
Show HN: Benefits comparison across tech companies - tifa2up
http://benefits.fyi
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txcwpalpha
I imagine comparing benefits across companies is hard, but there are some
weird, arbitrary things here that don't make sense. Example:

Looking at Salesforce, it's got three big red X's next to "Free
Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner". Ok, so I guess Salesforce doesn't have these things
(and notably, the red X makes it seem like Salesforce is being "dinged" for
this). But then I look at Microsoft, and it has "Free Snacks" and "Free
Drinks" listed with green check marks next to them. But then it doesn't list
"Free Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner" at all. Does Microsoft offer free meals? If yes,
why isn't it listed? If no, still why isn't it listed, but with a red X next
to it, like Salesforce? This is the case for a lot of companies and benefits.

Other stuff seems wrong or very situational. Stuff like "On-site gym" is
highly dependent on your office location, and I see companies that have a red
X next to it when I know for a fact that many of their offices do have gyms,
while I know that some of the companies that have it listed with a green check
do not have gyms at all office locations.

Also, all of the health insurance stuff is pretty meaningless without more
info about the actual insurance offered, and there's a lot of missing
information about supplemental insurance, or other uncommon forms of insurance
like legal group insurance.

edit: I see now that the way this works is based on user submissions, and you
can choose "Null", "Benefit Available", and "Benefit Not Available". IMO,
"Null" shouldn't be an option at all. Either a company offers some form of the
benefit or it does not. There is no "blank".

~~~
Zaheer
I'm from Levels.fyi. You're right, benefits are fairly hard to compare as it
can vary by location and specifics of various perks. We're still working on
gathering more data. The red X's appear when we've gotten a report confirming
the benefit is not present. If we don't have a report for a specific benefit,
nothing is shown. While it is true 'null' should not be an option, we wanted
to be able to collect some data even if a contributor does not know the full
scope of benefits which is often the case.

The initial set of companies was sourced directly from employees / HR /
recruiters at these companies. We're working on adding more details around
location for each benefit. You can also contribute here:
[https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/add.html](https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/add.html)

This is just a start. We appreciate the community contributing and are
continuously updating the page.

~~~
txcwpalpha
Once I saw what the data collection form looks like, this makes more sense to
me. My feedback as a user is that if you don't have a report for a benefit,
you should still show it but indicate that its status is unknown. As it is,
showing a red X next to a benefit for one company while not listing it at all
for another company seems like you are unfairly "punishing" the first company
while giving the second one a pass, when in reality you just don't have enough
data (which is fine and understandable, but should be shown).

Also, this may or may not be true, but I wouldn't be surprised if showing
"Unknown" next to some benefits encouraged people to actually submit their
knowledge of if that benefit exists or not. As the saying goes, if you really
want to get someone's input on the internet, just put something that might be
wrong and wait for someone to correct you ;)

~~~
Zaheer
Excellent points - I'll work on adding this in the next few days.

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confuseddesi
Looking at this dataset, the balance of benefits here seems more tailored to
deferring children (eg. egg freezing) vs. embracing children and providing
benefits to make it easier to have them (eg. in-office daycare, part time work
schedules). I wish these employers would focus more on the latter and build
upon benefits they already offer like parental leave instead of incentivizing
the delaying of children to further one’s career.

Edit: upon reflection, even free meals outside of lunch are not really a
meaningful benefit to parents who want to have those meals with their
families.

~~~
tick_tock_tick
Too many people especially in high income fields like tech have partners
making comparable amounts of money. If they do choose to have kids tons of
them leave the normal workforce.

When they do come back after kids to how do you keep them on a comparable
promotion/management track as their peers? Unless you give them a ridiculously
small amount of time off by the time they come back there peers will be a year
ahead of them, all their networking will have atrophied, and they will have no
major project to push to show off or will have to be sharing credit with
whoever took over when they were gone.

Incentivizing not having kids early instead of making having kids easy
sidesteps a ton of these issues. These companies goal to get a good gender
balance not necessary facilitate the life choices an employee wants to make.

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jrockway
Some information about how good the benefits actually are would be useful. It
always made me sad how much of my day I had to waste standing in line to get
the "free food". On most days I just got a grab-and-go sandwich to eat at my
desk, while other people would spend 20 minutes waiting in line and 40 minutes
eating it (and then waiting another 20 minutes to get coffee). I didn't mind
doing that on special occasions, but an hour lost per day to get "free" food
was just too much for me. ("They're only hurting themselves by making them
wait, they're paying for that hour" I hear you say. That is not really true.
It really depends on whether or not your team is okay with losing an hour a
day, and if you think you can get a good performance review by working 7 hours
a day instead of 8. They are happy to keep you around "meeting expectations"
at level 4 on some boring project that doesn't matter. If you want more pay or
a better project, you have to find time sinks and eliminate them. The power is
in your hands, and yours alone.)

I also ran into a fun experience with the health insurance. I needed surgery,
and had it pre-approved. It was in fact approved. When the bill showed up,
they decided they weren't going to pay it. I opened a ticket to get the issue
fixed, and they dragged me along until the deadline for further appeals was
reached, at which point the case was closed and I wrote a check for $30,000 to
my doctor. Bet they don't mention that caveat when Fortune is reviewing them
for "best place to work".

All of these benefits sound good on paper, but there is always a caveat. There
is no such thing as a free lunch!

~~~
abdabab
Which company was it? Your experience with health insurance sounds nuts.

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bankim
FAANGs have changed the compensation game in SF Bay Area, making joining
startups for potential financial gains pointless. Benefits are just icing on
the cake.

I wonder what techniques startups are using to recruit quality talent in the
Bay Area.

