38 ms·

Interview with the creators of levels.fyi

169 points by zalzal 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thinkingkong 7y ago
I think this type of information is desperately needed for all geographies and way more (smaller) companies. The one challenge is that the pay grades themselves are usually dependent on a common definition of certain roles, which is definitely also missing. It would be great to be able to have _some_ kind of standardized career track for Individual Contributors and Managers within software engineering so we could continue a healthy conversation about compensation, roles and responsibilities.
- ody4242 7y ago
  My former employer used "Towers Watson grading" which is sort of a global grading system. Obviously the purpose was not to maximize the compensation of an employee, quite the opposite.
  - magicnubs 7y ago
    Exactly. All of these "pay banding" methods are used to enforce a culture of no one asking for more pay regardless of the value of their contributions, because "sorry, even though I think you deserve a raise, you're at the top of the pay band for your role/title, there's nothing I can do". If your manager has to convince their manager to fight with their own manager to get you an out-of-band pay increase, it's almost never going to happen. It seems to me that now title inflation is countering this somewhat. I'm the newest hire in my organization and my title is "Analyst". I'm the only person at this level in the entire group, because I've been here less than a year. Everyone else, who have each been here 3 years or more, is "Manager" or higher (about 2/3rds are "Director" or higher) even if they are really just individual contributors with no direct reports or management duties, because they have to increase people's pay to keep from losing them, but they can't do it without bumping them up a pay band, which is only allowed with a "promotion". But while this is true in my group, there are groups where there are 200+ individual contributer-level people, and maybe 10 managers, and those people are never getting pay raises. It reminds me of how "VP" is an inflated title in investment banking roles. > In brokerage firms, investment banks and other financial companies, "vice president" is a seniority rank rather than denoting an actual managerial position within the company. It is a relatively junior position, usually does not denote managerial responsibilities and companies have a large number of vice presidents, perhaps as an inexpensive way for a company to recognize employees, or perhaps because of delayering when an employee can't be moved higher in the organization but still deserves recognition. In most cases, the title merely implies that someone is in a medium-seniority individual contributor role https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financial_services_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financia...
    - vostok 7y ago
      It's a middling role that pays circa £300k in London. It seems pretty sensible to call someone a VP if they make that much. https://news.efinancialcareers.com/ru-en/311356/salaries-and-bonuses-for-vps-in-investment-banks https://news.efinancialcareers.com/ru-en/311356/salaries-and...
    - huac 7y ago
      VP is (apparently) also a title which legally denotes that the holder is an "officer" of the corporation, and can enter into deals on behalf of the corporation. Having a lot of those people around is typically a good thing for financial institutions (e.g. for quicker decision making).
      - JoshTriplett 7y ago
        Financial institutions also need such people at individual branches. Companies have far fewer sites than banks have branches.
    - sweeneyrod 7y ago
      I think that quote about VPs overstates things - a VP in IB will usually manage some analysts/associates.
- Zaheer 7y ago
  Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Our next feature is actually better regionalization. This is the top ask we've gotten so far. Additionally we're considering coming up with a standard leveling so that we can provide industry-wide granular information easily. Ping us at hello (at) levels (dot) fyi if you have more feedback!
  - markdown 7y ago
    request :)
  - davidjnelson 7y ago
    > we're considering coming up with a standard leveling so that we can provide industry-wide granular information easily. Please do! Thanks :-)
nodesocket 7y ago
I've never worked for a public company (such as Facebook, Netflix, Google), when it says $120,000 in stock is that essentially free shares at a given price? I.E. you are open to sell them whenever? I worked at a small series B level startup, and when I left I had the option to buy my shares at the last valuation price, but at just over $20,000 total I declined. I decided I could use that capital better than waiting around hoping they explode and get acquired. I don't think stock options work the same with public companies though.
- opportune 7y ago
