If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I'm sorry for any trouble I caused here. I have no affiliation with the company, but just came across this company/its post and thought "Interesting! I wonder what HN readers will think."
Thanks for explaining! For future reference: would it have been OK if the post had the same title, but I left the URL box empty and placed the URL in the Text box along with a few sentences for context?
> The truth is that companies pay people less in other geographies for a simple reason: because they can. We at Oxide just don’t agree with this; we pay people the same regardless of where they pick up their mail.
So, look. I completely agree with this, and it’s an admirable ideal. If I were in a position to make this kind of decision, I’d make the same decision or one that looks a lot like it.
But if you’re anticipating counter-arguments, this glosses over a pretty important one. Regardless of geography, higher income brackets tend to have outsized influence on prices across all income brackets in that region. The more it deviates from the median, the more it distorts local pricing. All of this “rising tide” might eventually “lift boats”, but it depends where all that new capital is flowing and even in the best cases it doesn’t keep up with price inflation.
For a small company, that impact is pretty minimal and the rest of the admirable aspects of this surely outweigh it. And surely that falls into their “doesn’t scale” bucket, but deferring this analysis is different when the scale is external.
I’m not sure how best to mitigate that or whether mitigations are currently appropriate for Oxide. I have some vague ideas, but I’m not in any position to do anything other than comment. But I do think this impact should be part of the discussion, because the discussion is already poised for public impact.
There are many valid arguments in favor of location-based pay, but the one you are bringing up – that people in poorer regions shouldn't be paid the same as rich ones because then they'd have more spending money than their neighbors and that would be bad – isn't one of them.
It’s also not quite true that companies can just pay local rates. In my experience someone from low COL can easily find a position where the “local” pay band for their level is higher than the local rate. It’s virtually impossible for an engineer with 2 or 3 YOE from LCOL to find a local job paying 125k+, but not hard at all to find such a remote opportunity.
Furthermore, not all jobs are equal. If Google moves their headquarters to Detroit they won’t suddenly pay Detroit wages.
And finally there is another force at play here - companies need to fill the position and what they pay HCOL candidates establishes what they’re willing to pay for the work. Living in Beverly Hills doesn’t make you a better engineer. This isn’t a bargaining chip you can use, but it’s a fact you can benefit from if you’re persistent.
The markets just arent siloed as much as people want to pretend.
"Everyone paid same as CEO" seems great as a morale boost at a startup of 23 employees. Even if it's not a lot, startups are often not flush with extra cash and equity is the main incentive to join one rather than a tech giant. I like the mature "this may not scale and it doesn't have to for now" admission.
Oxide is able to do this because they are founded by folks who have (well-deservedly) an incredible brand and following. For example, I've had a few interactions with Bryan Cantrill over the years, and he's come off as super smart, down to earth, empathetic and fun. It's a good combination.
They're a cool tech company doing cool tech stuff, so folks want to work there and are willing to make salary tradeoffs to make it happen.
Pay has never been an accurate reflection of skill and skill has never been an accurate reflection of what a person can bring to a company. Big Tech thought they could use a combination of paying more and a stringent interviewing process to get the best talent. It turns out in the era of gamified interviewing (LeetCode and friends) that they were wrong and now are laying off tens of thousands of people. Having done over a hundred interviews at one of those big tech companies I was shocked by the people we were hiring and how much we were paying them towards the end of my time there.
Interviewing is a game of generalizations without any one-size-fits-all solutions. If you're a startup doing something ambitious, such as a from the ground up hyperscaler rack and software system, you want to attract extremely experienced and qualified people. Experienced and qualified people with a track record are likely on decent enough financial footing that they can get by on a salary with potential for future upside and an interesting problem to solve and mission.
Also later in your career you can't put a dollar amount on looking around at your co-workers and being thankful for working with high caliber people.
If we look at Amazon, they do something very similar as they have a salary cap which most employees hit at L6. They can then say 'Even the CEO hits this same salary cap' when in reality the former CEO was the wealthiest person in the world.
