If I can provide some guidance, there is no upside to share your data when you’re at a small company because it’s really easy to find who you are. If there is a way to obscure the company, for example, generalize to market cap or size ($1-3b mkt cap company with 2500-5000 employees) and bucket that way.

I appreciate the transparency of the data collection. I go to Levels for my first look over the Glassdoor’s of the world because I can actually trust the provenance of the data.

I like this site. It's also depressing. I see that new hires at my company are making substantially more than I was at that level, even accounting for inflation.

If you’re on the seller of labor side of the transaction, you should be happy labor is selling for more. Typically if new hires are getting paid more, then experience people will be getting paid more too.

This does likely require some action on your side to achieve though.

Typically, no-one will come and give you that 50% you are missing out on by not having pushed for an extra 4.1% every year for 10 years.

At my current company, we're experimenting with adding a market rate salary review component to our regular performance review cycle - we have a target salary percentile (based on years of experience, skillset, location, etc with aggregate market data from PayScale) for where we start new hires in a given role, and if for whatever reasons the market shifts upwards and leaves someone on staff below the new-hire percentile, we adjust upwards. We hope that regular pay increases, incentives, etc mean nobody's compensation ever falls lower than market rate after they're hired, but we also want to make sure we have a mechanism in place to correct if it does.

This is a feature we've been asked to add to our salary comparison tool (https://peerwyse.com). The request was to be able to create peer groups that you, as the manager, thought were appropriate peers for your report. Then you would be able to see the probability the report is in the different quintiles.

In the specific context the manager requesting this feature thought their reports were being underpaid and was looking for evidence that they could use to lobby for more.

Our company does market comparisons. It helps, but only for the severely under paid. They have a wide range that they consider acceptable.

Based on what I've seen, one probably has to switch companies.

In general that would be true. The problem for me is that it requires switching companies. I'm not able to do that since I naively did the jobs I was assigned. Now I'm a Neoxam and FileNet resource with zero prospects.

Seems that's the major flaw in self-reported salary aggregation sites: Because it's self-reported, you're generally going to get only one side of the bell curve: The side that people feel good about reporting. The FAANG employees, probably just the subset of them that are well paid. Who wants to go to a web site to report to the world about their utterly modest, average salary? How depressing! I wouldn't want to.

When I go to a site like levels.fyi looking to compare my comp, I'd have to believe that I'm not seeing "average" engineering salaries, but an average of the very best salaries at the very best companies. EDIT: Looks like you addressed my question in your comment already. Removing it!

I'm not convinced you're actually seeing the "very best salaries."

I've not posted my compensation at some firms because it'd be too easy to identify me. I'd say that levels.fyi often _underreports_ what levels of compensation are available to people of a given level.