You only get good options these days if you're one of the founders. I was the first regular employee for a YC graduate and the stock options were the same scammy, diluting bullshit.
Stock is a scam unless they are grants of actual shares in a publicly traded company that you are permitted to sell immediately if you want to. Anything else is a shell game of some sort in practice. Sure, a few guys win the lottery, but you won't. Not statistically, that is. Your options will either never vest, get diluted to hell, get Zucked away from you, or remain eternally locked up in a private company. Even when you do get cashed out, it's seldom for much. A friend of mine (who practically singlehandedly wrote their whole data ingest system) got $50k from his options when the place he worked got acquired. Spread over his time at the company and divided into his salary, it was equivalent to around a 5% raise. Peanuts.
The "$10k to $50k per day" nonsense from the matt.sh article is bad accounting of the handful of devs who did win the stock option lottery while ignoring the devs who didn't and the differences between them (luck and politics).
If you can't use it to buy a hamburger tomorrow, it's not actual pay.
The industry is already going Galt. I quit years ago and am now writing a game while living for peanuts in Mexico, along with a friend who did the same.
The best dev I know works for Corsair and basically does nothing at all, working from home, while making $150k to occasionally poke some hardcore OBS code.
Another skilled dev I know is about to buy some land in the Rockies, build an Uncle Ted cabin, and just retire to the woods. He's 31, I think, and writes drivers for a living.
It's really hard to keep them. They burn out so fast under the pressures. Retarded corporate crunchtime culture is a big reason games suck so bad now. The good devs are fucking off to the woods or writing their own rogue-lite tower defense monster girl hentai game and publishing on Steam for $10.
They do. I once worked in the same building (different company) as an ex Valve core engine dev. Dude practically co-invented deferred shading. He made $750k/yr back in the early 2000's, but the tradeoff is hell. 80+ hours of nothing but crunch. He nearly died from health issues due to stress. Later he went to Unity, then was doing his own shit when I met him.
The catch is that the best devs command a premium so it's rather expensive to slap on golden handcuffs. Big competition can simply pay $100k/yr more and poach them instantly. Little guys can simply not care how many hours they (don't) work and poach them without too much effort.
Some of them did, but much of the "talent" they hired wasn't very useful anyway. They hired 100 useless schmucks for every "rare" developer that they kept away from the competition.
Lots of the modern mid-level bloat came from Job Justification. Can't justify your six figure manager job if you're not managing people. Can't justify making more than the other manager if you don't manage more people than him. Can't justify handing out a promotion if there aren't more people being managed than before.
In more normal times, budgets limited this sort of chicanery. For the past few decades, Wall Street, VCs, and the Fed have been pumping endless free money into big corporations for various unusual and unsustainable reasons. It's starting to unravel now though. Grab some popcorn.
Supposedly it would drop about four inches if we took all the boats out. Or so I've heard. So all we have to do is take the largest boats out. You know, the ones shipping in cheap garbage from China.
Though seriously, I heard it on some show once. Who knows.
Either way, as an avid ocean-life lover, I wholeheartedly support rising oceans. You should too, unless you hate the whales. They deserve the space more than we do. Or at least more than people who live within a few inches of sea level do.
But, the global warming alarmist argument isn't so naive. They claim that the glaciers on top of land are also melting, which would be analogous to you adding another ice cube to your already full glass.
Their estimates of glacier volume are way off, of course. They don't account for new snowfall due to changes in weather patterns. They also wildly overestimate how much of this landlocked ice would actually melt; imagine thinking that any significant part of Greenland is going to melt because it got 1C warmer. Or 10C warmer. On average.