A senior high performer[0] at a public BigCo can relatively easily make (in total comp) 2x-3x the cash compensation of someone working for a startup.

So if you’re the sort if person who’s likely to work hard at a BigCO long enough for most of your rolling RSU grants to vest, then yes, the comp difference is that big.

[0] note that MANY senior people at BigCos are NOT high performers. So beware of comparing to things like Glassdoor comp figures, which are highly likely to be coming from non-high-performers.

This is true, though I would also add "high performer" does not just refer to your primary job function, but also the secondary job of playing BigCO's internal political games.

small companies have internal politics as well. It's not like working with people disappears. I've worked at both big and small companies, I don't really have a preference but in a big company, you can move around and keep all the good stuff if it gets a little hot under the collar. With a small company lots of times you have to leave to get a new manager or role or move up or just get a change of pace.

The continuity of a big co. can be very helpful from a salary perspective.

Yes. Assume $300k total comp at Facebook/Google/Netflix for a Senior Engineer. Getting $200k at a non unicorn startup is very rare for a Senior Engineer. $180k is more often the cap and $160k is the norm.

And while $300k assumes fairly high performance at a top public company, it's certainly not the upper bound.

TIL. Those numbers are definitively higher than I would expect. Here in Norway the average for someone with a technical or scientific degree and 5-9 years of experience in private sector is 690 000 NOK [1], or about 80 000 USD. The 90th percentile for 10 years experience is 915 000 NOK or 107 000 USD. So for me the idea of making another 100 000 USD more at another company is quite foreign.

[1] https://www.tekna.no/en/salary-and-negotiations/salary-stati...

Those numbers are accurate for the U.S.

Possibly even a little low for the Facebook / Netflix / etc tier.

Throw in stock growth for companies like Google back in the day and FB more recently. FB stock has doubled in ~2 years increasing the liquid value of employee stock compensation by nearly the same amount.

While that's true, I could invest my own funds in Google or Facebook stock and reap similar growth (depending on my access to funds to invest).

Also, some companies will have target compensation bands (I know Yahoo did) where an increase in stock price will actually result in a smaller additional grant each year.

I see that no one points this out: Dan Luu and others in this post are using 'Public Company' to refer to only a small high-growth subset of all public companies, namely Google, FB, Netflix, etc. (and perhaps Apple and Microsoft). Most other public companies: track S&P 500 or you joined at a time when your company's growth slowed down to S&P 500 or if you work at a place like IBM that underperforms S&P 500. In these cases, you aren't necessarily assured millions.

Dan Luu also has a post on this:

https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

Public companies can issue stock grants too. They tend to be much more worthwhile, too, as you can actually sell them once they vest.