Hello, I&#x27;ve been working as a systems&#x2F;security engineer in the NYC area for 8 years. This has been at a mixture of mid-sized &amp; large, privately held, technology organizations. Recently, I started thinking of making a move and have been trying to gather some information about average salaries using various resources (HN, Glassdoor, Quora, H1B databases).<p>I knew that at organizations like GOOG&#x2F;MSFT, the compensation comprises of a base salary + bonus + stock that usually vests over 4 years with a 1-year cliff and is refreshed every year. From what I&#x27;ve experienced, large, privately held organizations only offer a base salary + a bonus.<p>Based on the information that I&#x27;ve found, barring outliers, the base salaries for people with my experience at profitable public &amp; private organizations seem to be in the 150-200K range and the bonuses in the 10-20% range (the exception to this are the privately held hedge&#x2F;quant funds with bonuses in the 50-150% range).<p>The above didn&#x27;t come as a surprise but the amount of stock that employees seem to receive at public companies shocked me. 70-80K seemed normal and &gt;100K wasn&#x27;t  unheard of. And, at senior roles, one&#x27;s base salary doesn&#x27;t seem to sky rocket but the stock does (Someone told me that senior staff engineers @ Google could have a base salary of 220K and stocks &gt; 200K).<p>Unfortunately, I haven&#x27;t interviewed in a very long time so it&#x27;s hard for me to verify these numbers. I was wondering if people who have more insight into this could shed some light on the accuracy of these figures? If these are true, then it seems like a really unwise decision (at least from a financial perspective) to opt to work at privately held organizations unless it is a Renaissance&#x2F;Bridgewater. I feel that beyond a certain threshold, hopping jobs for raises &amp; fighting for a small increase in your bonus may not necessarily be worth the effort but these stock numbers over a few years could end up influencing major life decisions.<p>Thank you.
Ask HN: Do you loose out on money by working at large, private tech. companies?