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Comment by rinchik | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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

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.

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.)

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)

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