I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels. The cognitive dissonance is amazing.
Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it, and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment.
If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them.
But somehow, I'm supposed to not care about money at the same time caring about money.
I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much.
Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a year?
Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some people will just take “offer with most money” every time. Hell of a lot of people don’t.
I do think that C suite folks might not have the right vision of what “normal/comfortable” is for employees though. So they might offer a low number thinking it’s actually a “comfortable to live with at this stage of life” number and then get confused why they can’t recruit good talent and think people are obsessed with money.
First offer has gotta be within the ballpark of the right number if you don’t want your interviewee to immediately come back to you with a much higher number!
I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying.
For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.
Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck.
I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but it's not to the "worry not about money."
$200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest? That person can probably retire early in a few years.
I think if your kind of comfortable is needing to clear 500k or million in comp a year then you aren’t not in scrappy startup mode! This is fine but money out the door is money that then needs to get raised in early rounds
I dunno, I do think oxide for basically everyone who joins is asking for them to get pay cuts but I would really hope that people would still at least putting some stuff into savings.
And like … even if the equity is variable if people are getting even a bit of equity, that might end up as something in the end.
Saying this I think with the recent raise the comp could be made higher just to make the buffer even better. There’s definitely an opportunity cost
Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.
Just about any engineer who isnt independently wealthy is:
- recovering from layoffs and a period of unemployment at a high-COL cost structure
- facing layoffs with the above salients
- facing an imperative to insulate their fucking house with cash for their turn in the above crosshairs
Competence and a willingness to work hard stopped equalling access to basic necessities in November of 2022 - February of 2023, depending on how you count, and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
"200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.
My only reservation is that I’ve interviewed with or worked for multiple companies that made some claim about paying everyone the same and there was always some loophole: The company might have a fixed base pay but then use very different equity grants. One company claimed to give everyone the same base comp and equity but then it was discovered that some people were getting huge annual “guaranteed bonuses” that were effectively base compensation. It has left me tired of seeing companies push the idea of everyone being paid the same while not being open about the entire compensation structure.
EDIT: To be 100% clear, I don’t know what Oxide’s entire comp structure looks like. The examples above were for past companies I worked for.
reminded - the "amateur" (vs. paid "professional") requirement in Olympic and other sports, i.e. participation for the sake of only pure sport spirit, back then came from the aristocracy who could invest a lot of time in those sports without having to take care of making a living.
And when wealthy execs and founders tell what they want people who is interested in the mission/vision/whatever other than money - well, it is the same class thing. The ones who need money naturally can't have the required purity of vision as it is clouded by that lowly need for money.
Because, you know, you better have the same amount of skin in the game as I do.
That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the same. When I transitioned to software development (from basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my first software job, they were all because I liked the particular product in some way or another, and what the compensation was is basically the least interesting thing for me.
Of course, some level of base payment is needed, because I still needed to pay rent, but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. And no, I'm just an individual contributor who wants to like what I work with, not an executive, manager or similar.
For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business.
And, enough money can buy independenance in that you can get this flexibility of doing as you choose.
Yeah, I guess I've been lucky to be able to chose daily jobs in the past that basically gives me what you would create outside of work, except I got a fixed payment each month for doing something I really enjoyed. So I never had the need to do that stuff outside of work to derive enjoyment of most of my time, which I guess is my top priority and been most of my life.
If you have a team full of people who are just there for the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is increasing the paycheck. Which startups can't do in a crunch.
I chose my current job against competing offers because it was a good thing for the world, but I would not have taken significantly reduced pay for it. Let me tell you why: nobody that insists on paying you below market rates is going to treat you right. Some of the worst professional interactions I've ever dealt with involved high ranking individuals at nonprofits. These were orgs may have had genuinely good missions, but also paid rank and file employees quite poorly. On the other side, the 3x above market rate job is just a fantasy. I could believe it if you were talking about a 20% bonus.
That is, the work itself should be interesting and fulfilling.
Yes, we need money, but when the work relationship approaches being purely transactional the whole thing is demeaning for everyone and less effective.
Boy, it takes a lot of luck and skill and privilege to be able to shop for (or offer) work like this, and money is still important.
While this is true for most of the cases, it's not the case always. There are definitely jobs I'd work for less than I make at the job now and there are jobs which are considered "dream jobs", but ultimately there needs to be a solid base to make you and your family feel comfortable if you're spending at least 1/3 of your day on.
I used to have a manager that gave me this line. He left this company to join another one, had multiple offers, and told me he accepted the highest one because "it's all about the money".
They know, we know, everybody knows, but that's not the playbook.
