Google Salary Ranges and Levels – Levels.fyi | Hacker News Reader

Google Salary Ranges and Levels – Levels.fyi

levels.fyi

88 pointsZaheer51 comments

Speaking as someone who worked for Google for >6 years, these numbers are 100% accurate. People saying they're not just don't realize how much they're getting underpaid working for a small startup. Big Tech pays very, very well.

Likewise, looks in line with my experience at Google as well.

> Big Tech pays very, very well

Well, then there's the new guy at NY Google only making $128K. That person is going to need to visit a food bank to live in that city on that salary! /s

Also, note the differences between cities. You will earn a very different salary if you work in the Bay Area vs. London.

As someone who works at one of the companies on the list, yes, these numbers are real. Big companies pay very well, consider working for one.

small companies who value the type of work that you do also pay very well. Sometimes companies don't value engineering the same way they value sales or accounting. Avoid those if you're an engineer who values your work.

The trick, of course, is that very few people have the ability to pass a Google interview. So it isn't just a lot of money available to anyone who wants it. It's a lot of money available to the few who are talented enough.

https://www.levels.fyi/2018/

$236,000 entry level engineer at Lyft. these numbers don't feel real. even for SF.. how's it possible?

Is it a common practice to overpay THAT MUCH or those few young (maybe not so young) individuals are just negotiation geniuses and skewing the real picture?

In the case of Lyft, they would have benefitted from the stock appreciation that happened over the last 1-2 years. Even with the rocky IPO, most people would have seen 50-100% higher stock compensation than when they joined in 2018.

It comes from a sample size of 3: https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Lyft/SE/T3/

There's zero validation to this data. If you feel it's too high, just submit a lower data point: https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html

>If you feel it's too high, just submit a lower data point

That's not how this is supposed to work

TC includes generous stock compensation, which has generally appreciated across the board the last few years

That's a base salary of $136,750 plus stock and bonus. It's a middle-class salary given the high cost of living in the region[1] and the competition for talent. It's also not at all out of line with what investment banks and white-shoe law firms pay their associates.

Meanwhile, I believe younger talent is underpaid across the board in industry. In many cases junior employees make less than half what their more experienced colleagues do, even though the juniors tend to take on more than their fair share of the workload, and they often are relegated to doing the tasks and projects that the seniors don't want.

I think this is mostly based on ingrained beliefs in dues-paying and hazing culture (tendency for existing members of an in-group to exploit the newest members) rather than any empirical measure showing that juniors are that much less valuable from a productivity standpoint.

[1]It's estimated that you need to make north of $200k a year to be able to afford to buy a single-family home in the SF area: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/25/18277602/income-buy-home-san...

Our numbers for Lyft are admittingly based off a small sample size. We did validate these numbers manually though across other forums that exist (Blind, Reddit, etc) to ensure they're within range. For larger companies we have dozens of data points are able to paint a much more accurate picture.

I wonder how those numbers have changed now that the stock has lost 20% of its value.

still much hirer since theyre based on the price of the stock when it was granted. so its appreciated at least 20% (check back in 4 months when the employee lockout period ends)

The only other types of companies that basically print money like web tech companies do are in the finance sector (hedge funds, investment banks). That compensation is not out of line with what front office professionals at those companies make. ($230k is significantly higher than finance for an entry level job, but $400k for someone with 5+ years of experience is significantly lower, so on the whole it seems to be pretty comparable.)

I signed my Google offer when GOOG was at $500 about 4 years ago, and it's over $1,100 now. About a third of my offer was in stock, so some of these high numbers are just the result of the stock price rising. I wouldn't expect new hires at those levels to make those amounts, although they seem accurate to me for current employees.

I think you will find that you're wrong. Your $500 GOOG was pre-split and has appreciated to GOOG + GOOGL, or about $2500, more than double what you put here.

Nope, the split was 5 years ago.

Those compensation levels are highly dependent on equity appreciation. The base salaries are pretty standard.

Once the stock stops going up, compensation is going to drop by ~50% for a lot of folks.

Most of these numbers seem to lifted off of what employees are promised on their offer letter so I doubt the appreciation is already baked in.

Are you sure? It looks like an L3 is getting $100k in equity per year, so they’d get a $400k grant at hire, vesting over 4 years?

They are not dependent on stock appreciation (unlike most startup offers, who during the negotiation stage try to sell you their stock options at an implied valuation 10-100X from the current one), the RSUs are granted at the price of your joining date.

If/when the stock later crashes, typically the company is going to issue generous refreshers to good performers to bring them in line with their original grant amount (source: several friends who worked at FB during the stock crash of last year), whereas when the stock skyrockets your compensation skyrockets as well because your RSU grant price is locked in at your offer/refresher date, like a reverse mortgage (source: myself).

That only works if it's not market wide. Good luck getting option/rsu refreshes in a general tech recession.

In a general tech recession you wouldn't be any worse off than any other tech worker though, right?

In a general tech recession sure, but I can almost certainly guarantee that my total compensation at Google will still be much higher than the compensation at any startup or other second tier company.

People have been saying "this won't last, good luck keeping this going!" for a decade now, and rather than reciting the same motto like a broken record in an attempt to justify my lower compensation, I decided a few years ago to join the bandwagon and milk the good times as long as they last. I'm saving like crazy while doing so, and there's no apparent sign of stopping.

