The Diff is a newsletter that covers inflections in finance and technology, with a focus on financial services.

The Diff

<p>We've seen some huge OpenAI compensation numbers on <a href="https://levels.fyi" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">levels.fyi</a> before, but with Zuckerberg building his superintelligence team, some crazy things have come out about OpenAI's pay:</p><p><br></p><p>In the last year, stock-based compensation has jumped more than five times the previous year, up to $4.4 BILLION. Which means that OpenAI is paying out about ~$733k in stock per employee across its 6000 employees.</p><p><br></p><p>Insane stuff, saw it from this tweet here and wanted to share it: <a href="https://x.com/deedydas/status/1942612745725304954https://x.com/deedydas/status/1942612745725304954" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://x.com/deedydas/status/1942612745725304954https://x.com/deedydas/status/1942612745725304954</a></p>

Tech

OpenAI's stock compensation numbers revealed

<div>Like seriously, most of them have 0 technical ability. They show up to meetings, and when asked about basic requirements they say "I'll ask leadership" or lean on me to tell them, or give a corporate word salad to get out of the question all together. Then, as the engineer, I'm still left with figuring out the real requirements, socializing them, getting consensus, and implementing it. </div><div><br></div><div>Aren't product managers supposed to handle the requirements gathering, socializing of ideas, getting buy in, etc etc, while the engineers go out and implement what the PM's pass along?</div><div><br></div><div>And you may say, as you go up in the engineering ladder, that is what more senior engineers do. They do all the social stuff too. But if that's the case, then my question still stands. What is the point of Product Managers? Just to tick a box on payroll and say empty corporate jargon to keep stakeholders placated?</div>

What do Product Managers even do?

<p>Joined this company 2years ago to be Fully Remote, but since a few months ago I've been forced to go to the office 2 days a week since our CEO decided to get a Company-Owned Office where I live.. And I can't change the fact that since my job turned into a Hybrid position I got depressed as... It hella sucks, but seems like Remote IT jobs are no more in Europe. </p><p><br></p><p>Those that experienced this, how did you manage? Or what did you do to try and "fit in"? Cause I cant take it anymore.</p>

Hybrid made me Depressed

<p>I see more and more talk about how AI will change the way we work, or how AI will replace more and more people in the coming years, and I'm curious to see what impact AI has <em>actually </em>had in your day-to-day.</p><p><br></p><p>I'll go first: AI has marginally improved my ability to solve problems at work because it helps me debug code, but only after I give it a ton of context. Usually, having to reiterate the context helps me more than the AI actually does in solving the problem, but I could be an outlier here because I haven't been using AI coding tools at my work just yet. Everything I've been doing with AI has been on the side, without my manager knowing lol</p>

How has AI impacted you at work?

<p>Out of FAANG and the other top tier companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Nvidia, Uber, or whatever else you guys think fits in this "top tier" category, which companies have the best ratio between pay and WLB?</p><p><br></p><p>I recognize that these top companies all likely ask for a lot from their employees, which is fine, but I'm looking specifically for the best ratio.. Like let's say OpenAI pays ~$400k and is expecting 60+ hours, then yeah that's fine, but another company might pay ~$250k and expects ~40 hours: that'd be a better deal imo.</p>

Google

Product Manager

Data Scientist

The Diff

The Diff Salarissen

Don't get lowballed

Software Engineer

Mis je jouw functietitel?