We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything
tldr.tech
tldr.tech
Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.
Do you have kids? Have you thought about generational wealth? These are the things that are in people's minds. If you want to understand more visit subreddits like /r/FIRE or /r/bogelheads or /r/personalfinance?
Being able to donate a decent amount to a cause whenever I feel like it, is a plus.
Mo money mo problems.
The less obvious one is save a shit ton of money so you never have to worry about big healthcare expenses, whether it be illness or injury. It's amazing how quickly life can go from pretty good to pretty not good when you're unable to work for a while, especially when your health insurance is tied to your employment. One bad bike accident took me from a six figure income at the beginning of my career to struggling for over a decade, including a stretch of homelessness.
This is the dream. Get the second half of my life for myself, if I'm lucky.
If you don't make a very conscious decision to step off that flywheel, a lot of people find themselves in the position where that 500k is mostly going to maintain your new normal lifestyle.
Unfortunately hard to predict those events at the time of house purchase. Some people do very well on Bay Area real estate, some not so well.
In what areas did the pandemic wipe out housing prices?
Obviously not, but do diversify your investments.
A lot of homeowners are putting the vast majority of their portfolio in real estate due to the inflated home prices. Most folks taking on a $1 million mortgage with $200k down, don't have an addition $500k of other assets to fall back on if the housing market drops half the value of their house.
It's only a for-sure viable option for those that never marry or have children. And even then I'd caution someone to do it as long as you possibly can stand, you have no idea what lies ahead expense wise in life in your long retirement.
You simply have to experience or hear second hand.
Or just go to teamblind.com and ask people's experiences
At a smaller company there simply isn't that much work to do, nor is there much of a path for promotion (when your boss is the CTO...)
Ouch! That’s exactly right. Ultimately I bailed on small/medium companies because of the “boss is the CTO” promotion problem. There’s nothing to grow into at a smaller company. Also, most of them have no technical promotion track for Individual Contributors. You start at Junior Engineer, maybe get promoted to Senior Engineer, and that’s it. No more level ups unless you want to people-manage, which is a whole different skill set.
Contrast that with some place like Google, that has something like 7 or so distinct engineering levels with huge pay bumps and responsibility bumps between each of them! If you are a ladder climber by nature, the smaller company will infuriate you.
EDIT: (I just answered the inverse of your question didn't I?) People definitely grind leetcode for a FAANG gig after working elsewhere.
I worked at a FAANGs, now I work in lower-tier tech company. I make 3/4 (low-ish upper tier) of what I used to make, I work 1/8 of the hours I used to work, work stress is non-existent. Many people, many reasons.
Yours would be way more desirable than the FAANG stuff. People could moonlight for your job easily…
For me, the former type of job required very little actual work. It was comfortable. It was easy. It paid well enough for a single young person. My nights and weekends were free to pursue other interests, some of which were very time-consuming (e.g. flying helicopters part-time in the military).
The big turning point for me was having kids. The inherent danger of flying caused me to leave the reserves. The increased monthly budget required for kid-raising got me out of my comfort zone. I looked for a new job for the first time in 10+ years. My TC now is double what it was when I started that process 2.5 years ago and I'm well into the latter category. Partly that's due to moving to a name-brand company. Partly it's just a great market for SWEs. Partly it's years of 3 - 5% COLAs that made me fall behind market rates.
Switching jobs is hard mentally & emotionally, especially if you're basically comfortable already. I suspect that's why many people don't do it.
It really isn't comparable. The way SV people work, the expectations, level of responsibility, selectivity in hiring, and sometimes hours/stress, are of a kind only found in law or medicine elsewhere.
This skew is not obvious to people outside Silicon Valley, but it's discussed more now that sites like levels.fyi are providing data. Even more shocking is the split between SV/NYC/SEA salaries and the rest of the world. When the Google internal Salary Spreadsheet was created, people were amazed and the difference in salaries between LON/EU SWEs and US SWEs given that both groups are equally skilled.
Getting a FAANG job is hard, but it's worth it for the ability to retire after a decade of hard work compared to working for multiple decades at a normal tech company.
Don’t get me wrong. it might just be that life’s not fair.
It won't happen here, because our working class is asleep to the economic game being played, but the best blend is probably the UK and it's where we need to head as far as our demands.
It's very hard. Not having FANG/unicorns on your resume probably contributes massively to this. FANG style interviews are a skill of their own - I recently had a 6 hours of interviews back to back with Amazon and it was a mix of pretty tough technical questions and very specific behavioral questions. Even with practice solving sole of the question was very hard. For instance, I solved a DP question in a top down and interviewer asked me to then solve it bottom up for him in the remaining 5 minutes. You can't do this without a solid amount of practice.
What's always been a little baffling to me, though, is how easily these companies hire fresh grads. I have several friends that walked straight into FAANG jobs right out of school with little more than a couple quick phone interviews. One recruiter told me that the bar is lower for fresh grads because they can be more easily molded into the company culture.
so, If I'm fresh grad with 3 years of commercial, full time experience, then it'd be better for me to lie that I have no experience? :o
My views here are purely anecdotal, and based only on interactions with former peers (students) and something an Amazon recruiter told me at one point.
I don't think they can in the first place. It's like law, where compensation is highly bimodal.