  Yes but you do still need to think about vesting schedules. If you are at a company that doesn't do uniform vesting, then e.g. $400k stock/ 4 years might be more like $50k this year, $100k next two years, $150k the last year. Not sure how levels.fyi handles this but I would say that is not really the same as +$100k/year TC during your first year, given that people can change companies often, get promotions and refreshers, etc. To me it's more like an automatic raise.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    Just as an FYI, my understanding is that Google, FB, and MS all offer 25% annual vesting with no cliff, the exact vesting schedule depends (for Google, for example, it depends on the exact grant, but a 400K grant would vest monthly). Amazon offers a 5/15/40/40 backloaded vesting schedule, but cash bonuses in years 1 and 2 to compensate (sort of).
    - huac 7y ago
      I know Google has no cliff, is that also true now for the others?
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        My understanding is that Google dropped their cliff after facebook. I think MS is still on 6 months, but that's just their vest schedule.
notgivingemail 7y ago
I tried this on mobile and it never fully loads. When I click on the chat button to report it, it asks me to enter my email address. Not sure what that's about, but I'm not doing that.
- Zaheer 7y ago
  Maker here, what device & browser are you using? The email in chat is optional. You can ignore the input message for it if you would not like to share email address.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    I had that once or twice (that it never fully loads), but for example now it loads perfectly fine. Android with latest Chrome. PS. bro you're great for making this happen. levels.fyi is like "software eating the world" for labor unions. Clean, elegant solution avoiding all the nasty labor unions politics. Now if we could also bring awareness around work/life balance!
    - Zaheer 7y ago
      If this ever happens please try to capture / send us any relevant details. We know there's some issues with Internet Explorer but not aware of any other issues. Thanks for the kind words! Surfacing work / life balance and general workplace concerns is in our roadmap (3-6 months out). Look out for updates soon!
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
What's the bottom line with the super high compensation numbers? I've been a senior software engineer for a few years now and I make about half of what is reported at levels.fyi (I've been making about $120k-$140k/yr salary and receive little to no bonus/stocks, which seems to be the norm at two publicly traded companies for hundreds if not thousands of employees I've worked for so far), yet levels.fyi pretty much advertises everybody that at a senior level makes $300k/yr+ I'm $40k/yr shy of the average reported salary for the average senior SDE, and I'm missing $140k+ in stock/bonus... am I wasting my time at my current job making 50% of what I should be making or am I missing something about these massive public companies (like, not everybody gets hired at these companies... or... they suck to work for?) Where are these $200-300-400-500k/yr rates coming from? Do you have to sell your soul to reach that? Am I grossly underpaid? I usually am at the higher level in my organization/division, and yet I'm impoverished (comparatively) according to levels.fyi?
- svachalek 7y ago
  Are you working in Silicon Valley for a large tech company? If so you may be negotiating poorly. Otherwise, you may be getting typical or even good pay for where you are.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    You don't have to be in Silicon Valley. Some companies have a premium for working there, but not always, especially at the high end. The more important detail is working for a large company that has stock/RSUs, a bonus program, a robust technical job ladder, and a regular review process. If your company doesn't do stock/RSUs, you're missing out on that aspect (though a small number of companies make up for that with large cash bonuses).
    - twblalock 7y ago
      A regular review process is key. A lot of startups don't do regular, systematic performance reviews and people think that is a good thing, but it's actually a bad thing. A good performance review gives you the opportunity to demonstrate how well you are doing and back that up with feedback from your peers. It gives your manager documentation that proves you deserve more compensation. And you get this opportunity on a regular basis. Even if you don't get a big compensation increase every time, annual reviews are generally when the company, as a matter of policy, gives out cost-of-living raises and stock grant refreshers. At companies without review processes this doesn't always happen every year.
bradlys 7y ago
