I have first party information, two years out of date. Do you have contradictory first party information? Yes/no will be sufficient for me to adjust my priors and I will be grateful.
According to https://news.efinancialcareers.com/ch-en/307393/jane-street-... "Last year, Jane Street's graduate hires straight from college were said to be paid a $200k annual base salary, plus a $100k sign-on bonus, plus a $100k-$150k guaranteed performance bonus."
Am I the only one who thinks "$100k-$150k guaranteed performance bonus" is a weird concept?
I get how maybe "bonus" can count as "not salary" by being paid as lump sum. But "guaranteed" and "performance" going together? What's the deal here, even?!
>But "guaranteed" and "performance" going together? What's the deal here, even?!
After interviewing with a bunch of similar finance shops over the past year, I think whoever reported that info omitted one important thing: the "guaranteed" part of "guaranteed performance bonus" applies to the first year of employment only (and it isn't a secret, every single recruiter and hiring manager made that very explicit and clear).
With this context in mind, it makes perfect sense, because you don't know how things work at the new company, you will have lots of learning to do, you are not sure of how performance bonus is structured or what goes into it, you don't know the details of how to affect it in your favor, etc. With that in mind, it makes sense for those companies to reassure candidates that you have a nice headstart by guaranteeing your performance bonus for the first year, to allow you to focus on learning all of the things relevant to your position without having to stress much about the performance bonus.
Think of this guaranteed bonus a retention tool (we see some churn after bonus period) - I also have 3 tiers/ratings for individual accomplishment and 3 for group. If you bag top tier for both, you are getting promoted plus the bonus is bigger than your base plus you get serious chunk in stock. It is nearly impossible to get top tier across and in my team of nearly a thousand people, I had three that did it.
The correct metric is not what the employee’s salary is, but the opportunity cost of their time. If all your engineers are working on urgent stuff, and each engineer adds in $1-2m of revenue a year, then the cost to your business of taking them off feature work to do recruiting is not $150/hr.
