Show HN: Comp.fyi – Open compensation data by company and level | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Comp.fyi – Open compensation data by company and level

levels.fyi

34 pointszuhayeer13 comments

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.

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). 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.

Why not show recent aggregates alongside overall aggregates?

Yeah you're right, could do both

A graph would be great.

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.

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.

The numbers in the charts are means over user submitted data we've gotten. We've tried to dismiss severe outliers, but still are not 100% accurate. But with the volume of data we've collected I believe we're converging on something close to what is real.

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.

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

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

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

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

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