be a working person in general. How SWEs stack up against profession X? Depends on profession X.

SWEs are in a job market where a bunch of folks who have been repeatedly prosecuted for wage fixing (most successfully/recently in 2012) are taking another swing at it in a much more lawless regime. That's as precarious as it gets when this cabal monopolizes the front row at the Inaugeration.

[Aurornis]

> pricing relocation into or out of e.g. SFBA at zero is another conversational gambit popular with the out-of-touch. You don't teleport.

I think this is missing the point.

The target audience for remote jobs that pay $200K does not overlap with the target audience of people interested in working in SFBA at FAANG-level compensation.

If someone is interested in relocating to SFBA, they should do that and get a job there.

[steveklabnik]

> "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.

The median US income in 2023 was $39,982 for an individual, and $78,538 for a household.

[benreesman]

My issue isn't with Oxide's comp steucture which I neither understand nor care about.

My issue is with made-for-life, self-appointed elder statesmen on HN saying anything at all about other people's finances and imperatives from the comfort of a study in whatever isyllic community they're pontificating from.

Just, be grateful, and say nothing.

[steveklabnik]

> My issue isn't with Oxide's comp steucture which I neither understand nor care about.

This is a sub-thread about it, so that's what we're talking about though.

> Just, be grateful, and say nothing.

That's not how message boards work. If you say that it's ridiculous to live on such a salary, I'm going to point out how out of touch that is.

[benreesman]

That's not what I said, you know that's not what I said. I said people who talk like that on HN are doing so from an unrelated personal experience.

This sub-thread is about the habits of speech that make a certain breed of armchair public policy economist jump out like a lump on plate glass. Get Patek in here and we could start a convention.

[steveklabnik]

> you know that's not what I said.

Okay, just so you know, I did not understand that you were speaking in generalities whatsoever.

[benreesman]

Fair enough, this is a topic with a high and asymmetrical charge quotient and misunderstandings are a fact of life in such.

I also regret any degree to which I've singled you out for a generally regrettable trend among the long-time community members: it's very easy to see the world through the lens of one's own experience and I've been as guilty as anyone of doing just that on plenty of occasions.

We should all strive for empathy and understanding, that goes double for people like you and me (and Thomas) who have been around forever.

[rtpg]

200k a year. In US dollars. American dollars.

Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things. Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It’s not poverty wages!

“I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I’m passionate about” is such a normal thing that everyone serious I know in this industry says. Or like… even just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there’s a reason online casinos pay their software engineers so much!). Not everyone makes the choice (and I get people saying no) and but in a sense I gotta imagine it’s part of the calculus for making it work. “We won’t have to pay people half a mil in total comp like meta has to, because the mission is more straightforward”. I feel like an O&F ep mentioning someone from intel expecting _triple_ the comp. 600k!

And like… people saying it’s not enough and talking about equity. You’re not paying rent with equity!

Signed: a guy who was at a small startup and who would have been very happy with the inflation/CoL equivalent of 200k instead of what I had those early leaner years

At one point “joining the scrappy startup” does involve some scrappiness. Otherwise you’re just working in a division of Google that hasn’t been integrated into the borg yet.

[nemothekid]

Focusing on the raw dollar amount is a red-herring that always comes up in these conversations. 200k is plenty! is a sleight of hand. If I am building something with 10s of millions of value and you give me 200k and expect me to shut up cause it's plenty, you are deceiving me, full stop.

The "we all get paid the same" is a dishonest by omission. They don't all get paid the same, and while the peanut gallery may think so, I sure as hell don't think the IRS thinks the same way.

I personally don't really care what they pay their engineers, but to pretend to have this egalitarian approach to compensation and then hide the equity numbers is dishonest.

[Too]

In other threads, the voice of HN tells us to consider equity in a startup as worthless and only ever count on base salary.

Here we instead hear that equity is as important as the air we breathe.

Yes, 200k is not life changing but at least it’s not pretending to be, like many other inflated equity schemes that never vest. It’s just an honest decent salary, better than what you can find in many places of the world.

[epicureanideal]

I completely agree.

Note that according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 200k in 2025 is equivalent to about 160k in 2020 when the pandemic began, and 160k would've been on the low end for an experienced software engineer at a Series A or B startup at that time, in the SF Bay Area.