Oxide is clever in being provocative here but this is part of a totally normal compensation model.
I'm guessing they don't have offices that require employees like cleaners, or those are conveniently contracted out so don't technically factor into this?
For any startup I’ve worked for, cleaning is provided by the building. So yeah, I’m sure they’re contractors. It’d be silly to have someone as a full time FTE just to clean up after ~20 employees. In fact, the company in OP looks to be mostly remote.
They somewhat address that point by just saying they will figure it out later.
>Some will say that this narrows the kind of roles that we can hire for. In particular, different roles can have very different comp models (sales often has a significant commission component in exchange for a lower base, for example). There is truth to this too – but for the moment we’re going to put this in the "but-this-can’t-scale" bucket.
I am SO baffled. First, this post is two years old -- and has been discussed on HN several times[0][1], but the tenor of the comments here now is just so... vitriolic. I would like to do a blog post on an update on this (the dollar figure is now $191K as the blog post indicates, but the number of employees is now 60) and in particular reflect on some of its many surprising ramifications (all positive), but honestly some of the unhinged comments here have me questioning the judgement of that. Am I the only one seeing a changing tenor here at HN?
> Oxide not only offers the best healthcare plans we could find, but we also pay 100% of monthly premiums – a significant benefit for those with dependents.
I confess I read TFA just to see when the other shoe would drop, and there it is: compensation varies depending on number of dependents. Yes it's hidden from the paycheck but insurance premiums are absolutely part of compensation. Yet the author openly praises this discriminatory compensation decision.
If it turns out that they also offer a vision plan, are you going to describe it as discriminatory against the eagle-eyed? Or would you be mad if you find out that their healthcare covers women's reproductive health?
Healthcare in this country comes from employers, and so if you've got kids, you've mostly gotta get it from your employer, and everyone with kids needs healthcare for those kids. So if you cover healthcare for your employees, that includes their family. Good system? Hell no. But it's not a trick's trying to punish the folks without kids.
This is a fantastic example of _framing_ - how what's generally interpreted as a positive good can, with the right changes to presentation, be re-framed as a negative. The more classic framing example is a child tax credit (generally seen positively), which doesn't substantially differ from a childlessness tax in other ways than how it's framed.
For more information on that topic and how it's frequently used in arguments like these, I highly recommend _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ by Daniel Kahneman.
I can't tell if this is satire. Are you suggesting that they should pay higher salaries to single people because they likely won't use the healthcare plan as much? Should younger and healthier people also be paid more?
How in the world is this discriminatory compensation?
Let's simplify and say that: everyone at the company, and their families, are entitled to 100% of monthly premiums covered.
Someone choosing not to use that benefit as much as someone else by having fewer dependents is not discrimination.
It's like saying "I don't have a gym membership, I'm not using the wellness benefit each month, this is discrimination and others are getting paid more than me!"
I mean, this is about the employees feeling equal. That's the purpose. Would they feel more equal or less equal if the guy with 2 kids and a stay at home wife got a smaller paycheck than the 25 y/o with no dependents? Seems like you'd be giving up perceived equal (the whole purpose) just to be technically equal.
The cost to the company differs, but the pay to the employee does not differ: They have healthcare and $191,227. Sure, that healthcare is "worth more" if you have more kids, but you can't benefit from it if you don't anyways.
I only spent 6 months in the Bay Area in 2019 for an internship, so I don't have a strong understanding of the cost of living other than "it's expensive". For a family of 5 (two adults, three kids) what do folks perceive to be the minimum base annual salary (with no other compensation) to support such an environment in the Bay Area comfortably and without, as put by the author, financial distress?
My perspective is the COL difference is mostly housing. There are other things that are more expensive than MCOL cities like gas, utilities, childcare, but it's pretty much housing that makes up most of the higher costs.
And housing costs are quite different between the peninsula south of SF and the East Bay, so it's not easy to answer your question.
