This is misleading. His compensation may have been effectively $10M last year, but it's almost certainly based on a stock grant several years in the past. Twitter did not offer him $10M/year, they offered him some probability of $250k/year and a small chance of $10M/year. Now the bet has paid off and he's collecting, but it's incorrect to compare a winning lottery ticket to how many lottery tickets are being offered to current hires.
> At Hotel Tonight, which offers a mobile app for last-minute hotel bookings, CEO Sam Shank described staging the office to appear extra lively for a prospective hire. He roped in two employees for a game of ping-pong and positioned another group right by the bar...It worked: the recruit signed on and built a key piece of the company's software.<p>I don't know what's more disturbing:<p>1. That seeing employees playing ping pong and sitting at a bar would mean anything at all to a highly-sought after and ostensibly experienced candidate.<p>2. That CEOs apparently believe these things can convince the most desirable candidates to join their companies.
Most examples given are for VP of engineering and other technical management roles. If you are a plain-vanilla engineer (from the article), no $10 million or $1 million for you. Maybe a time slot for playing ping-pong. Please don't try to break your head trying to figure out how to be 10x or 100x or whatever. Totally different skills.
<i>Twitter pays engineer $10 million as Silicon Valley tussles for talent</i><p>He may be an engineer but he got the $10 Mil for being "The senior vice president of engineering"
Startup compensation is weird. Pretty much everyone makes about the same amount (currently, $100-150k for engineers and executives) but equity allotments are <i>massively</i> skewed. Equity in the VC-funded world exacerbates inequality monstrously, because management often takes 10-100+ times more per person.<p>Personally, I don't think it's worth taking equity seriously unless (a) it's public stock, which has a published value, or (b) you know the cap table. If you don't get to see the cap table and term sheets, that employee equity is pretty meaningless-- not worth taking a pay cut or working typical startup hours.