
Silicon Valley’s Exclusive Salary Database - ax00x
https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valleys-exclusive-salary-database
======
throwaway713
Glassdoor dramatically underestimates salaries. My position is listed as about
half of what I'm actually paid (and I'm "average"). Paysa and LinkedIn are
accurate for my position, but I think both generally tend to underestimate
most people's total comp as well, particularly for software engineers in the
Bay Area. Honestly, as bizarre as it sounds, comp info from Blind seems to be
the most accurate. Levels.fyi is fairly accurate as well, but only if you look
at the newest entries on the spreadsheet (and not on the level averages on the
main page).

~~~
pembrook
Glassdoor is old enough now their data comes from 10+ years ago, and the bulk
of their salary numbers come from the depths of the great recession. It's no
wonder their numbers are out of wack.

I also highly doubt they adjust their submitted salaries for inflation.

~~~
ta235262626
It wouldn't make any sense to adjust the salaries for inflation would it? Only
if salaries were moving up with inflation, and they're not. Haven't been for
decades, I thought that was across the board.

------
luminaobscura
For top paying companies (goog/fb/netflix/uber...), here are the total
compensation ranges i derived from various Blind threads:

3\. (entry level) software engineer : $175k-$225k

4\. (experienced or phd) software engineer : $225k-$300k

5\. senior software engineer: $300k-$400k

6\. staff software engineer/engineering manager: $400k-$550k

7\. senior staff software engineer/senior engineering manager: $550k-$750k

8\. principal engineer/engineering director: $750k - $1m

As a data point, my own comp. is above the corresponding range here due to
stock appreciation.

~~~
bitcoinmoney
wow. can you include base + bonus + stock info here?

I am currently hw/sw engineer at AMD austin (rank: Staff Engineer) and I get
paid 140K base + 80-100K stocks. Yearly refresh is 10-20K. This data makes me
cry.

~~~
luminaobscura
Senior Engineer example: $180k salary $30k cash bonus $150k stock

~~~
bitcoinmoney
senior engineer is how many years of experience out of school? with/without
PhD? area?

------
lpolovets
My take is very different from the Wired article: I think Option Impact is a
great resource. Anytime an early stage founder asks me about salary/equity
comps, I tell them to check out OI.

If a hiring manager wants to use this data to gouge employees then that's a
problem with their ethics, not OI. The place where OI is incredibly useful is
for making fair offers, especially for roles you're unfamiliar with. Maybe
your company has 6 engineers and you're about to hire your first PM. What
should you offer them? A market salary would be $X. You are not trying to
figure out X so that you can make a lowball offer; you're trying to figure out
X so that you don't offer 1.5X (which hurts your capacity to make future
hires) or 0.5X (which might come off as stupid or insulting to the candidate).
OI tells you what X is.

Data transparency is a good thing. It helps people avoid dumb mistakes. To be
honest, I think it would be great if employees could have access to this data,
too.

~~~
hitekker
It would be great if OI could let employees see this data.

It would also kill OI's business model: provide a semi-legal mechanism for
hiring-collusion among the giants and their wannabes.

~~~
sjg007
It sounds like collusion. I guess the anonymized profiles helps mitigate that.

------
fuelfive
It seems weird that Wired focuses on the negative edge case here. At Vicarious
we use OptionImpact to make sure everyone is paid fairly, and I imagine that's
the vast majority of users. Deceiving someone into taking a lowball salary is
a very shortsighted way to run a business, and I have trouble believing any
well-run company actually does this.

------
mattlondon
Sigh.

If you are running a start up and you're using this to fuck over your very
first employees' salary then please take a long hard look at yourself in the
mirror. You are decieving the very people you are hiring to make your business
a success. Are you really cut out for this kind of work if you deliberately
fucked over your first and likely some of the most important employees in your
business? Just to save a tiny fraction of some VC's money?

With respect, I think if this is you then you may as well shut the startup now
and save everyone the time and pain and money that will inevitably come later
(either due to failure stemming from your questionable ethics and questionable
business acumen evident from your hiring practices, or when your
employees/engineers #1-10 realised you conned them and they leave for someone
else and leave you in the lurch at some critical point). It's not going to be
a great experience for anyone.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Even later stage companies should wise up. It costs a fortune to recruit
talent into a company. Any small bumps in pay you can offer to increase
retention is a good idea.

------
geebee
Yeah, this is happening, we had to know it would. Imagine if real estate
transactions weren't recorded publicly - a small number of real estate agents
would create a private database of all transactions, while everyone else would
be limited to snippets of conversation and bits of unreliable info posted here
and there on the web. The disadvantage to being an outsider to the information
would be overwhelming.

This is one reason why I favor making all salary information public. I know it
freaks a lot of people out, but I work for a public university where all
salaries are public, and while the earth shattering problems I hear about
haven't materialized, the information it brings to the workforce is very
positive (you can actually see what the university pays your future colleagues
when you weight a job offer). The main disadvantage is that our info is public
but private colleges keep it, well, private, which probably does put the
publics at yet another disadvantage (Stanford can easily find out how much all
the profs and staff at Berkeley and UCSF earn, but not the other way around).

If this happened in the private sector, I think there would be a bit of a well
deserved reckoning, but far more good would come of it than harm. If a blanket
requirement would be too intrusive or unconstitutional, I think the gov't
could make it a condition for H1B visas, which does have a nice consistency to
it (if a corporate HR dept is going to be empowered to decide who does and
doesn't get to work in the US - a massive power usually reserved for
government - then it's very reasonable to ask for a high level of
transparency).

By this, I mean that if a company requests an H1B visa, they must make all
salary info public the way public institutions are required to, not just for
the particular job, and not anonymously.

------
wuunderbar
I've also felt that Glassdoor, across the board, very much underestimates real
salaries, and this further supports that. Anyone can think of a reason why
this happens? One would be that they have old, historial salaries in their
averages.