Facebook and Google are only setting the pay standard among other well paying public companies. The rest of the valley isn't keeping up. Startups in particular feel like slowly ramped up in pay but capped out. They're not offering enough stock to make up for it either. Usually only enough to make it such that your TC at startup would be equal to that of a big company IF the company IPO's/sells. (A big IF!) I don't see many salaries past $200k for IC software engineer (outside of 1 year to IPO startups) and most people still balk at the idea of it. Yet, 1-2 years out of school at Big CompanyTM and you'll be past $200k TC. I feel bad for the people who aren't in tech or things that tech pays for (real estate) and have to deal with even more frozen pay. However, it still sucks for engineers not at Big Co who believed they could make the american dream possible here. I'm on the verge of leaving this area. My current compensation makes me feel poor even though I could afford to buy a brand new Porsche. Even if I joined Big Co now and made $400k/yr... housing has grown too fast in price in the peninsula. By the time I've saved $300-400k for a down payment, I'm going to be priced out even more. If my SO had only become a software engineer or born into a rich family instead then maybe I would have been able to afford this region. Such is life in the bay area - you can buy a brand new Porsche but you can't afford a garage to put it in.
- svachalek 7y ago
  Yeah, I get recruiting emails from startups all the time but I don't even want to talk to them because somehow it feels rude to bring up the elephant in the room - I'd have to win the lottery at your startup to make up for the loss in joining it. I'm not sure if this is saying big techs have too much money or VC investors are not willing to compete for talent.
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    If you are a top talent there really is no upside of joining a startup anymore - even as a founder. It's terribly depressing. FAANG pays orders of magnitudes better, has better benefits, has flexible work locations and schedules, is working on the most leading edge stuff (autonomous everything, AR, VR, GreenTech etc...) contributes to FOSS, gives leadership opportunities etc... I'm not sure when this shift happened, but I do remember the tipping point in 2016 when Apple recruited the best PhD away from my company after 6 tries and gave him a 3x pay raise (400k/yr - what startup can afford that for one person?), with the ability to work on self-driving cars. I'm not sure how it would be possible to compete with that, and don't blame him for leaving.
hnaccy 7y ago
These numbers make my head implode. Back to the leetcode grind.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Pro-tip, work on personal projects, code something meaty. I learned far more from making websites and tools than I did with coding competitions.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    To put this in context though, if you’re already getting recruiter interest and scheduling onsites it’s better to leetcode. If you aren’t getting resume callbacks then build stuff. It’s been discussed before but the sad reality is that passing an interview loop at the big 5 and building stuff are not really correlated.
  - mathgladiator 7y ago
    This is very true, the need for cleverness of algorithms tends to be... sadly low compared to discipline needs to execute on a schedule. Build stuff, and then get used to the grind to finish and ship something.
- person_of_color 7y ago
  Missing something. What is "leetcode grind"?
  - mavelikara 7y ago
    Practicing algorithmic questions from https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/ as preparation for job interviews. What watching porn and masturbating is to the rest of the world, leetcoding is to Bay Area youth.
  - derivagral 7y ago
    In this case, its heavily using Leetcode[0] as interview prep for the kinds of questions that are asked in the interviews. [0]https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/
warp_factor 7y ago
this whole leveling thing is very sad. It makes you realize you are simply a number: a small pawn that falls into a predefined category and that will do a predefined job without too much opportunities to go out of its way. I'm missing the craziness of studying at university where I felt everything was possible. I had sometimes similar feelings in startups. In big companies that created that level structure it's shocking how boring everything becomes. People define themselves based on their level. That becomes the only goal together with the TC (Total compensation). It really feels like a rat race sometimes.
- avh02 7y ago
  On the flipside, I went back to uni after a few years working - it felt like I was producing stuff that just gets marked and thrown in the trash - time invested felt like it didn't have much value other than producing a mark. It was demoralizing. But that was an MSc, not PhD or something where your research is more likely to have output/outcome.
- mathgladiator 7y ago
  It gets worse if you level up because you realize that people are just numbers that need to be led and managed... It's also kind of amazing. I recommend reading "Extreme Ownership" to get a sense of the importance of leadership because there are no bad teams, just bad leaders. We are the apex predators on the planet, and the key to our success is understanding the social element of it and how to take a group of people and have them achieve something amazing beyond themselves individually.
- vshan 7y ago
  I feel the opposite way. When I was studying at university, I found it quite hard to motivate myself to do boring assignments, but after joining a BigCo and talking to customers who are direct beneficiaries of my work, it is much more rewarding and I feel more naturally motivated.