Take me at face value: I was just saying that RSU/option refreshes will be less frequent given a general recession, particularly a tech-heavy one (where so much capital has been deployed recently and there is probably a bit of overbuild).

I think there are a lot of advantages to a big company employer, and comp can definitely be one of them.

I would watch out for signs. Yield curve inversion and Duke CFO Global Business Outlook are bearish. The fact that those are happening with high levels of stimulative policy should get more attention. The run on ipos can definitely be read as a change in posture that this is a local high point for equity markets. Anecdata, but there are more stories like https://seekingalpha.com/news/3465880-pioneer-natural-resour... and https://seekingalpha.com/news/3465885-toll-brothers-minus-3_... which I would interpret as leading indicators of a slowdown.

These numbers are lower than I expected; if you have even a single competing offer from another respected tech company, the numbers are much much higher.

Also, once you stack the annual refreshers and a little bit of stock growth over a year or two, you could be making close what your L+1 peers are making as per the chart. This chart is a reasonable indicator of maybe the numbers on your offer letter but usually this increases substantially over time.

Source: I'm a Google employee.

Absolutely correct. Keep in mind if recruiters reach out to you while you’re employed you have a stronger negotiating position.

I think it’s a lot easier to get stock vs cash increase.

> if you have even a single competing offer from another respected tech company

At hire, or at the annual comp review?

Dear friends at Google, since I guess many of you will read this, I have a question for you. Is there any internal discussions going on about what you should do with all the money you are earning once your basic needs are covered and you find yourself with money that could be invested in interesting projects?

That's a crazy amount of money even relative to the salaries in the income tax free haven of Dubai. The highest pay for a software engineer is around 150k USD annually.

I would love to see the numbers for Paris, France. Salaries are a complete mess here and secrecy around the subject does not help

Without a location these numbers are useless. I assume they are all Seattle/SF. Comparing to what someone would make in a chicago suburb is not apples to apples.

They all have locations... Not sure why the summaries don't filter, but just type a location in the search bar and you can see the individual postings.

The locations are on there...

But you work for an advertising company.

Take sites like these with a grain of salt. Given the total lack of validation that any of this data is from real employees, there's not telling how (in)accurate this site (and others like it) are.

This particular site seems to be a marketing piece for TripleByte. Perhaps the makers can comment on the accuracy of the data?

I understand I'm just another random data point on the Internet you might decide not to trust, but I've received offers that exactly fall in the compensation bands of the website, specifically: Google L4 (~280k total comp), FB E5 (~390k total comp) and Netflix (~400k total comp). The years of experience for those roles (between 6 and 8) match as well. And I'm no genius at all, quite the opposite.

If you don't mind me asking, how much did you negotiate?

I negotiated, but not too much. Those are very standard offers.

Thanks!

How come you decided to take the Google offer? :)

It came down to choosing the best team for my skills, and since then I've received generous stock refreshers, a promotion to L5 and the stock also appreciated a lot, so compensation is not an issue.

Maker here. We do some validation across salaries and take down obvious outliers as well as only include 1 standard deviation on our charts. We've found this filters out majority of the noise. We've talked to employees, hiring managers and compensation analysts at several well-known tech companies who have all said that our compensation data is likely the most accurate that is publicly available. We're working on items to ensure data validity even more in the coming months.

I find the site super helpful, so thanks for your work!

Have you considered letting people also report refresher equity grants? It would be interesting to see how they vary at different companies.

Another thing I’ve noticed on other tech career forums, is that a lot of people seem to report their equity based on the value it had once it vested rather than the value at the time of the initial grant, which obviously can inflate the numbers since the same growth isn’t guaranteed going forward. Any sense if this happens much with levels.fyi data?

Thanks! The compensation figures we collect are 'Total Compensation' and so we expect users to include that as part of the reported figure. Many companies factor refreshers into the total compensation they allocate to employees.

This relates to the first point in some ways. The vested value is actually what we care about. Part of the reason why tech salaries have skyrocketed in recent years is due to this. For employer B to attract someone employee at A, they have to match the employees current vesting value (otherwise it wouldn't make sense for employee to switch). The stock market has rallied (with ups and downs) for several years not and has driven the compensation up as a result.

Interesting. Yeah, obviously the vested value is what matters to people at the end of the day.

In that case, maybe some kind of conversion view would be useful? Like splitting up: here is what you would expect an offer you receive today to look like (base, target bonus, and 4-year equity grant), and here is what your comp might look like at years 2, 3, or 4 at the company based on reported TC that factors in equity refreshers and recent stock appreciation.

My thinking is just that one of the obvious times when this tool is super useful is when you get an offer and you want to see how it compares to other offers the company has given out recently at the same level. But the offer you get will just be an initial grant and won't include stock appreciation or refresher grants (if there are target refresher grants, those would be listed separately in your offer). It would be cool if levels.fyi had some kind of normalized view to be able to do that direct comparison.

Worked at Google for 7.5 years. Numbers are valid

I work at a FAANG and have many friends/colleagues that do + have access to voluntarily shared internal compensation data at my company.

The numbers are fairly accurate, but are slightly (~5-10%) skewed higher. This could be because those the type of people that find the site represent those that are better at researching/negotiating, and/or those that are proud of their salary tend to report more.

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