500 Highest Paying Tech Companies (Dec 2023) | Hacker News Reader

500 Highest Paying Tech Companies (Dec 2023)

github.com

122 pointsmiketromba81 comments

This data is really not that useful, or doesn't reflect what the simple title suggests it does.

There doesn't appear to be any attempt to control for job level, and it's not even clear how one would control for such a thing. Public company stock and private company stock appear to be valued the same which may be true on the surface, but is a wild misrepresentation of reality (in many ways). Different companies need different distributions of skills, so would have different median salaries even though they might be paying the same amount for the same job. This doesn't account for geographical distribution, those centered in the bay area are likely going to be higher up this list despite others potentially paying much better in their regions.

Agreed, added a wall of disclaimers to clarify what it is and what it isn't.

Would it not be possible to look at one single level across all company? ie IC4 or something?

The definitions of levels vary wildly and there just isn't a good way to compare them. People can be justifiably one level at one company, while being quite a different level at another company.

not all companies have the same highly structured leveling system as amazon/google/facebook. look at the comp by level at jane street (https://www.levels.fyi/companies/jane-street/salaries/softwa...), it obviously doesn't make sense.

Would accounting for years of experience control for job level somewhat? That's the only info that could be extracted

I think that would be an interesting data set to publish, but you're right it would only somewhat control for it.

They normalize the levels between companies on a scale they defined themselves.

Who is they?

The data seems wildly inaccurate. The total comp for some of the private companies seems way too high, not to mention how the equity is extremely illiquid. The total comp for nvidia seems way low given how their recent performance.

And there are a ton of large "boring" tech companies that are not on the list at all. I don't expect that they're anywhere close to leading the pack in comp, but not in the top 500?

Maybe median is low? My total comp is high 2s, and where I work isn’t on the list.

My job is very easy and likely 36 hours a week. I’ve never once worked weekends or holidays, and the vacation time is better than European.

But when I started my total comp as waaaaaay lower. It took time for the money to stack.

What do you mean? I see dell, disney, EA, oracle, walmart, all on that list. Like what companies are you thinking of?

Also big boring companies tend not to pay very well compared to more modern companies. This is just an anecdote based on my experiences with Disney.

Akamai, HP, IBM... Those are just a few I looked up. I didn't look up the ones you did. But I think you're sort of making my point. Do you believe Dell pays better than at least one or two of the companies I listed?

I mean, yes? IBM is known for having absolute shit pay for engineers. I don't know anyone who has worked at HP in software either, so I'm not surprised it pays poorly. I've never even heard it brought up.

IBM's pay is abysmal though.

I won't argue that the bigger traditional companies are the highest-paying targets. But, again, top 500 is a big target and I'm skeptical your average small startup is a lot better. But maybe it's just that you probably won't have a job in a year.

Or they have a ton of junior engineers which brings down the median.

Maybe. But 500 is a large number of companies. And those same companies have a fair number of employees who have been there for a decade or more. I'm not sure I believe that large profitable public companies aren't in the top 500 companies in tech in compensation overall.

well, some private companies have liquidation events regularly, like Stripe or SpaceX. I'd consider that only slightly more risky than a public company.

I assume the same for Databricks, but i'm not sure?

I think nvidia has some title inflation. I have a friend who work there as 'distinguished engineer', and it's more likely they would be L6 or L7 at FAANG.

I'm guessing overall Nvidia's comp is very similar to most FAANGs in terms of skill and YOE but not title (maybe excepting entry level, since it goes lower and is more fine grained).

Are you suggesting that people are putting in bad data to Levels.fyi? Because the data wasn't extracted out of thin air, or made up.

Equity data usually represents a big part of compensation and is basically impossible to value objectively as there are too many factors at play.

“ In March 2022, OpenSea saw revenues of $61.33 million; in March 2023, it had revenues of $172.33k. The drop represented a whopping 99.72% fall. The platform's fees have also fallen from $193.94 million in March 2022 to $1.41 million in March 2023.”

That’s OpenSea, no 11 on the list making $1.4m of monthly revenue and paying SWEs 430k salary

Also clubhouse. Is it still alive ?

Even if it is, the stock is forever illiquid and that comp beyond base salary is a mirage.

OpenSea still being a thing is insane to me.

Talk about an absolute squandering of capital.

This is total comp so probably an inflated value given that opensea equity is most likely worth zero?

This is why total comp is so flawed, especially if it's a private company. Equity can be a $0. Should have options to see only salaries

Equity can even be negative, when considering tax.

Dotcom era was a great time of putting engineers on a multi-year payment plan with the IRS... had a friend end up owing $200k after losing what at the peak was $5M in paper wealth.

For a marketplace that takes a cut of transaction, why is revenue != fees?

i'm assuming they pay you in NFTs, not cash?

There won't be enough left for the second guy

These numbers are wildly inaccurate. I spotchecked multiple places that I know the salaries and they're wrong.

