Rithika Neti

Head of Insights @ Pave

[Rithika Neti @rithikaneti]

btw engineering isn’t shrinking. SWE share of the total workforce went 22.9% → 25.4% in the past year

jevons paradox, but for seniors?

[Rithika Neti @rithikaneti]

2023: 2.6 junior engineers for every staff engineer
2026: 1.2

pay growth followed, since 2023:
staff/principal: +13.8%
junior: +10.7%

[Rithika Neti @rithikaneti]

first of many collabs :)

[Zuhayeer Musa @zuhayeer]

Update on the Ramp equity grants for early hires. Got an anonymous tip that the first product designer at Ramp (within first 5 hires), received 0.25% over 4 years for their initial grant.

That’s ~24% under the low end I originally modeled for hire #5, so my estimates ran high. That 0.25% would be worth ~$28.5M at Ramp today.

I reached out to @Matthewschulman and @rithikaneti at @pavecomp, and they pulled their data on equity grants across US VC-backed tech companies (chart below).

Among the first 5 employees, 0.25% sits above the median (0.16%) but below the 75th percentile (0.42%). For a product designer in the first 5, it lines up almost exactly with the 75th percentile.

And more importantly, benchmarks for “founding” roles are a bit more of an art rather than a science this early in hiring, since grants can be ultra-specific to individuals and their worth to the organization.

It can change with role, seniority, stage, growth etc, so I wouldn’t treat it as prescriptive.

It’s also just a bet on the company from the candidate’s perspective, and sometimes employers will need to flex to close a stellar candidate.

Hope my post helped shed some light on what outcomes can look like at a high growth startup, post-dilution.

Some more exciting updates coming soon between @pavecomp + @Levelsfyi. This post sparked some awesome discussion, and there’s a lot of neat data between the two of our platforms 📊

[Rithika Neti @rithikaneti]

Anthropic just published its own workforce data showing the decline in junior share across its technical teams

At 10K+ companies in @pavecomp data, this trend is consistent

If entry-level roles keep shrinking, who’s being trained to replace today’s senior talent?