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Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines reveal salary, hiring bonus, and stock award ranges by level
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Technology
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so you get hired at level 70 and get 310k of stock? Is this normal for large tech companies? Do you have to sign some kind of blood oath to ~~Bill Gates~~ current CEO Satya Nadella to say you will remain there for n years? Presumably you can't just get the stock and fuck off? Also, why is stock based compensation (potentially) so huge compared to base pay? Is this to make sure employees work extra super duper hard, or some way to reduce taxes?
Level 70 corresponds to distinguished engineers, very few engineers have that level at MS (and Google etc). You don't get hired at that level unless you're already a computer science celebrity.
And yes you have to stick around because the 310k of stock will likely come with a vesting schedule, usually 4 years, i.e. you get 1/4 after one year and the rest gradually over the course of the 3 remaining years.
It's bigger than the base pay because stocks is basically the company printing money. Also it's only an initial grant, while the salary has to be paid every years until the contract is terminated.
You can assume contracts are involved in those c-level deals. Breaking contract usually involves renegotiating the shares to some degree. The stock options are certainly a means to consider them stakeholders so there is more incentive to produce.