There might be a huge difference between a person reporting their total compensation from their offer letter (according to the fair market value at the time) vs what it is after a few years of appreciation.
When the Years at Company field is 0 it is a new offer.
Even after digging in, there is no way on the site to restrict it to only new offers.
I personally have not reported my salary on levels.fyi or any similar website because my shares were granted pre-IPO and I don't want to further distort expectations for what an average software engineer is expected to make.
But we do have several other pages where you can dig deeper and filter into specific data points, for example for Google L6 new offers in the last year: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
Also another page with a better salary range chart to show some of the distribution: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
My understanding of tax is that escrowed shares (common for longer grants) aren't beneficially owned by the employee until the vesting expires, at which period the income is considered "earned" since it's yours (i.e. you can spend it), and taxed.
This means tech salaries are being somewhat artificially inflated by the huge run-up in general US equities (stock market). If the market is flat/down over the coming years, you're going to see these numbers crater for no reason other than that GOOG didn't double/triple over the past decade.
if you want to educate people and also raise awareness, you get a lot of pushback from people that do not believe anyone is making these amounts, people will literally debate the point because they are barely making $90k, and then your site comes along and the only source I can give shows people making $500k but really their compensation package would have said $320k annually. These are unnecessary hairs to split with an audience that understands none of it. They wouldn't believe the $320k or the reported $500k.
I think your site should either choose one standard, or add further metadata to what compensation people are getting/reporting. A scatterplot or graph that showed offer vs annual compensation would help. Reaching back out to people that uploaded offers to upload their tax document would help.
* Its cheaper for the company than cash (stock is the company's currency, they can issue more of it, decrease the supply, use it as collateral in financing etc)
* It can be better for the employees (pay less in taxes, more opportunity for growth)
* Incentives become aligned (I now care about the continued success of the company more so than I otherwise would)
They have one level and pay all cash with an option to convert some of it to equity.
For example, for a 500k salary you could say, I want 200k cash, and 300k in stock
Levels is showing that the average senior engineer at Netflix is only getting $11k stock though. If employees were allowed to choose what percentage stock they wanted, I'd expect most employees to choose a larger percentage than that.
Stock is likely to grow in value over the course of the year while cash is almost guaranteed to lose value due to inflation. You'd have to be pretty pessimistic about Netflix's future to choose the all-cash option. And even if you're only neutral about it, the stock is the better choice because it's inflation protected.
If I were a Netflix employee, I'd probably choose $200k cash, $300k stock. The fact that levels is reporting such wildly different numbers tells me employees don't actually have that level of freedom to control their comp.
versus
If you get cash, pay income tax on it, and then invest it, and then pay cap gains, that's another round of taxes you pay no?
ESPP can be a bit different, because you get a discount on the stock, but that discount is also taxed at normal income rates, and anyways is capped at like 15% or something.
The Employees do get the benefit that between the grant date and vest date, the RSU value could increase. And the employee gets the benefit of capturing that growth.
E.g. if 100k of RSUs granted, and 25% of it vested each year. Say in year 4 the value doubled. So they'd get 50k of RSUs and when it vests the employee is taxed as if it is income, and pays income tax on the 50k value.
Some explanation, in case people aren't familiar with "big N" or FAANG comp schemes: when you get an offer, you're given a "base salary"—somewhere between 100 and 250k unless you're quite senior—a four year RSU (stock) grant with some vesting conditions, and info on typical year-end cash bonuses and RSU refreshers. The annualized four year grant is usually somewhere between 50% and 200% of your base salary, depending on seniority. See levels.fyi for details. A "refresher" is a four year grant given in each of years n, n + 1, n + 2, ..., where n is typically year 2. The refresher is usually a quarter of your initial grant, but companies often given themselves a lot of legroom to adjust this number depending on market conditions, employee performance, etc.
We definitely have a lot of work to do to make international support better. We're working on better localization features right now.
We've added thousands of companies recently for a push to get more information, check out our company directory at https://levels.fyi/company/. We also take requests on this page if you don't see a company. The biggest limitation for us is getting salary data for a company – if we get 3 or more submissions for a company, we'll create a page for it. We encourage everyone to help us out by contributing at the link above!
Perhaps this is more of a social stigma issue around sharing your salary, but we encourage everyone to submit their salary, it helps everyone else out: https://levels.fyi/addcomp.html
I'm more interested in the business side of things e.g. how do you plan on monetising this app?
More info at https://levels.fyi/services/
If yes, then how the salary would be reduced due to location adjustments?
Salaries are definitely adjusted. To get a feel for salaries:
- https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Netherland...
- https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Ukraine/
e.g Google EU does CRUDs and maintains GCP meanwhile cool stuff is being done in MV?
WLB (fewer hours per week/more vacation) is the single most important factor for me, but I always feel weird asking/pushing for it because it feels like I'll give a slacker impression.
Even asking how many hours a team works feels delicate.
You know, "this offer is a little lower than I was hoping for, but if you can throw in an extra week of vacation time we have a deal"
Is this deliberate?
In tech metros, where those marginal market-clearing prices are set by those tech salaries, it makes sense that they would settle at precisely the point where they're no longer quite comfortable to the average tech worker. Otherwise, what's to stop you from paying a bit more for that house than the second best offer?
-Zaheer (Co-Founder Levels.fyi)