Post

Very appropriate May Day blog post. Compensation was one of the cool and appealing things I notice when I looked at the job posts the other day and noticed they were competitive and the same across the board

very interesting. Thank you! Sounds like it is quite close to coop values. But you’re not a coop, right?

This model seems amazing. I can see it promoting a lot of earnest collaboration and making teams tons more cohesive and, I guess, "mission-minded"? IDK how to put it without sounding all hail corporate. Hopefully it catches more attention and one day more of us will have gigs in this kind of setup.

I’ve always wondered how does equity and power dynamics play into all this? I’d assume the founders and c level execs still have more power and compensation in other ways given they interface with the board and investors compared to engineers and sales.

1. equity compensation is variable, across the company 2. cash compensation is equal: @bcantrill.bsky.social makes the same $ i do. 3. ultimately, the buck does stop at steve and bryan, so there is a form of power there, sure

The variable equity compensation seems, in my mind, like it would negate a fair bit of the value. Do you not feel like that? I definitely appreciate the *floor* as a helpful forcing function for hiring the best/flexible positions… but the rest seems somewhat muted by variable equity.

Got some comments that support people don’t deserve $200k/year and all I can think of is youtu.be/qyIyT2qTtzY

NGL, I would go back to my barista gig in a heartbeat if it paid what it was worth. Throwing dozens of milkshakes an hour, at $7 a pop, for 8-12 hours a day is worth way more than $300/week.

i say the same re: pizza

Even if you think that support is somehow “lower” than engineering (which I also take issue with!), everyone deserves to be well paid for their work. Yes, even the jobs you somehow think are beneath you.

I had a gig for a while where I had to spend one day a week in support. It was internal tech support only, but it was still way more stressful than my engineering duties. It was eventually handed over to a proper tech support team and they did a much better job of it than us engineers.

Related: In early days Silicon Valley lore, the practice of granting stock options to employees at all levels was a distinctive feature of SV startup culture. SV lost this value somewhere along the way. Now options are hoarded by execs.

goodness support folks definitely deserve all that compensation, they need nerves of steel and are the first line of defense against the End User