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Comment by uyt | Hacker News Reader

How do you account for stock/option appreciation? Which number is displayed on the site?

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.

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We think of data points on our platform as snapshots of salaries in time. Currently, we ask for the last reported year of compensation which would include stock appreciation. You can distinguish this on our compensation page by filtering the "Years at Company" field: https://levels.fyi/comp.html?showFilters

When the Years at Company field is 0 it is a new offer.

The problem is that right on your front page I see that the estimated annual comp for a G6 engineer at Google is expected to be $226,673 salary/$212,061 stock/$50,939 bonus. The stock portion, however, includes both brand new offers and those which have benefited from many years of appreciation, making the number effectively meaningless.

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.

I just look at the date.

Yeah definitely, we're working on improving the home page experience since that's what a lot of people land on initially. It's balance of keeping it simple vs having way too many options.

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...

I think this is a great point. You need some way to account for what the stock has done over the period.

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.

by mixing offers with tax returns, you are creating way too much noise.

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.

Yeah agreed, we're working on a better way to collect this in a new form. The plan is to initially collect the original offer as a standard and then having another stock compensation field + a description text box to account for appreciated value and also any details for refreshers etc.

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