Compare · Compensation desk · 3 minutes
Headline compensation is a marketing number: it omits the hours, haircuts nothing, and counts paper as cash. This instrument settles two offers the only way that survives contact with a calendar — total realistic comp divided by the hours each offer actually takes from your life.
Offer A
The realistic figure, not the target sheet.
Annual vest at today's paper value.
Offer B
Shared assumptions
The paper-to-cash haircut: liquidity, vesting risk, your belief. Public RSUs near 90; early-stage options far lower.
Nothing you type leaves this page. The instrument runs entirely in your browser; there is no account and no record.
Offer A.
$133/h vs $124/h
effective hourly value, offer A against offer B
| Offer A | Offer B | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash — base plus expected bonus | — | — |
| Equity, after your confidence haircut | — | — |
| Total realistic comp | — | — |
| Hours of your life, per year | — | — |
| Effective hourly value | — | — |
| If equity is worth | Leading offer | Hourly gap |
|---|---|---|
| — | — | — |
| — | — | — |
| — | — | — |
Trajectory is unpriced. A title, a scope, a mentor — the offer that pays less per hour this year can pay for the whole decade. This table settles the present, not the future.
The 55-hour offer has a habit of becoming the 60-hour reality. Re-run with each offer's hours at +10% and see whether the verdict survives.
Cliffs and vesting schedules are flattened into an annual figure here. If a cliff is close or a schedule back-loaded, discount that offer's equity harder than the shared haircut.
Everything below is calculated from your inputs. The equity confidence is an assumption you control; the scenarios test 30%, your figure and 100% regardless.
total = base + bonus + equity_face × confidence
hours = (weekly_hours + commute) × 46
hourly = total / hours
gauge = hourly_B / hourly_A (parity line at 100%)
The verdict names the offer with the higher effective hourly. Gaps under 5% are called a line-ball — at that distance the decision belongs to trajectory, people and scope, not to this year's arithmetic. When one offer pays more in total but less per hour, the instrument says so plainly: you'd be buying the raise with your evenings.
Limitations. Net figures are yours to supply — brackets differ across offers in different countries and this instrument does not compute tax. Benefits, pension matches and healthcare are omitted; add their annual cash value to base if they differ materially.