How Tech Salaries Work 💸, AI Chat with Google UX Lead, I'm moving?| Biz Analyst Diary

Last week, I found out my ex-co-worker became a millionaire. So this is how tax salaries work. Base salary, bonus, stock option. Now it's worth $400k. But, you actually need to go shopping. So what do you spend the most of your time on? Now that there's AI. They don't have it in New York. So last week, my ex-co-worker told me that he almost became a millionaire from his salaries. And I was like, what? So this is how tax salaries work. There are three components to it. The base salary, the bonus, and the stock option. Which is how people could become insanely rich or not. So first, for base salary. You can usually find the base salary range on most US job descriptions. And in the US, your base salaries are paid every two weeks. Second part is bonuses. Bonuses can have two types. One is annual bonus, which is usually 10 to 20% of your base salary. And insider tip, if you're on the revenue driving teams in tech, in sales, partnerships, BD, the bonus tends to be closer to 20%. Then there's also sign-on bonus. It's a one-time payment. Usually it's around 20k to 60k, depending on your years of experiences. Then the third part, the stock, or companies call it equity. This is the juicy part that people could potentially get really rich or not. And you will see why. So in tech, there are two types of stock. The most common one is RSUs. And that's what most big public tech companies like Google, Netflix, even Spotify, who give their employees. Basically, RSU is like, they award you a dollar amount, let's say $100,000 worth of stock. If the company stock is $100, then you get 1,000 shares. But there's a catch. Obviously, the company is smart, right? They don't want you to just work there for two months, get all the stock and quit and then become really rich. No. So there's something called a vest and a cliff. Vest determines the frequency when the stock will be vested or released to you. And for Spotify, it was vested over four years. That's kind of the phrasing you hear. And some companies are even more strict where there's a cliff. You have to work certain months or certain years before your stock even starts investing. So now, how did my coworker or how do people get rich from this? Basically, when the stock price shot up 4x, your stock value is also 4x. So if you were given $100k worth, now it's worth $400k. But if the stock goes down, then your value could also go down too. And because Albert, my boyfriend, also just finished his MBA, and as he's reviewing multiple offers, which part of the salary should you negotiate first? First, you always, always start negotiating with your base salary for two reasons. One, your base salary is tied to your bonus and your promotions, right? When you get promoted, it's based off of your base salary. Then you negotiate your stock, hoping that, you know, there's long-term upside and hopefully the company does well. Then the last thing to negotiate is the sign-on bonus. Pro tip, most of the time, sign-on bonus actually comes from a different call center than your team's budget. So most of the time, they're more lenient on giving you sign-on bonus. And if you want to hear more about the financial parts of working in tech, comment the word tech and I will share more in the future. I'm going to meet my friend at the Google office. She's a designer there. She actually now lives in London. It's been a while since I worked from an actual office at a tech company. So we got a little coffee. So much hair. That's a lot. You're going to get a shootout. This is Juliette. What do you do at Google? Tell the audience how big of a goal boss you are. I'm a UX lead for Google Shopping. You're elite now. I drive a lot of vision work and strategy. So what do you spend the most of your time on now that there's AI? Previously when I was doing vision work or when I was experimenting with the AI shopping stuff, we would prototype things or write code really quickly. It's faster to prototype now and people can actually feel it and you can kind of understand what's feasible. I feel like you don't need to build a perfect thing with AI. Oh seriously. Yeah, you just experiment, play around with it, get feedback, show people what you build. Yeah, I feel like I'm not using AI as much because the work that I'm doing is so like visioning or it's so day-to-day execution. It sounds like it's more high-level identifying opportunities, right? When I became more senior in my role, less about doing, more about like delegating. Yeah. And like enabling and influencing. So you're trying to be like, okay, what's next? Like how could we push this project forward? I'm working on my app as well and I feel like now my day job and my night job feels really similar. That's good. I love when people have a nine-to-five and they're also building something. Because at some point you realize you're not your job. You're very good. You're good at asking questions. If you also use AI tools like Cloud or Cursor to get work done, then this is for you. Most people use AI Assistant to write code or draft content. But the moment you ask it to do something, send an email, update a spreadsheet, log a task, it hits a wall because it can't actually connect to all your apps. And that's where Zapier MCP comes in. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's basically a bridge that lets your AI agent take real action across more than 9,000 apps directly from tools like Cloud Code or Cursor. Let's say halfway through building my app Bloom, I thought of a feature that I wanted to add. Instead of stopping to go write it down, I can tell Cloud to save it to Notion and Zapier MCP handled it instantly. Never had to break my workflow. And if you want something even more robust, Zapier SDK is the same idea. But built for when you're actually working in code, you can plug your AI coding agent into 9,000 apps with auth, governance, and reliability built in. So your workflows don't break. More control, more reliability, and same ecosystem. So if you feel limited by your AI tools, check out Zapier MCP in the link below. Ice Americano. It's been so hot these days. Quick update on my app Bloom. I've been working with a product designer. She's actually my IG real editor. I realized she was this whole time by coding on the side. She got so good at it. I love when people put themselves out there because when you do that, not only do you show resilience, you show courage, you show ambition and drive. Because a lot of people want to do things until they have to do it and they freeze. But I think this is a really great start where we see everything When we're talking about like the UI UX, I realized it's just like editing a video. You start with a bunch of footage and then you start funneling down, funneling down. A lot of people tend to think about the design, like the little color, everything. But to my designer's point, you gotta think about what the strategy is, what your users are. And so now we're really just focusing on, okay, what is our MVP and what are the core features that we want to build out? We're in Boston for our friend's wedding. We're gonna go get some coffee. Where are we going? Guys, how do you say it? They don't have it in New York. I didn't do my makeup yet. This is my bare face. I'll be the smoked salmon avocado egg sandwich. Whoa. In Taiwan, you have those like I usually never wear dresses, but I really like this dress. Friend gifted me. It's like the perfect summer dress. Did you finish tennis? I did. Oh my god. It was hot. I think I need to cancel my lesson tomorrow. Let us see it. Sunburnt now. Oh my god. I did have the sleeves on. So on today's agenda, I have a meeting and scripting this YouTube video because my content calendar is looking a little bit full. Okay, then I need to film the lesson 10 reel tonight so that I can film tomorrow afternoon.