- 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!
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.
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.
Re YoE Graph: Noted. We’re hoping to build dashboard functionality of sorts where you can choose what you want plotted and we'll dynamically generate graph.
No one has ever asked us to be removed. In fact, many companies have reached out to get their levels added. Which company is missing? We realize we need to add many more companies and are slowly adding more as we get data for it.
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.
If you want to compare what you are given to what someone else is given, isn't grant price better than number of shares? Grant price is what the company gives people.
>If a company drops the number of shares much faster than the stock appreciates, then that can signal they over-value their stock.
Maybe. Or maybe the company is simply paying employees less. Or maybe they're migrating to provide more compensation via salary or bonus instead of stock.
Why would a company cut down on the number of shares granted if they overvalue their stock? Another thing is that a company could do a simultaneous stock buyback, which wouldn't cause the number of shares in existence to increase, and would only cost the company market price for the stock.
If you are given the average number of shares that an employee has vest per year, how can you determine if a company is dropping the number of shares? Really what you would want is data on every single grant event each employee has been given. If you know the date of each grant event, it's then equivalent whether you know the number of stocks of each grant event or the dollar value at grant time of each grant event.
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.
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!?).
Why do you think that is?
Example: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries vs https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/
- Manual review - we review all data to filter extreme outliers and spam.
- By-Level info - we collect much more info per data point meaning we can hone in on title / role deeply.
- No Incentive - Not specific to Indeed but there is not incentive to submit your data. Everyone has access to data whether you submit or not. This along with the form being long leads to less spam.
- Staleness - we age out old data aggressively
- Total Comp - we're centered around total compensation. Most sites focus on salary which for tech jobs can sometimes be smallest portion of comp.
- Userbase - we're quite popular with tech demographic and have been able to field much wider range of data from folks at all levels due to it.
...there may be other reasons but these are the largest I can think of off hand
What does the estimated salary bill for each of these companies come out as and how does that stack up vs. their public declarations?
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.
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!