That's actually so much of why people feel underpaid. Pay varies incredibly widely. The job also varies quite widely, but when you're not in the job, IC sounds a lot like IC. You could be an IC with a total compensation of $80k (and actually getting $80k), you could be an IC with a TC of $300k (and actually getting $300k), and you could be an IC with a TC of $750k (and actually getting something like $200k-250k because your employer is private and your equity is all hypothetical)

If your employee is private, it is silly to count non liquid statistically meaningless “equity” as part of your compensation.

“compensation” is something I can trade for cash once I have earned it and then exchange for good and services.

It's also silly to discount the value of non-liquid equity to zero, unless you think there is literally zero chance of experiencing a liquidity event.

If only 1 out of 10 startups “succeed” where success is defined by “the investors got their money back”. What are he chances for you as an employee getting any meaningful returns? The investors are well diversified, you aren’t as an employee.

Besides that, it takes the average startup 7-10 years to exit. As opposed to a public company where you can diversify your risk every three to six months depending on your vesting schedule.

It’s also incorrect to assume the expected value of the equity is zero. It’s much more useful to model it as E(x)=x*p(x), especially if you have some useful information on estimating p(x) that a person working at a startup might.

Every startup thinks their company is going to be successful. No matter what the person thinks who is working their, they don’t know when the investors will cut their losses or when the market isn’t hungry for money losing startups and the VCs have to put off going public…like now.

Paper equity for late stage startups can be traded for cash in secondary markets like EquityZen

If your company allows it and it will probably be at a discount.

Only if the company allows it. Many don’t.

It's not what you make, it's what you keep. That 300K+ in SV comes coupled to an extreme cost of living. :)

SV COL is high, but I don't think it is high enough to explain SV pay.

Looking at a few non-SV cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Nashville, Orlando, Sacramento, Austin, and Fresno it costs $14-18k/year more to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area than to rent in those other places.

The average monthly spending on food in SF is about $150/month more than the US average. That's under $2K/year.

California does have a high income tax. For someone moving from somewhere else to California you might have to pay them maybe 10% more to compensate for that.

Putting it all together, a job that pays around $100k/year in non-SV non-NY decent sized cities should need to pay if we are generous maybe around $140k/year due to higher COL in the Bay Area.

That Bay Area tech pay is way more than that suggests that something other than SV COL is the main factor.

Good thing there are such things as remote jobs…

But you're not going to get paid SV salaries working remotely (yes, I work remotely because living in CA is not appealing to me).

I do and so does my whole team. I live in Seattle but a lot of our guys are in the south making six figure salaries. Not being paid the average salary seems to be fud I’ve heard from anti-remote people.

By “in the south making six figure salaries” do you mean $300k on 4 YOE?

My target is $250k, I'm getting $350k due to stock growth and I am remote with 6 YOE.

$200K with 15 YOE - I think that's pretty typical. I know people with even more experience who make less. Recruiters I talk to balk when I ask for $250K.

The article lists out the average software developer salary as $120k. I have no idea if this is true (it sounds low to me), but I don't hear people saying that $120k remote jobs don't exist...

People are saying $350k remote jobs don't exist. Which obviously is untrue (go work at Airbnb). But they're exceedingly rare.

I work for BigTech remotely. My comp may be about 10% lower than the equivalent position on the west coast according to the internal “anonymous” compensation sharing Slack channel.

It also doesn't help when the previous administration specifically targets you with punitive tax policies.