But if the expectation is that a family of 5 owns a home and the 3 kids are in public school, I'd say a household income (base salary) of $200-$250k is where you get into the "I can afford the basics and still save for retirement" starts.
I'm in that situation in NYC, which is roughly comparable. The author quotes ~$190k I'd peg it at ~$250k, but both are in the ballpark. Health insurance is another ~$35-40k on top.
That depends of your lifestyle, hobbies, idea of savings for the future, holidays plans, etc, etc. I do no tthink there is a generic answer for this question.
Overall I really like this -- I think it makes a ton of sense for a startup, where the expectation is that most of the hires will contribute equally. You might end up having senior people self select out for the "low" comp, but others won't care because they believe the equity will make up the difference.
But I take issue with this part:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
I don't think it's correct. Someone who joins with 25 years of experience is taking a lot more risk than someone who joins with 5 years of experience. The first person is most likely on their last job or close to it -- they don't have a lot of runway left to "take another chance". The person early in their career will have many chances to take new risks.
OP didn't get into it, but I hope they consider that when the look at the equity part of compensation.
> Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation. While it’s true that startup equity is important, it’s also true that startup equity doesn’t pay the orthodontist’s bill or get the basement repainted. We believe that every employee should have equity to give them a stake in the company’s future (and that an outsized return for investors should also be an outsized return for employees), but we also believe that the presence of equity can’t be used as an excuse for unsustainably low cash compensation. As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
There's an entire bullet point dedicated to it. They even used the same words you used, so searching the page should have gotten you to this section.
If you don't agree with the specifics of their argument here, then that would be an interesting addition to the conversation.
Probably projecting, but I imagine this is being posted in light of this thread under a comment by Bryan from the other day under an SVB post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35128789
I was actually completely unaware of Oxide's or Bryan's existence until yesterday - I had no clue they were both known on here, let alone so popular!
I'm just an HN user who was browsing jobs, found this one that listed the exact salary (with this link to their philosophy) - I had never seen this approach before and wanted to hear what HN felt about it.
> Some will say that we should be paying people differently based on different geographical locations. I know there are thoughtful people who pay folks differently based on their zip code, but (respectfully), we disagree with this approach. Companies spin this by explaining they are merely paying people based on their cost of living, but this is absurd: do we increase someone’s salary when their spouse loses their job or when their kid goes to college? Do we slash it when they inherit money from their deceased parent or move in with someone? The answer to all of these is no, of course not: we pay people based on their work, not their costs. The truth is that companies pay people less in other geographies for a simple reason: because they can. We at Oxide just don’t agree with this; we pay people the same regardless of where they pick up their mail.
That was an interesting take on geographic pay differences.
if they relocated to a perfectly nice place to live with lower COL (and probably better schools, housing and infra), then $192k would be just dandy, even rich
It's a little weird because while $191k is a lot of money to most people (it is twice what I make) but it isn't a lot of money in the Bay Area, especially for an experienced tech person.
More importantly Oxide is only (AFAIK) employing senior people who could make more at another company. They don't have Junior programmers or Helpdesk people on $191k.
It seems to very much be instead of a startup paying "minimum/ramen wage" plus options etc they are paying "middle class bay area wage" + options.
Looking at the careers page once again it seems like I am behind the curve. They are probably hoovering up the best engineers Google laid off: people who rode the ZIRP wave and are probably already wealthy as heck and are now jumping onto the next big thing that normie techies will latch onto after it too becomes cliche. It seem like reading HN is only if you want to know what has happened not what is currently happening or going to happen. Where do you go to find out those things?
Oxide has been on HN since very early on and they have been very public for 3 years now. The literally started the company doing a podcast. The opposite of hard to find.
That's the kind of pay that would make people very rich in some parts of the globe, and upper-middle class in many parts of Europe. Admirable of them that they want to create new rich people in poor places.
I wonder how the workers whose relative pay is much lower think about this.
I like this idea. If I'm in another early startup where everyone has to be really good, I might propose it.
