7 ms·

Co-Founder of Levels.fyi here (mentioned in article). We aim to share salaries for all companies. You can see the salary bands for example of google as well her

by Zaheer 7y ago

Co-Founder of Levels.fyi here (mentioned in article). We aim to share salaries for all companies. You can see the salary bands for example of google as well here: https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/ https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/ Would love feedback and suggestions to help make this a better resource. Our next feature is regionalization. Look out for it in next few weeks!

utopian3 7y ago
Looks like your site is broken when viewed on an iOS mobile with Firefox Focus (anti-tracking) is enabled. Not sure why disabling the trackers should break your site...
- Zaheer 7y ago
  We'll look into that right away! We keep track of which companies users click on so that we can focus data gathering on those. We use Google analytics so it's possible that's interfering.
  - bostik 7y ago
    Just as a historical data point: for a long time blogspot was completely broken if you blocked trackers (including Google analytics). The pages simply wouldn't load beyond the placeholder "gears in a box" emblem. My hypothesis at the time was that Google had deliberately introduced changes to GA that made it far too convenient for sites to depend on on ga.js for providing [something in the path of] actual page rendering logic. And so for a number of years any URL pointing to blogspot was as good as dead to me. The asinine behaviour has since been fixed. I can only assume the pageview numbers with intentionally parasitic ga.js were going down and couldn't be misattributed any longer.
seansmccullough 7y ago
Big fan of your site, the level comparison between companies is really useful. Keep up the good work!
choppaface 7y ago
It would be helpful to have stock as number of shares. For example, Microsoft is up 40% on the year, Pinterest went public this year, etc. Also, the graph from the Medium post showing comp vs years at company would be really helpful. In the OP, there's a 2nd year near $300k and 9.5 year employee at $150k. Have companies every asked to be removed from levels.fyi? I see at least one company missing from there now.
- Thorrez 7y ago
  I don't understand why number of shares would be useful. levels.fyi asks for stock grant value, not stock vest value.
  - pedrosorio 7y ago
    Look at FB stock in the past 2 years and see how the same stock grant value has wildly different outcomes.
    - Thorrez 7y ago
      Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because some Facebook employees' stocks went up after grant, and some Facebook employees' stock went down after grant, does not indicate what your granted stock will do after you get hired by Facebook. Also, if you do want to try to predict future stock moves via past stock moves, simply look at the stock charts. You can predict how much stock you will be granted via levels.fyi then adjust that based on how you predict the stock will move. I don't see how knowing how many stocks employees are granted will help you predict anything.
  - choppaface 7y ago
    Number of shares is useful in several ways, especially for new employees looking to compare the value of a promotion / offer versus what the company is paying somebody 2-3 years their senior. You can backtrack and ask “what did the company think its stock was worth two years ago?” If a company drops the number of shares much faster than the stock appreciates, then that can signal they over-value their stock. Both Facebook and Uber saw large declines in the stock price during the 1-2 years surrounding their IPO. Facebook was going for $40-45 during the months before their IPO (at $38), and 6 months later they fell to $20. Microsoft today might have a similar boom and bust. In these sorts of cases there will be lots of employees compensated unfairly one way or another. When total comp offers are all similar, a major differentiator can be how much hubris a company shows valuing their own stock.
unicornmama 7y ago
Would be helpful to have salary by location break down charts.
- dieFledermaus 7y ago
  Better than geographic would be state (counties for other countries) level break-down charts, as well. It would demonstrate the gross disparity between, say, Silicon Valley and DFW or Oslo and Trømso or Dublin and Cork.
denzil_correa 7y ago
It would be great to add non US locations too.
- lbriner 7y ago
  I think in the UK it would be much easier. Outside of London, only businesses who have just done IPO will pay anything above the approx £40-80K for developers. Even Development Managers outside London are probably lucky to get more than £100K On the other hand, we get healthcare paid for out of our taxes and accomodation is not too bad in most places so I guess it all works out in the end! Also, businesses like Google and MS are poor calibrators anyway since they have massive profits compared to 99% of other businesses in the world and ironically, despite their crazy salaries, I don't think either are the best model of amazing software (has anyone used Outlook or GMail recently!?).
- jxub 7y ago
  And filtering based on location, which affects the salary as well.
  - Zaheer 7y ago
    I assume you mean for visualizations. I do want to add though that you can already filter the comp data by location using the search bar or clicking the filter button to the right of it. Ex. https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&search=Seattle https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
mkhpalm 7y ago
Its interesting how completely different the numbers are on your site vs everything else I've ever seen. Why do you think that is? Example: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries vs https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/ https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/
- jvm 7y ago
  Not sure where indeed is getting their numbers, but I can assure you levels.fyi are well calibrated. Glassdoor also has weirdly low estimated salaries.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    Has anyone done the sums of the numbers of people on l1->l9 vs the mean salaries estimated? What does the estimated salary bill for each of these companies come out as and how does that stack up vs. their public declarations?
    - Zaheer 7y ago
      I haven't done that specific analysis but stock based compensation is given out in public quarterly financial statements. See here for example that Google spent ~9.35 Billion (!) in stock compensation last year: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/stock-based-compensation https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/stoc...
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
    Glassdoor tends to underestimate because a lot of the datapoints are from several years ago.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Thorrez 7y ago
  Is it possible Indeed is only counting base salary, and not stock and bonus?
mcspiff 7y ago
Couple things I’ve thought of when using the site: - Time at level - External hire vs internal (promotion, role change, etc) - As others have said, number of stocks. As it is currently, it can be very hard to tell if a salary is representative of a new offer, someone at the end of a 4 year compensation “hump” due to vesting schedule, someone approaching their next promotion/high end of salary bands. To a certain degree the current version of the site suggests overall salary bands, but it’s hard to make it actionable for a specific case. OTOH, I totally get that more data means more identifying, so tough balance. Love the site though!
- ianai 7y ago
  It’s pretty hard (impossible?) for the market to reach an efficient outcome with asymmetric information. Sure, there will always be unobserved variables lid you indicate, but the opaque practices currently employed contribute to societal problems. However, that same opacity gave me some peace of mind at a previous employer. I had very cutthroat coworkers. I was targeted, in part, for just the suspicion that I made more than other people. Didn’t matter if it was less than a quarter per hour. Didn’t matter when they all eventually were promoted above me and made more, either. I don’t know how to square those two. On one side, market regulation ala talking to employees in search of abuses and mistreatment may have helped me. On the other is the persistent pressure to have the least government possible.
- Zaheer 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Regarding the first two, we collect Years of Experience along with Years at Company information. On the comp page if you click any of the rows, it will be shown. We have quite a bit of work to do on visualizations and will add this on the docket.

