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Hi, I’m one of the creators of Levels.fyi. You’re right that there’s definitely likely a bias in the data we collect. But in terms of validation and verificatio

Hi, I’m one of the creators of Levels.fyi. You’re right that there’s definitely likely a bias in the data we collect. But in terms of validation and verification, I just wanted to provide some info on how we source. Whenever possible, we collect verified offers / pay stubs / W-2s to anchor the data on the site. While our self reported data is definitely the more popular choice for submission, we are able to determine general bands and find blatant outliers for certain companies and remove them. I think we might be the only consumer facing salary site to do this afaik. Some more info: https://levels.fyi/verified https://levels.fyi/verified We also do provide a community reporting feature much like the flag feature here on HN, which we actively monitor. Even after all we do, we are after all only as good as the data we collect. The more contributions we receive the more we can color in the whole picture. Feel free to email us any suggestions at hello[at]levels.fyi

ryandrake 6y ago
Thanks for responding. Generally I find the equity values to be way high. Do people submitting their info take into account vesting? I’ve talked to (otherwise smart) people who make claims like: “My salary is $120k and my equity offer was $100k, therefore my total comp is $220k” where obviously he’s wrong because he will only vest, for example, 25% of that equity the first year. So he should consider $145k his TC. A lot of people seem to make this mistake, so hopefully your data cleaners have solved that.
- zuhayeer 6y ago
  Yeah, we do specify that the values we collect our annual on our form. But we might be able to make it more clear. We had this issue earlier on in our first 2 years since our form was much more rudimentary – could it be that the data points you're visiting are from 2019 or earlier? Also in any case, feel free to report those entries, and we'll make sure to take a look.

ryandrake 6y ago

Thanks for responding. Generally I find the equity values to be way high. Do people submitting their info take into account vesting? I’ve talked to (otherwise smart) people who make claims like: “My salary is $120k and my equity offer was $100k, therefore my total comp is $220k” where obviously he’s wrong because he will only vest, for example, 25% of that equity the first year. So he should consider $145k his TC. A lot of people seem to make this mistake, so hopefully your data cleaners have solved that.

zuhayeer 6y ago
Yeah, we do specify that the values we collect our annual on our form. But we might be able to make it more clear. We had this issue earlier on in our first 2 years since our form was much more rudimentary – could it be that the data points you're visiting are from 2019 or earlier? Also in any case, feel free to report those entries, and we'll make sure to take a look.