Comment by kccqzy
2 years ago
Two people I knew recently left Google to join OpenAI. They were solid L5 engineers on the verge of being promoted to L6, and their TC is now $900k. And they are not even doing AI research, just general backend infra. You don't need to be gifted, just good. And of course I can't really fault them for joining a company for the purpose of optimizing TC.
> their TC is now $900k
As a community we should stop throwing numbers around like this when more than half of this number is speculative. You shouldn't be able to count it as "total compensation" unless you are compensated.
Word on town is OpenAI folks heavily selling shares in secondaries in 100s of millions.
The number is as real as someone else is willing to pay for them. Plenty of VCs willing to pay for it.
Word in town is [1] openai "plans" to let employees sell "some" equity through a "tender process" which ex-employees are excluded from; and also that openai can "claw back" vested equity, and has used the threat of doing so in the past to pressure people into signing sketchy legal documents.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/11/openai-insider-stock-sales-a...
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> Word on town is OpenAI folks heavily selling shares in secondaries in 100s of millions
OpenAI heavily restricts the selling of its "shares," which tends to come with management picking the winners and losers among its ESOs. Heavily, heavily discount an asset you cannot liquidate without someone's position, particularly if that person is your employer.
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You have no idea what youre talking about
don’t comment if you don’t know what you’re talking about, they have tender offers
Google itself is now filled with TC optimizing folks, just one level lower than the ones at Open AI.
> their TC is now $900k.
Everyone knows that openai TC is heavily weighted by ~~RSUs~~ options that themselves are heavily weighted by hopes and dreams.
When I looked into it and talked to some hiring managers, the big names were offering cash comp similar to total comp for big tech, with stock (sometimes complicated arrangements that were not options or RSUs) on top of that. I’m talking $400k cash for a senior engineer with equity on top.
> big names
Big names where? Inside of openai? What does that even mean?
The only place you can get 400k cash base for senior is quantfi
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Everything OpenAI does is about weights.
bro does their ceo even lift?
You mean PPUs or smoke and mirrors compensation. RSUs are actually worth something.
why are PPUs “smoke and mirrors” and RSUs “worth something”?
i suspect people commenting this don’t have a clue how PPU compensation actually works
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Seems like you need to have been working at a place like Google too
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the thing about mentioning compensation numbers on HN is you will get tons of pissy/ressentiment-y replies
I don't care about these. I care about the readers who might not have done job searching recently and might not know their worth in the market.