by Zaheer 7y ago

utopian3 7y ago

Looks like your site is broken when viewed on an iOS mobile with Firefox Focus (anti-tracking) is enabled. Not sure why disabling the trackers should break your site...

Zaheer 7y ago
We'll look into that right away! We keep track of which companies users click on so that we can focus data gathering on those. We use Google analytics so it's possible that's interfering.
- bostik 7y ago
  Just as a historical data point: for a long time blogspot was completely broken if you blocked trackers (including Google analytics). The pages simply wouldn't load beyond the placeholder "gears in a box" emblem. My hypothesis at the time was that Google had deliberately introduced changes to GA that made it far too convenient for sites to depend on on ga.js for providing [something in the path of] actual page rendering logic. And so for a number of years any URL pointing to blogspot was as good as dead to me. The asinine behaviour has since been fixed. I can only assume the pageview numbers with intentionally parasitic ga.js were going down and couldn't be misattributed any longer.

seansmccullough 7y ago

Big fan of your site, the level comparison between companies is really useful. Keep up the good work!

choppaface 7y ago

It would be helpful to have stock as number of shares. For example, Microsoft is up 40% on the year, Pinterest went public this year, etc. Also, the graph from the Medium post showing comp vs years at company would be really helpful. In the OP, there's a 2nd year near $300k and 9.5 year employee at $150k. Have companies every asked to be removed from levels.fyi? I see at least one company missing from there now.

