You are much more likely to get fired and lose all your income than for the stock to lose that much value, so the difference in risk between stock and cash is therefore minimal.

Edit: Just to clarify, $300k as a senior engineer is without any stock appreciation at all. I made $250k as one step below senior without any stock appreciation at all. My point about significant stock changes is for significant stock changes downwards, meaning if the Google stock somehow lost 50% of their value or something like that.

> My point about significant stock changes is for significant stock changes downwards

My point was a more holistic view. It's great that there is a 95% chance that your stock RSUs will increase. But if there is a 90% chance that within 3 years it's a 15% increase or more, you should rather use the 15% increased figure for calculation instead. And then the risk is much higher because it's not just stock not going down, but stock not going up as quickly as it did before.

But I use the 0% figure, so it is how much the company paid and not how much I get. If you count stock appreciation then a simple senior engineer can make 400-500k or more, but people don't really count that.

IDK for me personally that's the metric I'd use when comparing jobs/careers. From your statements alone, it can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in difference. That's not something to gloss over.

Right, my point is that if you count it as 0% it is significantly better than money, and even with it at 0% the money is still extremely good.

Not sure what you mean by that. Anyways, if given the choice, I think I'd prefer GAFAM for the lower burnout risk alone. Comp is definitely more than enough, and likely higher than what you'd get in finance. I'm getting offtopic but if I start a company and it fails and I have a burnout then I feel like I've done a meaningful journey. If on the other hand I join a company where tons of people burn out then I burn out... that's just stupidity :).