~~~
segmondy
Isn't Glassdoor across all of US whereas this is probably mostly SV based
companies?

~~~
celim307
You can filter down by city. I do agree even then it's underestimating but if
I can be arrogant for a moment, I believe people who read HN are accustomed to
slightly higher compensation than the average

~~~
closeparen
The median salary for software developers nationally is $103k per BLS.
According to Glassdoor it is $104k in SF. Do you really think ordinary
developers in the Bay Area are getting paid national median salaries to live
in an exceptionally high cost of living area? I think even the least among us
are smarter than that.

------
jonny_eh
How has this not been leaked yet?

~~~
consz
Agreed, anyone who has access to this and hasn't leaked it is a collaborator.

------
paulsutter
Don't be this guy, employees will figure it out.

> He recalls walking away from negotiations with a newly hired employee
> thinking, “Man, this guy is underpaid—we got a good deal.”

~~~
hitekker
Yes, calling the start of a relationship a "deal", frames that relationship as
transactional. That plus bragging about underpaying him simply means "I'll
stab you in the back the moment you look away"

~~~
wyclif
Wait, an employee-employer relationship isn't transactional? I agree with you
that bragging is a bad look but I also agree with an above commenter who says
that the point of using OI is that you're trying to find $X to avoid outlier
mistakes.

But I think it's naive to expect that salary negotiation isn't adversarial.
Both sides are trying to get an optimal deal. Employees making data-driven
acceptance decisions is better than "employees figuring it out" later.

~~~
hitekker
A transactional relationship is fine if the employee is not integral and will
remain not integral throughout their employment at the company. But if a
founder is hiring the first few engineers, or executives, or anyone of
importance-- he or she should be thinking about their futures: in particular,
how they might feel about being low-balled vis-a-vis their peers.

"If I pay this smart, black, female engineer less than every other male
engineer, just because she doesn't have a college degree, how would that look
if everyone found out?" [1]

"Adversarial" is expected in a negotiation. Short-sightedness is not.
"Bragging" about stiffing staff isn't just a a bad look, it's a sign that the
dealmaker is an animal in human skin.

I'm sure 10% of OI's users have good intentions. The rest are living examples
for why hiring collusion is outlawed and subject to prosecution.

[1] Yes, I worked for a startup that did exactly that, and was surprised when
the engineers started quitting weeks after the truth came out.

~~~
wyclif
I don't think any of your concerns are necessarily (important qualifier)
driven by use of OI data on the employer side, and the use of the typical
salary estimate services on the employee side. Of course there are going to be
bad actors and toxic workplaces where the data is being used to lowball. I
don't deny that it happens. I don't think those that do are going to be able
to survive long, because once the word is on the street that a company is
doing that it's gonna be very tough for them to hire talent competitively.

FWIW, when I mentioned "bad look", I meant it in the extended sense that
you're talking about here, so I agree that employers should never do that, and
even that it's a warning sign. I think it definitely impacts the culture of a
startup in a negative way and it's a horrible way to treat people.

------
coolmitch
if you have access to this, it's your moral responsibility to leak it

------
wolco
The most interesting headline today. The article has very little information.
Hope to see a followup.

------
fatjokes
How is this not considered collusion?