169 points by zalzal 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

I think this type of information is desperately needed for all geographies and way more (smaller) companies. The one challenge is that the pay grades themselves are usually dependent on a common definition of certain roles, which is definitely also missing. It would be great to be able to have _some_ kind of standardized career track for Individual Contributors and Managers within software engineering so we could continue a healthy conversation about compensation, roles and responsibilities.

ody4242 7y ago
My former employer used "Towers Watson grading" which is sort of a global grading system. Obviously the purpose was not to maximize the compensation of an employee, quite the opposite.
- magicnubs 7y ago
  Exactly. All of these "pay banding" methods are used to enforce a culture of no one asking for more pay regardless of the value of their contributions, because "sorry, even though I think you deserve a raise, you're at the top of the pay band for your role/title, there's nothing I can do". If your manager has to convince their manager to fight with their own manager to get you an out-of-band pay increase, it's almost never going to happen. It seems to me that now title inflation is countering this somewhat. I'm the newest hire in my organization and my title is "Analyst". I'm the only person at this level in the entire group, because I've been here less than a year. Everyone else, who have each been here 3 years or more, is "Manager" or higher (about 2/3rds are "Director" or higher) even if they are really just individual contributors with no direct reports or management duties, because they have to increase people's pay to keep from losing them, but they can't do it without bumping them up a pay band, which is only allowed with a "promotion". But while this is true in my group, there are groups where there are 200+ individual contributer-level people, and maybe 10 managers, and those people are never getting pay raises. It reminds me of how "VP" is an inflated title in investment banking roles. > In brokerage firms, investment banks and other financial companies, "vice president" is a seniority rank rather than denoting an actual managerial position within the company. It is a relatively junior position, usually does not denote managerial responsibilities and companies have a large number of vice presidents, perhaps as an inexpensive way for a company to recognize employees, or perhaps because of delayering when an employee can't be moved higher in the organization but still deserves recognition. In most cases, the title merely implies that someone is in a medium-seniority individual contributor role https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financial_services_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financia...
  - vostok 7y ago
    It's a middling role that pays circa £300k in London. It seems pretty sensible to call someone a VP if they make that much. https://news.efinancialcareers.com/ru-en/311356/salaries-and-bonuses-for-vps-in-investment-banks https://news.efinancialcareers.com/ru-en/311356/salaries-and...
  - huac 7y ago
    VP is (apparently) also a title which legally denotes that the holder is an "officer" of the corporation, and can enter into deals on behalf of the corporation. Having a lot of those people around is typically a good thing for financial institutions (e.g. for quicker decision making).
    - JoshTriplett 7y ago
      Financial institutions also need such people at individual branches. Companies have far fewer sites than banks have branches.
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
    I think that quote about VPs overstates things - a VP in IB will usually manage some analysts/associates.
Zaheer 7y ago
Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Our next feature is actually better regionalization. This is the top ask we've gotten so far. Additionally we're considering coming up with a standard leveling so that we can provide industry-wide granular information easily. Ping us at hello (at) levels (dot) fyi if you have more feedback!
- markdown 7y ago
  request :)
- davidjnelson 7y ago
  > we're considering coming up with a standard leveling so that we can provide industry-wide granular information easily. Please do! Thanks :-)

nodesocket 7y ago

I've never worked for a public company (such as Facebook, Netflix, Google), when it says $120,000 in stock is that essentially free shares at a given price? I.E. you are open to sell them whenever? I worked at a small series B level startup, and when I left I had the option to buy my shares at the last valuation price, but at just over $20,000 total I declined. I decided I could use that capital better than waiting around hoping they explode and get acquired. I don't think stock options work the same with public companies though.

