Hacker News Reader

Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

a new hire at my current level would get literally double my current comp as a person at the company for five years

That's not unusual. Well, 2x salary might be, but it's well established that job hopping is the only way to guarantee your salary stays close to market.

View on HN

To add a data point to this, I recently interviewed at a large tech company. As part of investigating the comp, I ran a linear regression on data from levels and the results indicated that you should deduct a few grand for every year of tenure.

Worth considering the biased data. Levels will only have data from job seekers- which would imply that they either have A) recent offer or B) salaries from employees who are considering jumping ship (biased towards employees who are underperforming or in underperforming business units)

There is probably a missing category of employees who have been successful, gotten raises, and aren't shopping for jobs

Levels is garbage data. How is this not obvious?

One reason it’s not obvious is that several findings of my analysis aligned neatly with things the recruiter told me about the company’s comp structure.

I know there is bias in who enters data on levels, but is there something else that makes it garbage data? Can you elaborate? Because I have never seen it as 'garbage data' and would like to know more.

This is not obvious to me. I had access to comp data at two different companies and Levels data was pretty accurate across the board.

I’ve never seen it be close to any job I’ve ever had access to data for

I wish it were easier to compare that against other considerations. Comp isn't everything (though not judging those for whom it is) and it can be challenging to weigh the benefits of being somewhere for multiple years. Especially for places with steep learning curves and very large orgs where getting established is a very different day to day type of stress than continuing on and growing in something familiar.

Right, like the company raised bands for new hires but didn’t raise current employees commensurately, that is in line with needing to job hop, and tracks with the other comment of a couple thousand. But the difference in pay now is so drastic now basically everyone with 1+ years is looking or left

And even without raising the bands, employees' salaries ends up lagging over time.

A lateral job hop comes with a >10% raise, while an annual raise is 3-6%.

i know thats the common refrain, im sure its true most of the time, but aside from this last year or so ive gotten more increases from promos/equity than from job hopping(which have mostly been flat)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com