patrick.net

A couple of my colleagues have gone to Apple over the last couple of years. Apple most certainly does grant stock awards and allow option sales. Both are based as a percentage of salary, and some are awarded as a signing incentive. The amounts are none of my business and I have not asked for specifics, but they have described them as, "generous." These are hardware engineers with 3-4 years of experience. Their base salaries are in the $115k neighborhood, and there are cash bonuses on top of that. The bonuses and RSUs ate performance-dependent.

So, there are not millionaires being minted daily, but folks like that could save and qualify for a jumbo loan pretty easily. If it is a DINK couple with 2x that income, it is even easier.

My $0.02.

thomas.wong1986 says

drew_eckhardt says

I have no experience with Apple specifically, although I'd expect them to be competitive with other large tech companies with 4-year compensation packages including $250-$300K worth (at grant time) of RSUs (where share prices can double or triple as they vest) to engineers with over a
decade of solid experience.

$250,000-300,000 Unless your a VP is just Laugable!

I know people got 200k rsu from google as sign-on last year as level 5 position. Suddenly, wages in some have caught up big time with inflation here. Think 120k-130k base used to be the norm for non-managerial mid career, now 150k seems to pale compared to last year offers. Again, that is biased to my sample size.

bmwman91 says

A couple of my colleagues have gone to Apple over the last couple of years. Apple most certainly does grant stock awards and allow option sales. Both are based as a percentage of salary, and some are awarded as a signing incentive. The amounts are none of my business and I have not asked for specifics, but they have described them as, "generous." These are hardware engineers with 3-4 years of experience. Their base salaries are in the $115k neighborhood, and there are cash bonuses on top of that. The bonuses and RSUs ate performance-dependent.

So, there are not millionaires being minted daily, but folks like that could save and qualify for a jumbo loan pretty easily. If it is a DINK couple with 2x that income, it is even easier.

My $0.02.

These numbers are similar to what I have heard as well. Salaries have gone up recently at several companies to around the 125-130K level for starting senior engineers which are just out of school PhDs or Masters + 4 yrs of experience. At this level, RSU/options tend to be around an average of 30K per year apart from bonus which also tends to be around that number. So someone around early 30s in places like goog,aapl,intc etc should be able to pull in close to 200K gross. So DINK with two engineers should cross 300K easily at the housing buying age of early 30s.

This salary increase is probably also why the rents in the apartment complexes are now 2500 for 2BR on average.

thomas.wong1986 says

$250,000-300,000 Unless your a VP is just Laugable!

One step below principal engineer in title. Where you might get to after 10-15 years in industry doing significant things without moving into management or taking a non technical job that doesn't pay nearly as well because you've burned out or won the startup lottery and decided something like acting might be more fun.

Many technically qualified people also feel that's not enough to compensate for employment at the big companies that make such grants.

drew_eckhardt says

Many technically qualified people also feel that's not enough to compensate for employment at the big companies that make such grants.

Yup. At some point, people realize that they need to stop trading every moment of life for money & career experience and leave some time for living. A couple of my friends at Apple basically say this, "Well, I just want to survive here for ~2 years without totally burning out. With that on my resumee, I can get a job anywhere I want after that." They are learning world-class engineering skills there for sure, but trips to China every 3-4 weeks & being on-call on weekends gets old fast. One of my friends has it figured out though, and she works 9-5, few weekends & rarely goes to China now (EE HW designer).

SFace says

But when I come back home a fatter ass after a reasonable amount of time, results speak louder than words.

Uh just so you know dude, women like men to have chubby asses

B.A.C.A.H. says

That said, for us non officer kinda folks, at best the RSUs are more like something to get new furniture with, or add to the annual IRA contribution, or (for some, not for us) maybe a DOWNPAYMENT on a car. Just as often, it's less than that.

These comments are more consistent with my 16 year career in technology. My wife is an engineer with a PhD and so I also got to see what her signing bonus and compensation was like when she got a job with one of the sexiest companies in the Bay Area.

The idea that RSUs or ISOs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars are regularly given is mistaken. This is more on the order of what happens during IPOs. Remember that RSUs and ISO are priced according to the market price at the time they are granted. So this type of compensation is at the mercy of the market. This also means that for a company like Apple or Netflix, employees have done very well in some cases. Others, not so well. Look at how much Apple and Google stock have gone up and down the last eight years.

This might explain it. Apple is now bigger than the city of Chicago and the same size as Switzerland
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46606766

FunTime says

The idea that RSUs or ISOs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars are regularly given is mistaken.

Yep.

I work in the trenches, so does my partner. Over the years, year after year (though not every single year) our employers have granted NQ, ISO, RSU. Public companies, private ("pre-IPO" for the Hipsters), big companies, small companies, middle sized companies. Companies on their way up, and also on their way down.

Sounds like you know, and like I know, and like another person (thomaswong86) who (claims to have) actually worked in such organizations knows.

Yep, working on the technology teams inventing, refining, manufacturing the stuff, or in my partners' case, doing the bean counting.

SFAce may be a cheerleader, and may be making Big Talk about the streets of Santa Clara County being paved with RSU/ISO/NQ gold, but those of us who work in the trenches know what is true.

But his cheerleading makes "fun reading", doesn't it?

thomas.wong1986 says

He disliked what he saw back in the early years how people became greedy and childish.. buying expensive toys and getting plastic surgery...

Uh, one of the first things Jobs did was lie to Woz about how much money they made on Breakout, and buying himself a sportscar. Then abandoning his girlfriend and their baby.

Yep. Jobs wasn't the saint some people portrayed him to be.