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Comment by imbusy111 | Hacker News Reader

Either I was: 1) seriously underpaid at Google, 2) things have changed a lot in the past half year or 3) the stats do not reflect real averages.

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Keep in mind that new hire salaries at the same level are typically higher than folks internally who have been at that level for some time. The market rate has actually gone up significantly in last 1-2 years.

I have 16 years of engineering experience and Google has made me two offers (original and revised) for a T4 position in NY that are well below the numbers reported on Levels (in fact, below the average on the site). So, either I am getting low balled like hell or there is skew in the numbers.

Edit: there is skew in the numbers, not some in the numbers.

Did you have strong competing offers? From the discussions on Blind most folks get strong offers from Google only if they have another really strong offer. Keep in mind most of our data presented right now is Bay Area-centric. We're working on filtering all views of data by location still.

There was a sheet shared around in Seattle some time ago with salary information. Some interesting points that came out of that were that salaries for women and minority engineers were significantly lower. Also, there were clearly a lot of misreported numbers (some exorbitantly so).

There are actually multiple sheets. Here's one: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-CqO6Px-0yA2421OOtJo...

There is an incentive to overstate one's salary and no down side. In fact everyone should just double their salary when self-reporting that information to anyone that won't keep it in confidence.

What's "Blind"?

https://www.teamblind.com. An anonymous cross industry social network with per company discussion boards. People share interview advice, salary information, (TC or GTFO is a blind meme...), "dissenting" political thoughts and bad dating advice mostly. It can be good and terrible like most anonymous platforms. It's pretty shallow compared to HN (almost no technical discussion, business discussion, shallow poltical discussion).

It's just like the old app "Secret" -- except huge tech companies are on it, meaning its only slightly less toxic than /pol.

My company is allegedly aligned with Google’s levels here, and people routinely make Senior within 4 years. Spending more than 2 years at Eng I or Eng II is considered a cause for serious concern.

So T4 after 16 years is very surprising. Something is off.

It is not especially unusual for industry hires (even those with plenty of experience) to come in at T4 for Google. Being productive and effective within Google is an additional skill which is not identical to the outside, so it's a risk avoidance measure on both sides.

Assuming your experience translates well, people frequently go for promo within a year or two.

> Being productive and effective within Google is an additional skill which is not identical to the outside

I don't buy that. I get that Google has a whole lot of proprietary stuff they have built their business on, but being in that situation is not unique to Google.

> Assuming your experience translates well, people frequently go for promo within a year or two.

If that's the case, I'm not going to feel bad rejecting this offer.

If you don't work at one of a small list of companies (I've said elsewhere that "Facebook" would be a decent approximation, but Amazon or MS could count in some cases), you'll be downleveled when joining Google.

>Spending more than 2 years at Eng I or Eng II is considered a cause for serious concern.

Is this just for within Google or also from Google's perspective of hires from elsewhere? Because I have to admit I have not been past mid-level (which I guess is the Eng II equivalent) for over five years.

I have 10 years experience in my career and never held a senior position, officially. Do I miss out a lot in seniority by just being a permatemp and contractor for small shops?

I thought it happens quite regularly. I mean, I have about 16 years of experience and am still a Level 3 (but not a FAANG)

Are you accounting for annual refreshes? It's likely that the data posted represents employees that not only have had their grant value increase, but have had reasonable annual refreshes. The initial offer would naturally be much lower by comparison.

Please keep in mind, the compensation numbers are from employees that have typically worked for a couple years, have stock grants that have appreciated significantly, and that is a significant portion of their total compensation.

If you want to compare your offer, look at GOOG, AAPL, FB and what their stock value was in 2016. Use that share price to figure out what the employees that were hired in 2016 were offered in terms of stock, and compare your offer.

There is no magic to it. HR is just taking what they think they need to offer to be competitive, assuming a 10-20% annual increase in stock value, and making the offer. The primary reason why you see such high total compensation numbers is that tech stocks have done extremely well recently, which has put employees above their target compensation.

surprised google made you an offer at all. 16 years experience and only slotting in at T4 is a rejection.

Agreed that market rates have gone up significantly in the past 2 years

That's true, but it's also counterbalanced by strong equity growth over the past few years. A $100k/yr GOOG grant from 2014 is now almost $200k/yr (even ignoring refresh and raises).