We'd need to keep having attractive enough work and environment, and promising enough equity lottery ticket, that others can't just hire away our people by paying 2x to 5x more TC.
How many "non-privileged" companies (tech or not) can't charge the margins tech can (due to whatever market they're in/competition/"that's just the way it is"/customer's wouldn't pay those prices) which enables them to do stuff like this?
First of all, tech isn't always high margin. Second, there are many types of companies that 'could' do this. And even if you are not a 'privileged' company (whatever that is) you can do the same scheme with lower salary.
Is this being a little disingenuous? Obviously the CEO is going to get more equity than other folks, regardless of when they joined. And we all know equity is the real difference maker in compensation in SV / faang / etc.
I appreciate the transparency about pay - that's something we need more of - but the underlying idea is... strangely anti-capitalist for what's supposed to be a startup. This seems more like the viewpoint of a co-op or non-profit than a for-profit startup.
Or at least it did, until I found this buried in paragraphs and paragraphs of text:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
So they're still stratifying employees, but by equity, not cash comp. Likewise, they're still hiding information about the thing that is most likely to benefit the founders of the company more than its employees. If Oxide sells to $bigco for $1 billion, employees 1-5 might get $100 million each, and employee 100 might get less than that yearly "sustainable for everyone" salary.
How equitable and fair will that (for some positions, relatively low) cash compensation seem then?
I get the idea: Do the traditional startup thing, but instead of competing on cash, just make it clear everyone will make a living wage and should be in it for the equity. But if you do that and then aren't being transparent about what the equity is, you're not really being particularly transparent at all. You're just making a big splash.
All the other stuff about values, etc., is bullshit. The point of a startup is to get rich.
I should let this comment go answered, but I simply can't: this team is packed with folks who are exceptionally good at what they do -- it's an extraordinarily inspiring team to be a part of.
> the three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year
Putting aside the fact that is terrible way to determine the rate of pay for anyone, let alone every single person in a company - how on earth did they come up with such a lower number for such a high cost of living area?
Yeah... $190k sounds a lot except in any HCOL area (SF, NY, LA, Seattle, heck even Portland has skyrocketed) it's going to feel very tight with three kids.
It's not much, and I'd wager they're restricting their talent pool mostly to people that are making less than that. A senior engineer can easily make almost triple that today.
But I can admire their reasoning (empathy, equality) and the fact that they are sticking by a principle. If I had "f you" money I might simply join just cause what they're doing is so damn cool.
> A senior engineer can easily make almost triple that today.
Salary? Easily? Where?
I've been browsing a lot of staff and principal jobs on LinkedIn recently. Some Crypto firms are around $300k, and I've seen one or two Fintech with specialized knowledge at $400k, but by far the majority are in the $200k region.
dang|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
lsj0627|3 years ago
xref|3 years ago
lsj0627|3 years ago
eyelidlessness|3 years ago
So, look. I completely agree with this, and it’s an admirable ideal. If I were in a position to make this kind of decision, I’d make the same decision or one that looks a lot like it.
But if you’re anticipating counter-arguments, this glosses over a pretty important one. Regardless of geography, higher income brackets tend to have outsized influence on prices across all income brackets in that region. The more it deviates from the median, the more it distorts local pricing. All of this “rising tide” might eventually “lift boats”, but it depends where all that new capital is flowing and even in the best cases it doesn’t keep up with price inflation.
For a small company, that impact is pretty minimal and the rest of the admirable aspects of this surely outweigh it. And surely that falls into their “doesn’t scale” bucket, but deferring this analysis is different when the scale is external.
I’m not sure how best to mitigate that or whether mitigations are currently appropriate for Oxide. I have some vague ideas, but I’m not in any position to do anything other than comment. But I do think this impact should be part of the discussion, because the discussion is already poised for public impact.
acover|3 years ago
Are rich people so destructive to neighborhoods?
paxys|3 years ago
nonethewiser|3 years ago
Furthermore, not all jobs are equal. If Google moves their headquarters to Detroit they won’t suddenly pay Detroit wages.