~~~
dev_throw
This is based on the presumption that quality talent joins FAANG. From what
I've seen so far, it's mostly people that can leetcode their socks off that
make it into FAANG.

Startups get people interested in the domain knowledge and everyone else that
couldn't make it into FAANG. I agree that it is a bad financial move to join a
startup if you could join FAANG instead.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
Most people at FAANG may not be very sharp, but very sharp people easily make
it into FAANG and it's a much better deal than the majority of startups.

~~~
nogabebop23
Question: why is Amazon included in this cohort but not Microsoft? The total
comp packages I've seen from MS dwarf Amazon, which frankly is pretty middle
of the road.

~~~
CephalopodMD
It doesn't fit in the acronym

What I usually see is both MS and Amazon are part of the "big 5" tech
companies/"tech giants" where Netflix isn't. I think FAANG is really more
about stock performance and hype in the past 5 or 6 years (though to be fair,
MS has had a really good run in this time span as well).

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nrmitchi
I don't know if it is expressing some sort of bias, but some of the companies
seem to be purposely expressed in a "negative" fashion, by including red X's
for "missing" benefits, but those exclusions don't seem to be uniform?

A couple examples:

\- Uber has a bright red "X" beside "Sick Time", seemingly to imply that
working at Uber gives you no sick days. However you also have "Unlimited PTO
(Vacation/Personal days), so this just seems misleading (at best)

\- Neither Uber nor LinkedIn offer "On-Site Tire Replacement" or "On-Site Car
Wash / Detailing", but this is only explicitly called out under Uber

It appears that only Uber, Amazon, and Salesforce have _any_ "missing
benefits" explicitly highlighted, which feels very misleading.

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disabled
I personally think that Microsoft benefits are more pragmatic, realistic, and
usable even if they rank lowest on the comparison. A lot of the stuff Google
offers, is icing on the cake.

The problem is that there are loopholes in health insurance, that unless you
have extensive experience and a keen eye, you will miss the financial tricks.

For example, in my state, we have the highest amount of surprise bills
(usually out-of-network billing) in the US, statistically. I have a family
member who was considering getting a plan that was $100 cheaper per month, but
had a very high out of network billing cap.

But, if you have health conditions, making a spreadsheet like this goes a long
ways:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/diabetes/comments/9xwvl4/usa_i_crea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/diabetes/comments/9xwvl4/usa_i_created_and_am_sharing_a_spreadsheet_for/)

But, things should not be this way. It is chaotic to have to worry about
healthcare costs like this.

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quicklime
Interesting that "Company Phones" is considered a benefit - I and a lot of
people I know view it as a negative.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
Surprised to see how common 'Mega Backdoor Roth IRA' is that it has reached
Benefits comparison guides.

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throwaway43234
I wonder how they're computing total effective monetary value, especially when
it comes to 401k contribution. For instance, it has MSFT as 50% up to 19500
(it should actually be 100% up to 20000, but I digress), but a total effective
benefit of just over 10k. I'd put the 401k contribution multiplier at >=1, but
they clearly have it much less than that.

Really what would make more sense is allowing customization of how much you
value particular benefits (i.e. free dinner means nothing to me, if not
negative, because it also means you're "expected" to stick around for it)

~~~
infinitone
Also only MSFT offers ESPP which is a guaranteed free $1500 cash a year if not
more (i got 2500)...

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quicklime
When I load the site, I get Google, Facebook and Microsoft selected by
default. If I deselect Microsoft and re-select it, for some reason Google
disappears. Is this a bug?

Happens on both Firefox on Ubuntu as well as Safari on my iPhone.

~~~
zuhayeer
Good catch, should be fixed now

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jacques_chester
"On-site mother's room" is not a distinguishing benefit. It's a legal
requirement in at least California and New York, to my knowledge.

~~~
bankim
+1. Legal requirement for companies > 50 ppl.

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fragmede
The big one that's come up very recently that I don't see is: do they
viciously enforce non-competes?

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throwawaysea
I like the idea but some of these comparisons are strange. Why does one
company have 2 benefits listed in a category with green checkmarks while
another has several more benefits listed under the same category with red X's?
It seems like all of them should have the same red X's?

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bankim
Feedback: Could the companies selected be part of the URL? This helps sharing.

~~~
zuhayeer
Thanks for the feedback – just added!

Here's an example URL:
[https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/?companies=Google,LinkedIn,B...](https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/?companies=Google,LinkedIn,ByteDance)

~~~
1wheel
The sort order within a category is also wonky, making comparisons hard:

Google: \- Health Insurance \- On-Site Mother's Room \- Fertility Assistance

Citadel: \- On-Site Mother's Room \- Health Insurance \- Fertility Assistance

~~~
zuhayeer
Yeah thanks for pointing it out. This was a very preliminary version, hoping
to clean this up over the next few days

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johnnydoe9
This is the most inane comment but it's kind of bugging me that they're
misaligned, the same benefit as number 1 for one company and 3rd for another

~~~
InfiniteRand
That was annoying me too, it makes it hard to spot what exactly one company is
offering that the other company is not

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klipt
[http://perks.guide](http://perks.guide) seems to have a similar comparison
across more companies.

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baby
Heh. Lots of stuff is missing or incorrect (no not everyone has a park on
their rooftop at fb :D)

~~~
abdabab
Do they really have housing stipend? I never heard of it.