This uhh isn't normally the case at Google. There are almost no cases where a new grad will make more in base salary than an existing employee. And relatively few where a new grad will make more in tc than an existing employee, although that does happen.

New hire != new grad

While that's true, experienced offers are influenced by tons of factors (and arent, as a rule, better than current employee offers ). There's not really enough data to draw any conclusion.

I'm not surprised. From personal and friends experiences, Google will lowball you if you don't have any competing offers.

As they should. It isn't a charity. A candidate without competing offers also represents a greater risk, because you don't have that additional signal of "somebody else wants this person too." But compensation ramps up quite quickly if you are good, likable, and not too unlucky.

I found that there was extreme variance at the lower levels and that would persist as people moved up through the ranks. A lot of that came down to negotiation or previous salary at the company they were leaving. I'd also say that the Zurich office throws the salary average much higher. The real strat was to get hired at Zurich, lock in the big RSU package and then take a nugatory salary cut and move to LA or Boulder.

This matches up with what I was paid at Google, even a little under, at the T3 level. I didn't have any competing offers. And I didn't negotiate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe T3 level is accurate because they're new hires, but higher levels are skewed by how much the value of stock grants have increased.

I'm inclined to think a combination of 3) and 1). For example the jump in base salary for Google from T5 (171k) to T6 (260k) seemed suspiciously high. So I looked at the page for T6, and it has 15 entries, most around 200k-220k, but one 550k. That's probably wrong. I think the reporter switched salary and stock (which shows 200k).

Not just you. These numbers are seriously inflated. I think it's for a few reasons:

1) Selection bias - people with larger comp packages are more likely to report their earnings.

2) Ego - people tend to embellish their reported wages.

3) People are reporting capital gains on their stock grants as income. If you started as a L4 3 years ago, I don't doubt you are making 250k with the growth Alphabet has experienced. If you start as an L4 today I guarantee the average is below 200k.

Are you comfortable posting your previous level/salary?

It was a little under 200k/yr total in Mountain View for T4.

I think the stats reported are probably inflated because of equity. If it includes people who had equity packages hired five years ago, that equity income is now worth twice as much as opposed to the equity someone would get if hired today.

People should be reporting the dollar values they were awarded, not what the shares are worth when they added their comp.

But refreshes and new offers are matching the current stock value not the original

$60k worth of stock is $60k worth of stock. Initial and refresh awards are converted to shares from a dollar amount. If new grants were $200k six years ago and are still $200k now, what the stock price has done in the interim is irrelevant.

This is evidently false. Stock has pulled total numbers comp up significantly. Employer is not going to give an engineer refresh that brings tc lower (in $ value) than the year before unless it wants to lose that engineer.

This is false - employers do give less. My own FAANG stock for my initial compensation when I joined my company was at $105k in RSUs, and they jumped up about 35% (was even higher, but the market is a little volatile currently). My refresh grant after a little over a year was $125k in RSUs, which turned out to be less stock by a not insignificant percentage compared to my first grant!

My read of the numbers floating around the internet suggests my refresh grant was for outperforming and my TC is high for my band. Whether my new TC is less than my first year, who knows. I'm happy with my work, and while the comp could be better (I should be at the next band but promotions are slower to come by in FAANG), I don't know if I'll ever even leave my company given that my total comp for a mid-level software engineer (at my employer) is already over $300k.

Is the stock posted here a full package (vesting over several years) or yearly vest amount?

Full package vesting over 4 years - you typically get annual refresh grants, which are new 4 year grants that stack on top of your existing grant.

Google grants RSUs. So $60k is 12 RSUs for someone hired in 2014.

In 2018, RSUs are worth twice as much as 2014, so people hired for the same role in 2018 get 6 RSUs ($60k) while the people hired in 2014 are still getting [at least] 12 RSUs ($120k).

This is what I'm talking about with regards to stat inflation on this reporting.

There’s no T-ladder for a while now. That does sound kinda low. I was payed slightly more as L3 more than 5 years ago.

I was L4. I was just sticking to the nomenclature of the website.

(not parent, of course)

IIRC: T4 (it wasn't called that internally. it was the "SWE III" smaller text on the box), 100k/yr salary + ~15k stock / yr, don't remember bonus, in 2011. ~$114k adjusted for inflation.

It could also be you didn't negotiate your pay well.

It happens to all of us.

Is glassdoor information more in line?

Glassdoor will be significantly off as it doesn’t discount older data

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