8 ms·
One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which
by zuhayeer 6y ago
One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/what-do-software-engineers-get-paid https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-...
In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/ https://levels.fyi/2020/
- mmmBacon 6y agoHonestly your site blows away the competition. AFAIK you have the best data. Great work and bravo on making compensation more transparent.
- dangwu 6y agoAgreed. I'm always shocked when I go to Glassdoor and see how wrong the compensation is.
- holoduke 6y agoGlasdoor community are marketing representatives from companies and angry employees. lots of negativity and fake or wrong submissions there.
- smabie 6y agoGlassdoor systematically underestimates total compensation for pretty much every position I've looked at. Not exactly sure why that is.
- B-Con 6y agoEmployers are incentivised to have pay reports underrepresented so new goes don't negotiate for more. I don't know what actually happens, but following the money is usually a good first place to look.
- zuhayeer 6y agoAppreciate it!
- logicslave 6y agoYour website has single handedly changed the negotiations for so many people. It was so hard to get good salary data
- dan-robertson 6y agoThe first graph in the spectrum article seems wrong (eg some companies only have a bar for 2018 when they ought to only have one for 2020), and the interpretation doesn’t line up with it either, but maybe they are referring to something different.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- subsubzero 6y agoWith regular chats with a few old coworkers in various FANGish companies(we talk total comp between us) the numbers are always solid at levels, I wish this was more widely known as companies want to keep pay bands secret to drive down engineer's wages. Good work on the site and thanks!
- smabie 6y agoHave you considered adding finance/investment/trading salaries? It's super great for tech (one high paying field) and I think it would be really great for finance (another high paying field).
- yowlingcat 6y ago+1, the only comparable source I've found is anecdotal data from Blind.
- Zaheer 6y agoYes, we're working on collecting more data still: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Investment%20Banker https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Investment%20Banker
- zuhayeer 6y agoDefinitely! We’re working on finance, the variability there in compensation is pretty high especially at these HFT firms with heavy bonus structures, and so we’re hoping to develop a way to accommodate for the soon (although you can still enter your information today)
- elvongray 6y agoOne of your cofounder's, Zaheer, set a date and time with me for a phone interview and proceeded to ghost me even after sending multiple emails asking why he didn't appear for the call. I'm really glad I didn't join the company whose cofounder can do something like that.
- Zaheer 6y agoHey Zaheer here. There’s no excuse for ghosting. I totally apologize. I just checked back in my emails and it seems like our meeting and subsequent emails were around the same time I was out of town for a wedding a few things fell through the cracks. I generally make it a point to respond back to everyone but this was a period of time where there was a lot going on in my personal space and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you. I’ll DM you separately.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoWhoa. @elvongray is a real world Ghostbuster!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- asdffdsa 6y agoI only use Levels.fyi btw. Blows glassdoor out of the water. Thank you so much.
- Justsignedup 6y agoJust looking at this data I question why even bother working for a startup. Getting paid 200k at a startup is a rarity, usually with poor health benefits. Lots of work and a hope that you can make up the difference in case of a huge sale. Am I looking at it wrong?
- notJim 6y agoFor me, startups helped me establish a track record and learn practical skills that helped get into bigger companies. I don't have a CS degree, and didn't go to a fancy school, so experience helped a lot. But now that I'm past that period, the value proposition of most startups seems really bad. Especially given ageism in tech, I think it really makes sense to maximize earnings while you can. The really only reason I can imagine doing it would be if I really liked the team and product, such that the actual experience of working there was going to be really fun. But the startups I worked at were similar or worse than the larger companies on those fronts. I think this Dan Luu article is a good look at it: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
- darkwizard42 6y agoIt depends on if you are optimizing for money, work-life balance, interest, impact etc. If you want the money... you can't beat the highly profitable big-tech companies. If you want small teams, deep ownership of the projects you work on, and like being invested in your product/company you might enjoy a start up more. (also this isn't a dig at big companies, it's just way harder to match the start-up/small co. experience)
- ska 6y ago> Am I looking at it wrong? It all depends on what you want out of your work. The balance has shifted semi recently so that if you want to maximize your expected earnings, for most tech area engineers the answer has shifted from "pick the right startup" or maybe "go be a quant if you can" to "go work for FAANG". Things get a lot more complicated if you are not merely optimizing for income.
- Mehdi2277 6y ago
- dmode 6y agoQuick question: does this account for recent massive stock price inflation ? My comp at one of these places matched what you have here early to mid last year, but since then has gone up quite a bit due to the stock market
- darkwizard42 6y agoUsually what will happen when a company's stock increases is that new offers have a lower # of stock units in the hiring grant. Basically, even if Google is worth $1.5T or $15T they don't change the "total compensation" value of the offer at hand. Ultimately, if you join and the stock goes up, congrats on your "free" raise!
