I don't think benefits are the main reason to work anywhere -- doing meaningful work and working with great people far exceeds financial benefit, and salary/bonus/equity should dominate fringe benefits. However, why do benefits packages need to be uniform?
I personally hate having "benefits" in my compensation which come out of my salary which I don't really want. Sometimes companies get tax savings (i.e. they can deduct, I can't), but VERY RARELY do they get actual dollar savings (health insurance is one weird case, due to some people being more expensive to insure than they could ever pay, and that risk being spread across a group).
My personal ideal benefits package is:
0) Private office, 24x7 hvac, a door, decent security, locking storage, parking on-site ideally with a guard or gate. Essentially non-negotiable (or, wfh). EV parking would be nice too soon.
1) Max 401k match and maybe even profit sharing (in California, I'd happily take $1 of salary and put it into employer 401k match) -- I think you can get up to 46k/yr max, so 15k personal contribution, 5% salary match, and the rest as profit share up to 46k.
2) FSA, Transportation accounts (fully deductible for employer, and non-taxed). I ended up buying a bunch of air filters and condoms when I had an FSA, and I guess I could find a use for a TSA.
3) As much hardware as I realistically can use ($10-20k/yr -- not just computers, but I'd love to have a budget for a hw lab). Someone recently questioned whether a $4k per developer laptop budget was legitimate, and I seriously question why someone would deny a $1-2k marginal expense on a worker generating >$500k/yr in returns.
4) Conference/books/etc. (time is the big cost for the company there, not the cost) -- and "if you're speaking at a conference related to work, we cover nice travel)
5) Free food/etc. (i.e. RG's "unlimited Seamless"). Bad food is of negative value, since I'll feel obligated to eat it.
6) Decent travel when travel is required. Not first class, but helping you make it less painful -- either letting you do your own bookings (I'm better than any corp travel agent I've used), or doing it for you. Optimize for ff status. I pretty much need a $65/day car vs. a $30/day car (and tend to pay for the upgrade out of pocket when it's not covered), but would in exchange prefer a more complex $300 routed ticket vs. a $500 direct flight, and would stay on starwood points sometimes vs. paying cash.
7) I prefer to keep my health insurance separate from the company, for practical and philosophical reasons. (I pay $118/mo for better coverage than ~any company I've seen). Give me $5k/yr into my HSA instead, and pay any other marginal insurance benefit to me as extra salary or more RAM or something.
8) Use of company resources for personal projects (e.g. hosting a tech user's group, or helping friends launch their own startups by letting them use conference rooms when meeting with people, etc. etc.
I'm curious if people are "picky" like me, or would just prefer a bunch of benefits as a package. There are HR reasons to give everyone the same thing, but IMO one of the advantages of being a small startup is being able to customize packages for people. If I hired someone with sick kids, I'd obviously make sure there were a group health insurance plan for him or her. If I hired someone who was on an H1B or otherwise needed citizenship sponsorship, I'd call in favors with undersecretaries to write letters on his behalf. etc. There's no need for a small company to act like a megacorp.
> I don't think benefits are the main reason to work anywhere -- doing meaningful work and working with great people far exceeds financial benefit
You've got to be kidding me. I mean that's nice. But it's just so idealistic and so outside of the realities of the vast majority of people that live on planet Earth. I just see too much anti-money stuff on HN sometimes. It's as if everyone thinks their startup is changing the world for the better but many times it's just some CRUD based marketing tool or something ... not exactly feeding kids Sudan.
> (I pay $118/mo for better coverage than ~any company I've seen)
I don't know how old you are but that is unlikely to last. If it does, you are in such a minority here that I don't see how that furthers a point (along with the "money's no big thang" deal, it's a very anomalous situation). Just being honest.
FSA got gimped in the past year or so - you can't use it to expense non-prescription items.
Where are you getting your better coverage than at a company? I heard group coverage was insanely difficult to get outside the umbrella of a large risk pool (ie, corporate)...
Most of the times benefits offered are optional - I've never been forced into any benefit at my company. Also the cost for benefits are usually better for larger pools than smaller so some of the not-as-popular options you state would cost the company an inordinate amount if you were the only subscriber.
I'm pretty healthy and single, so when I priced my personal $3500 deductible HSA (+$3500/yr into the HSA, which is like a Roth) vs. any group plans I've found, I ended up with much better coverage and pricing. I think the issue is we have people in multiple states, so it was hard to get good group coverage.
I forgot about FSA reductions (which were already pretty bad when you have both an HSA and FSA). I probably don't have anything useful to spend FSA money on.
I believe companies do not offer ginormous 401k matching because 401k plans can't be too "top-heavy". So for that to work, the less compensated at the company have to contribute a lot.
