3.3 Bonuses

There are many types of bonuses, but the two most common are a sign-on bonus that you get when you join and an annual bonus. Sign-on bonuses for junior roles can go anywhere from $0 to over $100K. For more senior roles, they can be unbounded. I’ve seen sign-on bonuses in the neighborhood of half a million.

Annual bonuses are often between 10% and 20% of your base salary. However, companies like Netflix don’t believe in bonuses, but prefer to include bonuses to the base salary because they believe that “$200K base salary with 15% performance bonus” is less attractive to candidates than “$230K base salary.”