
Show HN: Comp.fyi – Open compensation data by company and level - zuhayeer
http://levels.fyi/comp.html
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hbhakhra
Great work on launching this and levels.fyi. How does comp.fyi ensure
freshness of salary data?

I feel like sites like Glassdoor became a victim of their own success. It
became the salary site for years, so naturally it accumulated data going back
years. Last I checked, their salary numbers are significantly lower than
current industry comp since it has been going up over the past few years and
it seems like they don't drop old data from the averages.

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zuhayeer
Thanks! Definitely a problem even for us. Right now, we're focusing on getting
as many people to contribute as possible (over at
[http://levels.fyi/addcomp.html](http://levels.fyi/addcomp.html)). We've
tossed some ideas around about only showing / averaging the last 10 salaries
submitted for a certain company and level and ensuring some minimum date of
submission. Glassdoor also suffers from not having granularity of level for
engineers and I think that may be why salary data is so broadly ranged.

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CardenB
Why not show recent aggregates alongside overall aggregates?

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zuhayeer
Yeah you're right, could do both

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j88439h84
A graph would be great.

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Camillo
What are the numbers in the career trajectories? Means? Medians? Maxima? It's
hard to make sense of this.

Can anybody vouch for the accuracy of the data? A friend of mine works for one
of these companies, gets (or claims to get) excellent reviews, and makes
nowhere close the "career trajectory" numbers.

BTW, salary data for H1B applicants is public and could be used to validate
the base salary numbers, to some extent. Although it is not a given that H1B
workers make the same as non-H1B. And then of course there is the stock, which
is a mystery.

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murderfs
I can vouch that the Google numbers are plausible, but only because of stock
appreciation. The actual numbers that a new hire would get are somewhat lower.

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waldrews
Could you clarify what convention you use for the stock value, given vesting?
E.g. if you have a base salary of 100k and a 100k stock grant, vesting over 4
years, do you count that as 100+100 total comp (upper bound)? Or would you
count that as 100+(100/4) total comp ramping up to 100+(100/4)+(100/4) in the
second year if you are given a similar stock grant next year (lower bound)?

My own preference would be to value stock grants for total comp comparison
purposes by the expected value of the number of vesting events, or,
equivalently, to impose a discount rate on the future grants based on the
turnover rate in the job category. I've never seen that applied to total comp
comparisons; presumably it would be a moderate value somewhere between the
lower bound and upper bound.

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Zaheer
In the comp submission form [1] we highlight the fact that the comp figures
should be what your are earning total (ex. what shows up on your W2). Some
companies actually factor in the stock appreciation during compensation
adjustments (Amazon does this). Although it's not perfect, we think it answers
best the question most people are after: Where can I earn the most amount of
money?

[1] [https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html](https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html)

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tifa2up
Love the visualization you're doing with how salary scales at different
companies. It's often overlooked

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ah27182
Awesome! how did you guys end up collecting all the data in the spreadsheet?

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zuhayeer
We collected all the data through a form we had on our main site at
[http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi). We've gotten enough responses to where
we decided to create another site specifically for visualizing and
understanding this information!

