As a Swede working in tech I can't relate to that salary at all, but at a glance it sounds like it would be a really, really great salary. A "good" salary here is less than $80,000 gross (with addition of employer fees of 31.42%) - 9 hours do sound exhausting, but for that salary and working with the next big thing could well be worth it and perhaps a reason to apply as they are remote friendly. The material requested though, sounds a bit like a showstopper for all of us that haven't been public speakers and so on.

To be clear about it, we also pay that salary to folks outside of the US. It is a bit tough given the desire to have overlapping work hours. But we have a couple of hires in Europe, and they are great folks, who are compensated the same.

And we have tons of folks who are not speakers or are even active on social media. Being well known is not an important factor in being hired, having skills that fit with what we need is the most important thing.

What an industry we're fortunate to work in.

> 9+ hours of interview process for a salary of $201,227 USD. Isn't this bit too much?¹

Only in our industry we cast doubts over salaries like $200K, which is generally accepted lower limit for Sr. Devs.

As someone that doesn't live in a rich country, I have no words for this statement...

It was even less money when I joined. You're also leaving out stock, which absolutely makes sense to value at $0 at this early stage of the company, but there is more upside potential as well.

No regrets on taking a pay cut, personally. It is true that I could make a larger salary elsewhere; I also would not be working on this product with this team.

After reading the policy when the blog post came out, I think one negative thing about it is that it can self select for people generally later in their career or with a much bigger safety net. When you have a 10-20+ tech career and the money saved up, like the founders and many of the early employees, it can be much easier to say that’s enough to cover expenses. I have nothing against it as a policy and I think there are definitely benefits to it. I just think that the biases aren’t clearly talked about either.

> self select for people generally later in their career or with a much bigger safety net

They're still basically a startup / pre-stable revenue, and most folks at startups are not risk-averse. So I'm not sure this bias really affects them at this stage of the company; even if they didn't have this hiring policy the people who want to work at startups have the same characteristics.