That’s why I asked about equity. If they’re giving significant equity then I have no problems with the $175K compensation limit.
One of my favorite employers right out of college did almost exactly this same thing: Everyone gets paid the same (although they had a couple tiers) and a lot of talk about how we’re all equal.
I believed it, until the acquisition event and I realized that the founders and early team members literally had 100-1000X or more as much equity than I did. All of the talk about paying everyone the same suddenly seemed like a cruel joke.
Rust in Cryptocurrency is mostly a marketing play (and I say this as someone who does a lot of Rust).
Are there even any cryptocurrencies that allowed less-safe languages like C in the first place?
In my opinion (as a Rust dev), Rust is weirdly over complicated for what they’re trying to do. Common types scripting languages are basically more than sufficient (and safe)for these applications.
It’s only a matter of time before a crypto project overplays the safety of Rust and them has a huge heist due to a logic bug, which will further contribute to jokes about Rust programmers. Most of the Rust devs I know are wary of Rust crypto projects.
In my first-hand experience interviewing at other startups (Q3 and Q4 2021) it’s definitely not competitive. Startups are unbelievably well-funded right now and capital is cheap and easy to come by. Even small startups don’t hesitate to compensate their employees well because they know it’s their only shot at attractive the type of talent that gets them to exit.
Basically, it doesn’t make sense for a startup to be frugal with compensation right now.
Unless you interpret it as their way of hiring only promising junior candidates or remote workers from locations where $175K is a lot of money?
Regardless, it’s weird to pay everyone the same amount of money because you’re basically pretending experience doesn’t matter. This leads to more experienced people leaving for other companies where they can (easily) get paid more while the less experienced people won’t leave because it’s a boost over what they’d get at other places.
I’ve worked at places with HR-mandated salary caps before. The best people always leave because there’s no hope of moving up and there’s no real incentive to work any harder than anyone else earning the same amount (as long as you avoid getting fired).
Yes! Of course it is, but employment is a market like anything else.
The difference between $175K and market rate compensation (which may be significantly higher right now, considering the job market and the skills they’re asking for) is captured entirely by the founders and investors. We shouldn’t be shaming people for expecting a higher portion of the value they create in a competitive market like this.
But the fixed salary method creates a lot of secondary problems for a company: It can become a revolving door as people join for quick experience and resume-building, but then leave as soon as they can get a higher paying job somewhere else.
> To the point they did a blog post trying to defend their use of C,
I do a lot of Rust work, but C still occupies a prominent place in my toolkit.
In fact, this is fairly standard among all of the professionals I know. The idea that companies need to abandon C and only do Rust as soon as possible is more of an idealistic idea on internet communities.
Oxide’s work is always interesting and basically a perfect confluence of all of my combined hardware and software experience to date.
However, I can’t quite get over their policy of paying everyone the same salary of $175,000. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348836 ) I’d love to apply and work on these things, but I wouldn’t love the idea of sacrificing $xxx,000 per year for the privilege of building someone else’s startup.
Does anyone know if they have some variability in equity compensation at least? I’m no stranger to taking significant compensation in startup equity, but it would have to be significant enough to make up for the significant comp reduction relative to just about every other employer in these domains.
One of my favorite employers right out of college did almost exactly this same thing: Everyone gets paid the same (although they had a couple tiers) and a lot of talk about how we’re all equal.
I believed it, until the acquisition event and I realized that the founders and early team members literally had 100-1000X or more as much equity than I did. All of the talk about paying everyone the same suddenly seemed like a cruel joke.