Yes. But their data is not coming from every employee out there. I believe their data are largely self-reported so perhaps biased toward the slice of people proud enough of their salary to report it? You also have to trust that they verify the salary reports somehow, which they say they do.
I’d like to see an anonymized dump straight from one or more of the big payroll companies. I think I’d find that a little more believable.
The other problem with levels.fyi is ambiguity around grant vesting, stacked refreshes and stock appreciation.
Typically in an offer letter the dollar figure shown will be a 4-year grant, submitters are supposed to divide that number by 4 to give the annual comp, but I suspect some don't realize this and submit the full 4-year grant + annual salary.
This is solved by verifying the offer letter, but that's only one form of verified salary.
They also let you verify via W2, and with W2 you are seeing stock appreciation plus stacked refreshers, so this can be very hard to assess, especially with a decade-plus bull run in tech stocks. Naive observers looking at the data would be shocked how many of those 7-figure salaries actually came from $300-$400k total comp offers that benefitted from stock appreciation.
