Could Facebook hire away OpenAI people just by matching their comp? Doubtful. Facebook is widely hated and embarrassing to work at. Facebook has to offer significantly more.
And if someone at OpenAI says hey Facebook just offered me more money to jump ship, that's when OpenAI says "Sorry to hear, best of luck. Seeya!"
In this scenario, you're only underpaid by staying at OpenAI if you have no sense of shame.
> Facebook is widely hated and embarrassing to work at.
Not sure it's widely hated (disclaimer: I work there), despite all the bad press. The vast majority of people I meet respond with "oh how cool!" when they hear that someone works for the company that owns Instagram.
"Embarassing to work at" - I can count on one hand the number of developers I've met who would refuse to work for Meta out of principle. They are there, but they are rarer than HN likes to believe. Most devs I know associate a FAANG job with competence (correctly or incorrectly).
> Could Facebook hire away OpenAI people just by matching their comp?
My guess is some people might value Meta's RSUs which are very liquid higher than OAI's illiquid stocks? I have no clue how equity compensation works at OAI.
Within my (admittedly limited) social circle of engineers/developers there is consensus that working at Facebook is pretty taboo. I’ve personally asked recruiters to not bother.
Honestly I’d be happy to work at any FAANG. Early FB in particular was great in terms of keeping up with friends.
I’ve only interviewed with Meta once and failed during a final interview. Aside from online dating and defense I don’t have any moral qualms regarding employment.
My dream in my younger days was to hit 500k tc and retire by 40. Too late now
By defense do you mean like weapons development, or do you mean the entire DoD-and-related contractor system, including like tiny SIBR chasing companies researching things like, uh
"Multi-Agent Debloating Environment to Increase Robustness in Applications"
Which was totally not named in a backronym-gymnastics way of remembering the lead researcher's last vacation destination or hometown or anything, probably.
> Doubtful. Facebook is widely hated and embarrassing to work at. Facebook has to offer significantly more.
I’m at a point in my career and life at 51 that I wouldn’t work for any BigTech company (again) even if I made twice what I make now. Not that I ever struck it rich. But I’m doing okay. Yes I’ve turned down overtures at both GCP, Azure, etc.
But I did work for AWS (ProServe) from the time I was 46-49 remotely knowing going in that it was a toxic shit show for both the money and for the niche I wanted to pivot to (cloud consulting) I knew it would open doors and it has.
If I were younger and still focused on money instead of skating my way to retirement working remotely, doing the digital nomad thing off an on etc, I would have no moral qualms about grinding leetcode and exchanging my labor for as much money as possible at Meta. No one is out here feeding starving children or making the world a better place working for a for profit company.
My “mission” would be to exchange as much money as possible for labor and I tell all of the younger grads the same thing.
I can't explain why but I don't think money is it. Nor a new project or whatever can't be it either. Its just too small of a value proposition when you are already in openAI making banger models used by the world.
According to reports, the comp packages were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I doubt anyone but execs are making that kind of money at OpenAI; its the sort of money you hope from a successful exit after years of efforts. I don’t blame them for jumping ship.
And if someone at OpenAI says hey Facebook just offered me more money to jump ship, that's when OpenAI says "Sorry to hear, best of luck. Seeya!"
In this scenario, you're only underpaid by staying at OpenAI if you have no sense of shame.