One of the oldest rules in tech pay still looks like one of the smartest.
Levels.fyi, a company that tracks compensation across the industry, recently analyzed what would have happened to the same senior Microsoft software engineer pay package in two scenarios.
In one, the employee sold their stock as it vested and reinvested the money in the S&P 500. That person would be about $50,000 better off than the colleague who held onto all of their Microsoft shares.
That's a reminder that even in the AI era, diversification can pay off. The biggest AI winners, like Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic, have delivered extraordinary gains.
But for many tech employees, spreading investments beyond a single employer remains the safer, and sometimes more profitable, strategy.
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Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter and the driving force behind the company's AI Insider franchise. Sign up here. Before that, he was Business Insider's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair covers all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including AI, cloud computing, data centers, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
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