One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-...
In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/
With regular chats with a few old coworkers in various FANGish companies(we talk total comp between us) the numbers are always solid at levels, I wish this was more widely known as companies want to keep pay bands secret to drive down engineer's wages. Good work on the site and thanks!
One of your cofounder's, Zaheer, set a date and time with me for a phone interview and proceeded to ghost me even after sending multiple emails asking why he didn't appear for the call. I'm really glad I didn't join the company whose cofounder can do something like that.
Hey Zaheer here. There’s no excuse for ghosting. I totally apologize. I just checked back in my emails and it seems like our meeting and subsequent emails were around the same time I was out of town for a wedding a few things fell through the cracks. I generally make it a point to respond back to everyone but this was a period of time where there was a lot going on in my personal space and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you. I’ll DM you separately.
Just looking at this data I question why even bother working for a startup. Getting paid 200k at a startup is a rarity, usually with poor health benefits. Lots of work and a hope that you can make up the difference in case of a huge sale.
For me, startups helped me establish a track record and learn practical skills that helped get into bigger companies. I don't have a CS degree, and didn't go to a fancy school, so experience helped a lot. But now that I'm past that period, the value proposition of most startups seems really bad. Especially given ageism in tech, I think it really makes sense to maximize earnings while you can.
The really only reason I can imagine doing it would be if I really liked the team and product, such that the actual experience of working there was going to be really fun. But the startups I worked at were similar or worse than the larger companies on those fronts.
I've worked at a bunch of startups (20 years) and what I've learned is:
Do not work at an early stage startup!
- Shitty experience because you won't have to do things right. Initial system will turn out like crap because you are rushed to build it.
- You will be in constant firefights once live. You will feel like a hero but in reality you're just burning yourself out to make the leadership rich.
- No customers so won't learn about scaling,
- Little to no process.
- Pay is crap
- Equity is a complete scam. Company will do everything they can to keep you from capitalizing on them. 90 day exercise after leaving. 8-10 years before there's a market to sell and you won't last that long. Company won't buy them from you. Common shares instead of preferred. Dilution, etc.
- Management is inexperienced and a lot of times abusive.
- Once the company starts to succeed, a new wave of management will be hired. They will bring their own direct reports who blame you for creating the initial crappy system and your career will essentially be over at the startup.
This is spot on to my experience as well. Startup employees seems to move in waves and being the first wave of employees at a startup usually means working the hardest and getting burnt out. In my experience it's the second and third wave employees that have it easier, get to reap the benefits.
(Also, your bullets didn't format properly, you may want to edit your response to fix that)
It all depends on what you want out of your work. The balance has shifted semi recently so that if you want to maximize your expected earnings, for most tech area engineers the answer has shifted from "pick the right startup" or maybe "go be a quant if you can" to "go work for FAANG".
Things get a lot more complicated if you are not merely optimizing for income.
Quants still pay a silly amount that being a quant at a top firm (citadel, jane street, HRT, etc) still out pays FAANG most of the time. A candidate that interviews well and negotiates some can go for 300-400k new grad bachelors to those firms. That's not doable at FAANG. For FAANGs, over 300k without equity growth requires senior level or top band mid level. 400k needs senior level. While for citadel they're willing to immediately go that high. The growth in pay is also high in finance although it is very bonus heavy so performance matters a lot more than other places.
Have you considered adding finance/investment/trading salaries? It's super great for tech (one high paying field) and I think it would be really great for finance (another high paying field).
Definitely! We’re working on finance, the variability there in compensation is pretty high especially at these HFT firms with heavy bonus structures, and so we’re hoping to develop a way to accommodate for the soon (although you can still enter your information today)
sidenote, it's a bit hard to access aggregated data, I always have to click bunch of things if I want to see e.g. distribution of salaries for role in switzerland.
(all the default views seem to show just a list of entries, I think you first have to pivot to company, then to location before you can see any aggregated data)
Totally, we’re just starting to accommodate for better international support. We want to auto detect and change our home page (companies and currency) based on where you are. Look out for updates!
Can I suggest making it easy to include conversion to another currency? I recently was arguing about salaries at large tech companies with employees in Bangalore and Hyderabad. It would have been convenient (for my task) to not only have the local rupee rate but the “equivalent USD” (in this case at exchange rates, not PPP).
Yeah we do want to include currency exchange rates. On certain location pages, we actually do offer this. For example for India, you can toggle between INR and USD up top: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/India/
Can you add more nuance for private companies? It is hard to determine what people got at private companies because no one is using a consistent formula. It'd be good if everyone just gave number of shares they received (unless it's some other format like how Stripe does it) for private firms.
Yeah, this is something we’re actively working on for early stage companies. Number of shares is actually not very valuable information. What’s more important is your percentage of ownership given how many outstanding shares there are at the company. We’re taking a first attempt at collecting this information here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdErbieBKoeEVhrOWZn...
We think startup compensation will be a huge and important next step for us. Hope to have more updates soon!
*Note that once a company switches to RSU we collect that as a cash value at that point (so for example Stripe would have a cash value for their stock grant)
The first graph in the spectrum article seems wrong (eg some companies only have a bar for 2018 when they ought to only have one for 2020), and the interpretation doesn’t line up with it either, but maybe they are referring to something different.
Quick question: does this account for recent massive stock price inflation ? My comp at one of these places matched what you have here early to mid last year, but since then has gone up quite a bit due to the stock market
Usually what will happen when a company's stock increases is that new offers have a lower # of stock units in the hiring grant. Basically, even if Google is worth $1.5T or $15T they don't change the "total compensation" value of the offer at hand.
Ultimately, if you join and the stock goes up, congrats on your "free" raise!
Yeah agreed. I was curious if the median salary was impacted by the bull run, where suddenly engineers who joined a couple of years before the bull run are now disproportionately paid compared to more recent hires
Yes, it may – our aggregates account for the latest information at a specific level which can include data points for individuals who have been at a company and experienced stock growth. However, when you drill down into the individual data points (https://levels.fyi/comp.html?showFilters), you can take a look at, and filter by the "Years at Company" field to distinguish how long the employee has been in their current role.
We do believe that the stock growth in the market in general influences the monetary amounts of new stock grants. The bull run in essence contributes to larger stock grants through a cascading effect, as people who are looking to switch to another company expect higher and more competitive packages to make the leap.
Is there a way to filter for remote friendliness on Levels.fyi? Especially since COVID it's gotten hard to keep track of who hires remote and who doesn't.
I declined a role in the USA with severe performance anxiety over asking for 2-3x my current salary. I learned from your report I should have declined for asking 6-8x my current salary, with stock options.
I still would have had performance anxiety, but it would have been bigger, and bigger, is better, right?
I need some help interpreting the location data. For example, if you click on Los Angeles, there's a bar chart with median and different percentiles. I assume this is across all engineer levels (I - V). But I'm interested in compensation for a level at a location.
Going by years of experience, my level is Staff (IV) and the description notes that this is 10% of all engineers. Looking at the LA bar chart, the 90th percentile is around $325k total compensation. So a Staff level engineer in the LA area should expect around this much. Does this analysis seem correct with the given data?
We have yet to provide a generalized leveling filter for our salaries – we have started on creating a normalization though. You can check out the standard leveling guide we put together here: https://levels.fyi/standard
Click on the levels to get a brief overview of the scope and responsibility.
Yeah, sharp eye! So right now, the provider we use for location, Geobytes, abbreviates state code to 2 letters internationally and so the 3 letter code gets chopped to 2. Gets a bit confusing for some areas, so we’re trying to figure out we can have another mapping with it spelled out.
In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/