- dmode 6y agoYeah agreed. I was curious if the median salary was impacted by the bull run, where suddenly engineers who joined a couple of years before the bull run are now disproportionately paid compared to more recent hires
- zuhayeer 6y agoYes, it may – our aggregates account for the latest information at a specific level which can include data points for individuals who have been at a company and experienced stock growth. However, when you drill down into the individual data points (https://levels.fyi/comp.html?showFilters https://levels.fyi/comp.html?showFilters), you can take a look at, and filter by the "Years at Company" field to distinguish how long the employee has been in their current role. We do believe that the stock growth in the market in general influences the monetary amounts of new stock grants. The bull run in essence contributes to larger stock grants through a cascading effect, as people who are looking to switch to another company expect higher and more competitive packages to make the leap.
- notJim 6y agoIs there a way to filter for remote friendliness on Levels.fyi? Especially since COVID it's gotten hard to keep track of who hires remote and who doesn't.
- zuhayeer 6y agoYes, there is! Check out this search: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&search=Remote https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s... You’ll notice when you expand each row by clicking on it, there are some additional details such as if the data point is for remote.
- dbetteridge 6y agoFunny thing I noticed on https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&search=Sydney https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s... You're abbreviating 'NSW' as just 'NS', is that intentional?
- zuhayeer 6y agoYeah, sharp eye! So right now, the provider we use for location, Geobytes, abbreviates state code to 2 letters internationally and so the 3 letter code gets chopped to 2. Gets a bit confusing for some areas, so we’re trying to figure out we can have another mapping with it spelled out.
- tonfa 6y ago(really like the site) sidenote, it's a bit hard to access aggregated data, I always have to click bunch of things if I want to see e.g. distribution of salaries for role in switzerland. (all the default views seem to show just a list of entries, I think you first have to pivot to company, then to location before you can see any aggregated data)
- zuhayeer 6y agoTotally, we’re just starting to accommodate for better international support. We want to auto detect and change our home page (companies and currency) based on where you are. Look out for updates!
- boulos 6y agoCan I suggest making it easy to include conversion to another currency? I recently was arguing about salaries at large tech companies with employees in Bangalore and Hyderabad. It would have been convenient (for my task) to not only have the local rupee rate but the “equivalent USD” (in this case at exchange rates, not PPP).
- zuhayeer 6y agoYeah we do want to include currency exchange rates. On certain location pages, we actually do offer this. For example for India, you can toggle between INR and USD up top: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/India/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/India/
- bradlys 6y agoCan you add more nuance for private companies? It is hard to determine what people got at private companies because no one is using a consistent formula. It'd be good if everyone just gave number of shares they received (unless it's some other format like how Stripe does it) for private firms.
- zuhayeer 6y agoYeah, this is something we’re actively working on for early stage companies. Number of shares is actually not very valuable information. What’s more important is your percentage of ownership given how many outstanding shares there are at the company. We’re taking a first attempt at collecting this information here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdErbieBKoeEVhrOWZnnCRHgeXUqCGVbyFlw-Fm0575syA0ig/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdErbieBKoeEVhrOWZn... We think startup compensation will be a huge and important next step for us. Hope to have more updates soon! *Note that once a company switches to RSU we collect that as a cash value at that point (so for example Stripe would have a cash value for their stock grant)
- bit_logic 6y agohttps://www.levels.fyi/2020/ https://www.levels.fyi/2020/ I need some help interpreting the location data. For example, if you click on Los Angeles, there's a bar chart with median and different percentiles. I assume this is across all engineer levels (I - V). But I'm interested in compensation for a level at a location. Going by years of experience, my level is Staff (IV) and the description notes that this is 10% of all engineers. Looking at the LA bar chart, the 90th percentile is around $325k total compensation. So a Staff level engineer in the LA area should expect around this much. Does this analysis seem correct with the given data?
- zuhayeer 6y agoWe have yet to provide a generalized leveling filter for our salaries – we have started on creating a normalization though. You can check out the standard leveling guide we put together here: https://levels.fyi/standard https://levels.fyi/standard Click on the levels to get a brief overview of the scope and responsibility.
- sn9 6y agoDo you plan on incorporating how salaries compare to local costs of living? Discretionary income can vary widely after living expenses are removed for a given salary for a given locale.
- ggm 6y agoI declined a role in the USA with severe performance anxiety over asking for 2-3x my current salary. I learned from your report I should have declined for asking 6-8x my current salary, with stock options. I still would have had performance anxiety, but it would have been bigger, and bigger, is better, right?
- emptysongglass 6y agoCo-opting to ask where should Danes go to find these numbers?