And finally there is another force at play here - companies need to fill the position and what they pay HCOL candidates establishes what they’re willing to pay for the work. Living in Beverly Hills doesn’t make you a better engineer. This isn’t a bargaining chip you can use, but it’s a fact you can benefit from if you’re persistent.
The markets just arent siloed as much as people want to pretend.
mstipetic|3 years ago
lozenge|3 years ago
cat_plus_plus|3 years ago
ivraatiems|3 years ago
AbrahamParangi|3 years ago
rvnx|3 years ago
btheshoe|3 years ago
gerad|3 years ago
They're a cool tech company doing cool tech stuff, so folks want to work there and are willing to make salary tradeoffs to make it happen.
rubiquity|3 years ago
Interviewing is a game of generalizations without any one-size-fits-all solutions. If you're a startup doing something ambitious, such as a from the ground up hyperscaler rack and software system, you want to attract extremely experienced and qualified people. Experienced and qualified people with a track record are likely on decent enough financial footing that they can get by on a salary with potential for future upside and an interesting problem to solve and mission.
Also later in your career you can't put a dollar amount on looking around at your co-workers and being thankful for working with high caliber people.
ocdtrekkie|3 years ago
I hope to make this much annually sometime before I die, but I am not totally confident I will get there.
nix23|3 years ago
seniortaco|3 years ago
If we look at Amazon, they do something very similar as they have a salary cap which most employees hit at L6. They can then say 'Even the CEO hits this same salary cap' when in reality the former CEO was the wealthiest person in the world.
Oxide is clever in being provocative here but this is part of a totally normal compensation model.
newaccount2023|3 years ago
RobotToaster|3 years ago
seattle_spring|3 years ago
_-david-_|3 years ago
>Some will say that this narrows the kind of roles that we can hire for. In particular, different roles can have very different comp models (sales often has a significant commission component in exchange for a lower base, for example). There is truth to this too – but for the moment we’re going to put this in the "but-this-can’t-scale" bucket.
epolanski|3 years ago
I think all do nothing but confirm the very first sentence:
"Compensation: the word alone is enough to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction in many".
There's literally nothing you can say about it without floods of negativity.
bcantrill|3 years ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348836
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26683510
firstlink|3 years ago
I confess I read TFA just to see when the other shoe would drop, and there it is: compensation varies depending on number of dependents. Yes it's hidden from the paycheck but insurance premiums are absolutely part of compensation. Yet the author openly praises this discriminatory compensation decision.
CobrastanJorji|3 years ago
Healthcare in this country comes from employers, and so if you've got kids, you've mostly gotta get it from your employer, and everyone with kids needs healthcare for those kids. So if you cover healthcare for your employees, that includes their family. Good system? Hell no. But it's not a trick's trying to punish the folks without kids.
don-code|3 years ago
For more information on that topic and how it's frequently used in arguments like these, I highly recommend _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ by Daniel Kahneman.
tempestn|3 years ago
lowkey_|3 years ago
Let's simplify and say that: everyone at the company, and their families, are entitled to 100% of monthly premiums covered.
Someone choosing not to use that benefit as much as someone else by having fewer dependents is not discrimination.
It's like saying "I don't have a gym membership, I'm not using the wellness benefit each month, this is discrimination and others are getting paid more than me!"
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
BobbyJo|3 years ago
ocdtrekkie|3 years ago
jedberg|3 years ago
Where the real variation is is in the stock comp, which seems to be variable.
chernevik|3 years ago
mroche|3 years ago
refurb|3 years ago
And housing costs are quite different between the peninsula south of SF and the East Bay, so it's not easy to answer your question.
But if the expectation is that a family of 5 owns a home and the 3 kids are in public school, I'd say a household income (base salary) of $200-$250k is where you get into the "I can afford the basics and still save for retirement" starts.
e1g|3 years ago
101008|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
jedberg|3 years ago
But I take issue with this part:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
I don't think it's correct. Someone who joins with 25 years of experience is taking a lot more risk than someone who joins with 5 years of experience. The first person is most likely on their last job or close to it -- they don't have a lot of runway left to "take another chance". The person early in their career will have many chances to take new risks.