opportune 7y ago
Yes but you do still need to think about vesting schedules. If you are at a company that doesn't do uniform vesting, then e.g. $400k stock/ 4 years might be more like $50k this year, $100k next two years, $150k the last year. Not sure how levels.fyi handles this but I would say that is not really the same as +$100k/year TC during your first year, given that people can change companies often, get promotions and refreshers, etc. To me it's more like an automatic raise.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Just as an FYI, my understanding is that Google, FB, and MS all offer 25% annual vesting with no cliff, the exact vesting schedule depends (for Google, for example, it depends on the exact grant, but a 400K grant would vest monthly). Amazon offers a 5/15/40/40 backloaded vesting schedule, but cash bonuses in years 1 and 2 to compensate (sort of).
  - huac 7y ago
    I know Google has no cliff, is that also true now for the others?
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      My understanding is that Google dropped their cliff after facebook. I think MS is still on 6 months, but that's just their vest schedule.

notgivingemail 7y ago

I tried this on mobile and it never fully loads. When I click on the chat button to report it, it asks me to enter my email address. Not sure what that's about, but I'm not doing that.

Zaheer 7y ago
Maker here, what device & browser are you using? The email in chat is optional. You can ignore the input message for it if you would not like to share email address.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  I had that once or twice (that it never fully loads), but for example now it loads perfectly fine. Android with latest Chrome. PS. bro you're great for making this happen. levels.fyi is like "software eating the world" for labor unions. Clean, elegant solution avoiding all the nasty labor unions politics. Now if we could also bring awareness around work/life balance!
  - Zaheer 7y ago
    If this ever happens please try to capture / send us any relevant details. We know there's some issues with Internet Explorer but not aware of any other issues. Thanks for the kind words! Surfacing work / life balance and general workplace concerns is in our roadmap (3-6 months out). Look out for updates soon!

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

What's the bottom line with the super high compensation numbers? I've been a senior software engineer for a few years now and I make about half of what is reported at levels.fyi (I've been making about $120k-$140k/yr salary and receive little to no bonus/stocks, which seems to be the norm at two publicly traded companies for hundreds if not thousands of employees I've worked for so far), yet levels.fyi pretty much advertises everybody that at a senior level makes $300k/yr+ I'm $40k/yr shy of the average reported salary for the average senior SDE, and I'm missing $140k+ in stock/bonus... am I wasting my time at my current job making 50% of what I should be making or am I missing something about these massive public companies (like, not everybody gets hired at these companies... or... they suck to work for?) Where are these $200-300-400-500k/yr rates coming from? Do you have to sell your soul to reach that? Am I grossly underpaid? I usually am at the higher level in my organization/division, and yet I'm impoverished (comparatively) according to levels.fyi?

svachalek 7y ago
Are you working in Silicon Valley for a large tech company? If so you may be negotiating poorly. Otherwise, you may be getting typical or even good pay for where you are.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  You don't have to be in Silicon Valley. Some companies have a premium for working there, but not always, especially at the high end. The more important detail is working for a large company that has stock/RSUs, a bonus program, a robust technical job ladder, and a regular review process. If your company doesn't do stock/RSUs, you're missing out on that aspect (though a small number of companies make up for that with large cash bonuses).
  - twblalock 7y ago
    A regular review process is key. A lot of startups don't do regular, systematic performance reviews and people think that is a good thing, but it's actually a bad thing. A good performance review gives you the opportunity to demonstrate how well you are doing and back that up with feedback from your peers. It gives your manager documentation that proves you deserve more compensation. And you get this opportunity on a regular basis. Even if you don't get a big compensation increase every time, annual reviews are generally when the company, as a matter of policy, gives out cost-of-living raises and stock grant refreshers. At companies without review processes this doesn't always happen every year.

