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Comment by Zaheer | Hacker News Reader

Maker here, posting this as a top-level comment for visibility. Lots of folks are interested in the salary information alone. We have a dedicated page for compensation information: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html

There's also a short url: http://www.comp.fyi :)

Edit: You can also contribute by adding your comp here: https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html

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Very interesting, thanks for putting this together.

One thing that I'd like to see - on compensation, can you clarify whether the stock grants are valued at time of grant or at time of vesting?

If they are valued at time of vesting then the numbers will be much harder to (a) compare against one another, and (b) extrapolate into the future.

Right now the submission form is ambiguous, which I worry is muddying your dataset. I highly recommend picking one and clarifying that on the submission form.

The submission form [1] asks explicitly for what would appear on your W2 (ex. vested value). Part of the reason why comp packages have been so high in last 1-2 years is that stock grants that were given to employees 2-4 years ago have shot up in value via a bull run stock market. To attract these employees, companies have to outbid their current expected take-home pay. Thus the vested value is actually most relevant when you are comparing your current compensation and new offers.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html

Thank you for the response and the explanation.

This is really true. A lot of people ask “what kind of a developer makes $300-400k per year?”.

The answer is one working for a company with equity that is increasing in value rapidly.

Take that away and it’s more typical to get $150-200k base plus another $50k in equity.

This is pretty critical information that, imo, you should communicate more prominently. I was a little shocked at the value of some of these grants for the level, but this makes more sense.

With compensation like that, I have to reconsider my drive to be an entrepreneur. If you can make a million bucks working for someone else, why work for yourself?

Statistically if you can get into a tier 1 company you’ll be better off. You get 10-20 years at $200-$400k by default, so $2-8 million. You have to weigh that against the exit success chance and size of a 5-10 year (as typical) startup run to an exit.

It’s not all about money of course, and if you can run your own place you can probably get into into a tier 1 tech company.

I worry if I'm missing out on the opportunity to get into a Tier-1 company while I'm busy going on my own. The chance of a $5-10M exit is slimmer than the chance of getting into a Tier-1 company.

I've got a couple of feature requests:

- Allow me to select more than three companies on the homepage. Or if that's not possible, let me toggle a specific one in and out. Right now I try to keep my current company on the screen, but as toggling a new company in drops an old one (seemingly lifo) it's a bit of a juggle - On comp.html the tooltip over the graphs only shows 2/3 of the values. So I can see: * Base salary + Total * Base salary + Stock * Stock + Bonus but not all 4 at the same time. It'd be a lot more useful if I could.

I don't see a way to search within a company. Like salary of software engineers at level E5 at Facebook.

Ah yes this is a common feature request. We'll get to it soon! For now searching the company name in textbox + clicking on column sort may help.

Really cool website!

One thing that seem to be missing is the signing bonus.

It's different from the yearly bonus since it's a one time event, but it can be significant.

Averaging it per year would only make sense if a person leaves the company and divides the signing bonus by the number of years worked

Where is the data sourced from? Is it all self-reported?

Yup, you can add your own here: https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html

I work for a company that was marked as "New" but there was no compensation. The levels were correct (close enough). Was wondering where you get the levels data from? Job postings? Or someone submitted levels w/o submitting compensation.

Levels can be submitted here: https://www.levels.fyi/create.html

Compensation we get separately through this form: https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html

Love this! Would love to see it expanded to include the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

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