Thorrez 7y ago
I don't understand why number of shares would be useful. levels.fyi asks for stock grant value, not stock vest value.
- pedrosorio 7y ago
  Look at FB stock in the past 2 years and see how the same stock grant value has wildly different outcomes.
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because some Facebook employees' stocks went up after grant, and some Facebook employees' stock went down after grant, does not indicate what your granted stock will do after you get hired by Facebook. Also, if you do want to try to predict future stock moves via past stock moves, simply look at the stock charts. You can predict how much stock you will be granted via levels.fyi then adjust that based on how you predict the stock will move. I don't see how knowing how many stocks employees are granted will help you predict anything.
- choppaface 7y ago
  Number of shares is useful in several ways, especially for new employees looking to compare the value of a promotion / offer versus what the company is paying somebody 2-3 years their senior. You can backtrack and ask “what did the company think its stock was worth two years ago?” If a company drops the number of shares much faster than the stock appreciates, then that can signal they over-value their stock. Both Facebook and Uber saw large declines in the stock price during the 1-2 years surrounding their IPO. Facebook was going for $40-45 during the months before their IPO (at $38), and 6 months later they fell to $20. Microsoft today might have a similar boom and bust. In these sorts of cases there will be lots of employees compensated unfairly one way or another. When total comp offers are all similar, a major differentiator can be how much hubris a company shows valuing their own stock.

unicornmama 7y ago

Would be helpful to have salary by location break down charts.

dieFledermaus 7y ago
Better than geographic would be state (counties for other countries) level break-down charts, as well. It would demonstrate the gross disparity between, say, Silicon Valley and DFW or Oslo and Trømso or Dublin and Cork.

denzil_correa 7y ago

It would be great to add non US locations too.

lbriner 7y ago
I think in the UK it would be much easier. Outside of London, only businesses who have just done IPO will pay anything above the approx £40-80K for developers. Even Development Managers outside London are probably lucky to get more than £100K On the other hand, we get healthcare paid for out of our taxes and accomodation is not too bad in most places so I guess it all works out in the end! Also, businesses like Google and MS are poor calibrators anyway since they have massive profits compared to 99% of other businesses in the world and ironically, despite their crazy salaries, I don't think either are the best model of amazing software (has anyone used Outlook or GMail recently!?).
jxub 7y ago
And filtering based on location, which affects the salary as well.
- Zaheer 7y ago
  I assume you mean for visualizations. I do want to add though that you can already filter the comp data by location using the search bar or clicking the filter button to the right of it. Ex. https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&search=Seattle https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...

mkhpalm 7y ago

Its interesting how completely different the numbers are on your site vs everything else I've ever seen. Why do you think that is? Example: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries vs https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/ https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/

jvm 7y ago
Not sure where indeed is getting their numbers, but I can assure you levels.fyi are well calibrated. Glassdoor also has weirdly low estimated salaries.
- sgt101 7y ago
  Has anyone done the sums of the numbers of people on l1->l9 vs the mean salaries estimated? What does the estimated salary bill for each of these companies come out as and how does that stack up vs. their public declarations?
  - Zaheer 7y ago
    I haven't done that specific analysis but stock based compensation is given out in public quarterly financial statements. See here for example that Google spent ~9.35 Billion (!) in stock compensation last year: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/stock-based-compensation https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/stoc...
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  Glassdoor tends to underestimate because a lot of the datapoints are from several years ago.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Thorrez 7y ago
Is it possible Indeed is only counting base salary, and not stock and bonus?

mcspiff 7y ago

Couple things I’ve thought of when using the site: - Time at level - External hire vs internal (promotion, role change, etc) - As others have said, number of stocks. As it is currently, it can be very hard to tell if a salary is representative of a new offer, someone at the end of a 4 year compensation “hump” due to vesting schedule, someone approaching their next promotion/high end of salary bands. To a certain degree the current version of the site suggests overall salary bands, but it’s hard to make it actionable for a specific case. OTOH, I totally get that more data means more identifying, so tough balance. Love the site though!

ianai 7y ago
It’s pretty hard (impossible?) for the market to reach an efficient outcome with asymmetric information. Sure, there will always be unobserved variables lid you indicate, but the opaque practices currently employed contribute to societal problems. However, that same opacity gave me some peace of mind at a previous employer. I had very cutthroat coworkers. I was targeted, in part, for just the suspicion that I made more than other people. Didn’t matter if it was less than a quarter per hour. Didn’t matter when they all eventually were promoted above me and made more, either. I don’t know how to square those two. On one side, market regulation ala talking to employees in search of abuses and mistreatment may have helped me. On the other is the persistent pressure to have the least government possible.
Zaheer 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Regarding the first two, we collect Years of Experience along with Years at Company information. On the comp page if you click any of the rows, it will be shown. We have quite a bit of work to do on visualizations and will add this on the docket.