How would you know they're inaccurate, unless you work in HR and know everyone's salaries? Just because the median is lower or higher than you or your immediate peers doesn't mean it's inaccurate, because you might have a bias

Agreed. I've worked at more than one company on this list, in positions with visibility into multiple peoples' total comp, and none of those are shown accurately here.

Are they mostly too high, too low, or all over the place?

Also agreed, there's a lot of inflation of reported numbers here.

I see the opposite fwiw. Numbers significantly lower

from my check, this doc seems to be showing the base comp (cash $$) for many positions. not all, but many.

Saw the description on the README which shows median, fair, but there's a lot of nuance such as whether or not it's a new offer, location, and level. As a consumer of this info I'd usually try to understand comp against those extra dimensions. That said, great simple table though!

Neat, thanks for sharing.

1. Posting some methodology in the README might be good, such as any filtering you did or didn't do.

2. You do have some obvious duplicates on there, e.g. `cit` and `citadel`, `jane` and `jane-street`. It's probably not worth the effort to manually clean that up, but I figured I'd mention.

Good call, added some more details.

Yeah, i somehow doubt clubhouse stock has any value.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Where’s the garbage in? This is allegedly self reported data by actual employees, not made up fabricated data

I think the fact that the best we can do is allege that the data is user reported, and further assume that users report this data accurately tells you everything you need to know.

levels.fyi is pretty good for what it is, but it's obvious a lot of users don't really understand their comp structure (or at least how it maps onto the form). just for example, there are a lot of amazon L4 sde records that have cash bonus + rsu amounts that take them way out of band for that level. they probably don't know how to represent the weird vesting schedule.

Is this new offers only? Because it matters a lot. I know people who joined Facebook an year ago when the stock was at rock bottom and are now making 800k+ as a Senior, mostly due to stock appreciation. (And thus reporting as such on levels.fyi)

It seems extracted from levels, so it's about whatever people report there.

I don't work at TGS, but I have a feeling they're much higher on average than this shows.

I've seen their recruiting emails, they are happy to hint at being able to 3x whatever someone's current comp is.

Which TGS? Total Global Sports or the TGS Energy Data Company?

It’s a secretive quant fund in California. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGS_Management

A good start, now just needs a tech stack, location, and remote columns.

This list in inaccurate. Renaissance Technologies isn't even listed, and they offer very high TC. TGS Management offers way more than $500k for SWEs, I know one SWE makes $700k there.

Would it be included in TC that your company managed Roth IRA grows by 66% each year? If so, it would be easily the highest on the list.

Woah what company is that

Renaissance

If the numbers are wildly inaccurate as everyone seems to be saying, what are the actual highest-paying tech companies? The usual FAANG and quant-type companies everyone knows?

Roblox has to be among the top 5

Choosing companies by compensation is so 2019. In 2023, it's about your commitment to and track-record on remote employment.

Actually choosing companies at all is so 2019. Now it’s companies choosing you :(

Apparently at CZI, L4 engineers reported to make less than L3 engineers. Seems like some data quality issues here

sounds like garbage data, but if they hire L3 and promote to L4, new hires will often make more than old-hands promoted up.

Recent OpenAI datapoints on Levels.fyi show something like $300K salary and $600K "stock", for hires just in the last few months...

Is that RSUs at some current valuation? ISOs with strike price at current(!) but assuming stratospheric growth continues over vesting period? Something else?

Is the stock value what the landslide support for the CEO-in-exile was about?

This is why adding equity to these comparisons is so problematic. It’s not apples to apples

In this particular case, maybe also why it's problematic to align staff too much with the for-profit rather than the non-profit.

If the for-profit didn't already have too much power over the non-profit initially, it does when the entire staff has been given multiples-of-salary reasons to back the for-profit.

How that staff misalignment with the non-profit appears to have been leveraged is exquisite, in how well it was pulled off in the end (especially with the drama). But seems to also be a concern for anyone wanting to structure a non-profit in which there's a fund-raising for-profit sideline, when the stakes are large.

Can't speak to the accuracy of the salaries, but it's a handy list of "higher paying" tech companies for those applying right now. Nice to have it all in one place.

Assuming a decent amount don't still have hiring freezes. I know one of them definitely does. At least in the US.

Uh, Convoy is on the list.

Maybe filter out the bankrupt ones?

Hertz sure seems out of place in that list.

Number 8 on the list is "Radix". When you look into levels.fyi, it shows the salary as $25k.

There's definitely some publicly traded tech companies that are missing from the list.

is clubhouse still a company ?

On the topic of levels.fyi, the enshitification of the product has begun. It won't let you access things unless you provide your work email? Yeah right, like I am going to do that. A bunch of other mandatory questions in the sign up process also irk me a lot.

This is a issue, as if you need a work email and your workplace actively monitors email and sees a confirmation message of some sort from levels, they could assume you are hunting for a new job and act on it. This seems to defeat the purpose of levels