Other employer contributions. If the plan document permits, the employer can make additional contributions (other than matching contributions) for participants, including participants who choose not to contribute elective deferrals to the 401(k) plan. If the 401(k) plan is top-heavy, the employer may be required to make minimum contributions on behalf of certain employees. In general, a plan is top-heavy if the account balances of key employees exceed 60% of the account balances of all employees. The rules relating to the determination of whether a plan is top-heavy are complex. Please refer to section 1.416-1 of the Income Tax Regulations for the rules describing how to determine whether a plan is top-heavy.
Yeah. the "Safe Harbor" thing is weird, but it's probably realistic to have $45k/yr in extra compensation for every employee if you're a 5-10 person shop where everyone is a professional (with high compensation). I've seen it work at consultancies where everyone was a partner or otherwise highly compensated, but I've never seen it at a company which had receptionists, etc. (You could probably hire through a temp agency or contractor for things like janitorial/reception/etc. if you wanted to get around this)
Just among YC companies from one public list I saw, I'd consider highly meaningful:
Errplane, Microryza, Watsi, Eligible, Plivo, Matterport, PlanGrid, PerVices, Parse, Meteor, Comprehend, DrChrono, Mailgun, Pebble, Upverter, AeroFS, Stripe, Mixpanel, Octopart, ...
(Personal bias: healthcare, developer tools, hard tech -- other people probably have different preferences)
Tesla or SpaceX or Cryptography Research or Flylogic might top these, but any would be better than Wells Fargo, IMO.
>doing meaningful work and working with great people
overall this is true, but its as rare as a finding an employee like the one in the article to accept accept below market rates and less than stellar benefits.
The irony is that all the places I've found where you do meaningful work ALSO pay well. Some of them do just pay high cash comp with minimal benefits, though, and some startups do large equity (1-5%) with less cash comp for a year or so (80k/yr vs. 120-150k).
(The exception was government contracting, where it was >$250k/yr but the most meaningless work, 3 year old broken Dell laptops, and generally horrible.)
I personally hate having "benefits" in my compensation which come out of my salary which I don't really want. Sometimes companies get tax savings (i.e. they can deduct, I can't), but VERY RARELY do they get actual dollar savings (health insurance is one weird case, due to some people being more expensive to insure than they could ever pay, and that risk being spread across a group).
My personal ideal benefits package is: 0) Private office, 24x7 hvac, a door, decent security, locking storage, parking on-site ideally with a guard or gate. Essentially non-negotiable (or, wfh). EV parking would be nice too soon.
1) Max 401k match and maybe even profit sharing (in California, I'd happily take $1 of salary and put it into employer 401k match) -- I think you can get up to 46k/yr max, so 15k personal contribution, 5% salary match, and the rest as profit share up to 46k.
2) FSA, Transportation accounts (fully deductible for employer, and non-taxed). I ended up buying a bunch of air filters and condoms when I had an FSA, and I guess I could find a use for a TSA.
3) As much hardware as I realistically can use ($10-20k/yr -- not just computers, but I'd love to have a budget for a hw lab). Someone recently questioned whether a $4k per developer laptop budget was legitimate, and I seriously question why someone would deny a $1-2k marginal expense on a worker generating >$500k/yr in returns.
4) Conference/books/etc. (time is the big cost for the company there, not the cost) -- and "if you're speaking at a conference related to work, we cover nice travel)
5) Free food/etc. (i.e. RG's "unlimited Seamless"). Bad food is of negative value, since I'll feel obligated to eat it.
6) Decent travel when travel is required. Not first class, but helping you make it less painful -- either letting you do your own bookings (I'm better than any corp travel agent I've used), or doing it for you. Optimize for ff status. I pretty much need a $65/day car vs. a $30/day car (and tend to pay for the upgrade out of pocket when it's not covered), but would in exchange prefer a more complex $300 routed ticket vs. a $500 direct flight, and would stay on starwood points sometimes vs. paying cash.
7) I prefer to keep my health insurance separate from the company, for practical and philosophical reasons. (I pay $118/mo for better coverage than ~any company I've seen). Give me $5k/yr into my HSA instead, and pay any other marginal insurance benefit to me as extra salary or more RAM or something.
8) Use of company resources for personal projects (e.g. hosting a tech user's group, or helping friends launch their own startups by letting them use conference rooms when meeting with people, etc. etc.
I'm curious if people are "picky" like me, or would just prefer a bunch of benefits as a package. There are HR reasons to give everyone the same thing, but IMO one of the advantages of being a small startup is being able to customize packages for people. If I hired someone with sick kids, I'd obviously make sure there were a group health insurance plan for him or her. If I hired someone who was on an H1B or otherwise needed citizenship sponsorship, I'd call in favors with undersecretaries to write letters on his behalf. etc. There's no need for a small company to act like a megacorp.