~~~
sneak
Collusion is illegal cooperation. This is legal.

~~~
rmk
How is this legal? Let's take a hypothetical example:

Joe is employee #2 FoolzRUs, at a Sequoia-backed startup, in CA. The company
is small, having 10 employees total, and maybe 6 engineers. Joe is
interviewing to get another job, because he feels that his company is not
going to last. The prospective employer happens to be a growing company that
was funded by Sequoia. The recruiter looks up FoolzRUs in Option Impact and
deduces that the Principal Engineer at FoolzRUs sounds like Joe, and thus, his
salary. Now she does not have to ask Joe what his salary is, but is she
violating California's new law, where an she is barred from asking Joe what
his compensation is?

~~~
jkaplowitz
She is violating the law. California doesn't allow seeking his past salary
data in the hiring process. This is true even if they don't seek it from him.

Of course, they can use general data that they think matches his experience.
But not if they're using that as a way to dig for his individual past salary.

------
jiveturkey
good headline but only useful for startups and i suppose it comes “free” with
VC money. regular companies share salaries with an aggregator (i forget the
name) and it’s repackaged for sale to other participating companies. USA-wide
at least.

I think the aggregator/sharing company is owned by equifax. there might be
more than one of them.

------
godelski
This is all about symmetry of information. Which I want to remind everyone
that during the who's hiring posts we need to consider. I exclusively upvote
companies that post salary ranges. I know some users even downvote those that
don't. Plus posting salaries saves everyone time and effort.

------
londons_explore
This sort-of reads like an ad...

------
mathattack
The databases (Glassdoor, etc) I’ve seen are pretty close on base salary.
There are outlier mistakes but generally close. They get some of their data
from H1B applications. This misses bonuses and equity, and can be a little
lower than non-H1B, but the numbers I’ve had first hand knowledge on are 100%
accurate.

------
walshemj
How would "steve" as a engineer have access to something that presumably would
be jealously guarded by the hr director.

~~~
BWStearns
Startup. Logins are routinely shared for third party software.

~~~
walshemj
Even some this sensitive - that's just asking for trouble

~~~
BWStearns
Yup. It’s not uncommon in the slightest.

------
le3dh4x0r
Why do data scientists have such a high salary? Everyone seems to be one at
the moment.

~~~
throwaway713
They don't at all. At typical companies, their salaries are maybe a bit higher
than software engineers. At top companies though, their base and bonus is the
same, but stock is about half (unless you're a core DS or have an AI/ML PhD).
Also, 4-5 years working on a PhD could have been spent gaining experience as a
software engineer, which means that all total a data scientist at FANG will
make $100k to $250k per year less than a software engineer at the same age.

------
tinktank
Where do I get this?

------
janeroe
> the daunting task of hiring a team, from low-level engineers to a new VP

I don't think "low-level" means what the article's author thinks it means.

------
kevmo
How do we shut this place - Option Impact - down?

Ideally, regulators would, but we live in a hyper-capitalistic age, so they
probably won't.

~~~
Ancalagon
I mean, I don't know if I'd want anyone to shut it down. Just somebody leak it
and the playing field is evened out again (and from the sounds of it, we all
get big raises after switching jobs).

~~~
coldcode
Don't shut it down, make it open so we can all benefit. But I imagine no one
would update it.

From a data standpoint, using such a resource to determine salaries would like
cause salaries to become predictable, based solely on what other people paid
for the combination of experiences used to classify the salaries (Ruby
programmers with 5 years of experience in startups of size Z get X). So
salaries would tend to not diversify much from the median (perhaps tend down a
little).

~~~
briandear
That also neglects the quality of those 5 years of experience as it relates to
the actual position. 5 years of designing financial services systems is more
valuable to a financial services company than 5 years of building web
applications for a dating company.

That is the problem I have with collective bargaining in higher skilled fields
— it assumes people are interchangeable based on worthless “years of
experience” metrics. Some sysadmin with 20 year experience might not know the
first thing about DevOps, while a fresh college graduate might be an expert.
Yet the 20 year guy would get paid more despite knowing less.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The problem of outliers not being able to fully maximize their earnings under
collective bargaining is a substantially smaller issue than everyone being
underpaid without collective bargaining.