bradlys 7y ago

Facebook and Google are only setting the pay standard among other well paying public companies. The rest of the valley isn't keeping up. Startups in particular feel like slowly ramped up in pay but capped out. They're not offering enough stock to make up for it either. Usually only enough to make it such that your TC at startup would be equal to that of a big company IF the company IPO's/sells. (A big IF!) I don't see many salaries past $200k for IC software engineer (outside of 1 year to IPO startups) and most people still balk at the idea of it. Yet, 1-2 years out of school at Big CompanyTM and you'll be past $200k TC. I feel bad for the people who aren't in tech or things that tech pays for (real estate) and have to deal with even more frozen pay. However, it still sucks for engineers not at Big Co who believed they could make the american dream possible here. I'm on the verge of leaving this area. My current compensation makes me feel poor even though I could afford to buy a brand new Porsche. Even if I joined Big Co now and made $400k/yr... housing has grown too fast in price in the peninsula. By the time I've saved $300-400k for a down payment, I'm going to be priced out even more. If my SO had only become a software engineer or born into a rich family instead then maybe I would have been able to afford this region. Such is life in the bay area - you can buy a brand new Porsche but you can't afford a garage to put it in.

svachalek 7y ago
Yeah, I get recruiting emails from startups all the time but I don't even want to talk to them because somehow it feels rude to bring up the elephant in the room - I'd have to win the lottery at your startup to make up for the loss in joining it. I'm not sure if this is saying big techs have too much money or VC investors are not willing to compete for talent.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  If you are a top talent there really is no upside of joining a startup anymore - even as a founder. It's terribly depressing. FAANG pays orders of magnitudes better, has better benefits, has flexible work locations and schedules, is working on the most leading edge stuff (autonomous everything, AR, VR, GreenTech etc...) contributes to FOSS, gives leadership opportunities etc... I'm not sure when this shift happened, but I do remember the tipping point in 2016 when Apple recruited the best PhD away from my company after 6 tries and gave him a 3x pay raise (400k/yr - what startup can afford that for one person?), with the ability to work on self-driving cars. I'm not sure how it would be possible to compete with that, and don't blame him for leaving.

hnaccy 7y ago

These numbers make my head implode. Back to the leetcode grind.

ehsankia 7y ago
Pro-tip, work on personal projects, code something meaty. I learned far more from making websites and tools than I did with coding competitions.
- chillacy 7y ago
  To put this in context though, if you’re already getting recruiter interest and scheduling onsites it’s better to leetcode. If you aren’t getting resume callbacks then build stuff. It’s been discussed before but the sad reality is that passing an interview loop at the big 5 and building stuff are not really correlated.
- mathgladiator 7y ago
  This is very true, the need for cleverness of algorithms tends to be... sadly low compared to discipline needs to execute on a schedule. Build stuff, and then get used to the grind to finish and ship something.
person_of_color 7y ago
Missing something. What is "leetcode grind"?
- mavelikara 7y ago
  Practicing algorithmic questions from https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/ as preparation for job interviews. What watching porn and masturbating is to the rest of the world, leetcoding is to Bay Area youth.
- derivagral 7y ago
  In this case, its heavily using Leetcode[0] as interview prep for the kinds of questions that are asked in the interviews. [0]https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/

warp_factor 7y ago

this whole leveling thing is very sad. It makes you realize you are simply a number: a small pawn that falls into a predefined category and that will do a predefined job without too much opportunities to go out of its way. I'm missing the craziness of studying at university where I felt everything was possible. I had sometimes similar feelings in startups. In big companies that created that level structure it's shocking how boring everything becomes. People define themselves based on their level. That becomes the only goal together with the TC (Total compensation). It really feels like a rat race sometimes.

avh02 7y ago
On the flipside, I went back to uni after a few years working - it felt like I was producing stuff that just gets marked and thrown in the trash - time invested felt like it didn't have much value other than producing a mark. It was demoralizing. But that was an MSc, not PhD or something where your research is more likely to have output/outcome.
mathgladiator 7y ago
It gets worse if you level up because you realize that people are just numbers that need to be led and managed... It's also kind of amazing. I recommend reading "Extreme Ownership" to get a sense of the importance of leadership because there are no bad teams, just bad leaders. We are the apex predators on the planet, and the key to our success is understanding the social element of it and how to take a group of people and have them achieve something amazing beyond themselves individually.
vshan 7y ago
I feel the opposite way. When I was studying at university, I found it quite hard to motivate myself to do boring assignments, but after joining a BigCo and talking to customers who are direct beneficiaries of my work, it is much more rewarding and I feel more naturally motivated.