OP didn't get into it, but I hope they consider that when the look at the equity part of compensation.
paxys|3 years ago
The article very conveniently skips that whole discussion.
mmcclure|3 years ago
There's an entire bullet point dedicated to it. They even used the same words you used, so searching the page should have gotten you to this section.
If you don't agree with the specifics of their argument here, then that would be an interesting addition to the conversation.
epolanski|3 years ago
wmf|3 years ago
abathur|3 years ago
lsj0627|3 years ago
I'm just an HN user who was browsing jobs, found this one that listed the exact salary (with this link to their philosophy) - I had never seen this approach before and wanted to hear what HN felt about it.
RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago
That was an interesting take on geographic pay differences.
alfalfasprout|3 years ago
johnea|3 years ago
Well, they WOULD pay $190K...
panick21_|3 years ago
newaccount2023|3 years ago
slyall|3 years ago
More importantly Oxide is only (AFAIK) employing senior people who could make more at another company. They don't have Junior programmers or Helpdesk people on $191k.
It seems to very much be instead of a startup paying "minimum/ramen wage" plus options etc they are paying "middle class bay area wage" + options.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
nebula8804|3 years ago
panick21_|3 years ago
https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal/teaser
4 Nov 2019
darthrupert|3 years ago
I wonder how the workers whose relative pay is much lower think about this.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
neilv|3 years ago
We'd need to keep having attractive enough work and environment, and promising enough equity lottery ticket, that others can't just hire away our people by paying 2x to 5x more TC.
MuffinFlavored|3 years ago
panick21_|3 years ago
elromulous|3 years ago
Feels a little publicity stunty / PR-ish.
-elromulous the curmudgeon
tomandrews88|3 years ago
ivraatiems|3 years ago
Or at least it did, until I found this buried in paragraphs and paragraphs of text:
> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
So they're still stratifying employees, but by equity, not cash comp. Likewise, they're still hiding information about the thing that is most likely to benefit the founders of the company more than its employees. If Oxide sells to $bigco for $1 billion, employees 1-5 might get $100 million each, and employee 100 might get less than that yearly "sustainable for everyone" salary.
How equitable and fair will that (for some positions, relatively low) cash compensation seem then?
I get the idea: Do the traditional startup thing, but instead of competing on cash, just make it clear everyone will make a living wage and should be in it for the equity. But if you do that and then aren't being transparent about what the equity is, you're not really being particularly transparent at all. You're just making a big splash.
All the other stuff about values, etc., is bullshit. The point of a startup is to get rich.
stuaxo|3 years ago
tomandrews88|3 years ago
bcantrill|3 years ago
legohead|3 years ago
slap_shot|3 years ago
Putting aside the fact that is terrible way to determine the rate of pay for anyone, let alone every single person in a company - how on earth did they come up with such a lower number for such a high cost of living area?
alfalfasprout|3 years ago
jchonphoenix|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
alexpetralia|3 years ago
Edit: This was a reference to Akerlof's "A Market for Lemons"!
cvhashim04|3 years ago
erik_landerholm|3 years ago
buffington|3 years ago
xvector|3 years ago
But I can admire their reasoning (empathy, equality) and the fact that they are sticking by a principle. If I had "f you" money I might simply join just cause what they're doing is so damn cool.
smallerfish|3 years ago
Salary? Easily? Where?
I've been browsing a lot of staff and principal jobs on LinkedIn recently. Some Crypto firms are around $300k, and I've seen one or two Fintech with specialized knowledge at $400k, but by far the majority are in the $200k region.
intelVISA|3 years ago
acqbu|3 years ago
InCityDreams|3 years ago
That's $691.66 pcm - what standards are you using as a reference to the 'not bad' NK ones?