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Compare career levels across companies

levels.fyi

61–70 of 428 posts

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very very few make it to T7. You will not be hired as T7 either. Your comp may exceed T7, but not your level. Yes, you can make a lot of money at Google.

Is your comp not tied to your level?

It is but they are overlapping ranges so it's entirely possible for a level N to make more than an N+1

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#62
post #3

Hi, I'm one the makers of Levels.fyi. Happy to answer any questions and would love to hear feedback! We have a lot of features in the coming months that we think folks will love!

Consider adding non-binary genders to the comp reporting. Something as simple as 'other' or 'non-binary' would be nice. The challenges that non-binary folks face can sometimes be different, and it might be nice to see that reflected in the comp tool.

Edit: I wouldn't ask, except that the tool already asks for gender. If you are already asking for a gender, you should consider include options beyond male/female.

Curious about the downvotes without responses. Tech has people who are non-binary, whose salary negotiations may be impacted by that, and who may struggle to find data that represents them.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#63
post #31

Either I was: 1) seriously underpaid at Google, 2) things have changed a lot in the past half year or 3) the stats do not reflect real averages.

Keep in mind that new hire salaries at the same level are typically higher than folks internally who have been at that level for some time. The market rate has actually gone up significantly in last 1-2 years.

I have 16 years of engineering experience and Google has made me two offers (original and revised) for a T4 position in NY that are well below the numbers reported on Levels (in fact, below the average on the site). So, either I am getting low balled like hell or there is skew in the numbers.

Edit: there is skew in the numbers, not some in the numbers.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a little under 200k/yr total in Mountain View for T4.

I think the stats reported are probably inflated because of equity. If it includes people who had equity packages hired five years ago, that equity income is now worth twice as much as opposed to the equity someone would get if hired today.

People should be reporting the dollar values they were awarded, not what the shares are worth when they added their comp.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#65
post #20

Wow, I'm 40 year old director at big fortune company... and I find this mildly depressing lol. Why is this so different than Glassdoor?

> Why is this so different than Glassdoor?

Not sure about this, but IIRC Glassdoor is not systematically gathered, and so doesn't support generalization to any population other than “people who choose to provide info to Glassdoor.”

Glassdoor is radically out of line with systematically gathered data like BLS data.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#67
post #7

Here's a slightly related open question: Are Engineers in the US just much richer than in the UK? For perspective, I started my career with an MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering as a Hardware Design Engineer at £35k (I out-earned most of my fellow graduates). It seems like these salaries are just comically disjointed from my entire experience of life. Can anyone here speak to the differences? Everything I'…

I've been struggling with a similar question lately (only Poland instead of the UK and... the UK instead of the US) and here's what I've come up with:

It's not about being paid poorly/well - it's about serving a specific market segment.

To give an example: I work for a company based in Poland so I get to do "Tier 3" stuff, namely churn out apps with a Java back-end and an Angular/React/Vue/whatever front-end. I make considerably less than your junior salary. 90% of job opportunities here look like this.

What about the other 10%? Sure, they're more interesting, but they're usually paid less. And I'm not even talking about startups - just regular companies who happened to gain the trust of an overseas client.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#68

This makes salaries and compensation in Toronto seem outrageously low. Wow. Maybe I should be moving? Crazy. (Sadly, family is here, so moving is unlikely)

This is the usual reaction for those outside the Bay Area. Cost of living is very high in SF though, as are home prices.

Yes, but if you are capable of getting to senior levels at Google, COL in the Bay area is much less of a concern.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#69
post #39
post #3

Hi, I'm one the makers of Levels.fyi. Happy to answer any questions and would love to hear feedback! We have a lot of features in the coming months that we think folks will love!

Interesting site - it's nice to have such straightforward compensation numbers. Worth mentioning, though - several tech companies intentionally and transparently attempt to pay more for some locations. My company, for instance, pays way more if you're in Silicon Valley than pretty much anywhere else. It'd be nice aggregate, summarize, and compare companies based on a single location.

We're working on ability to filter by location more easily. More of a UX challenge than data challenge since we have data for other regions already. Still need to think through how to present this cleanly without over cluttering the site. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#70
post #35

Can you really make a million bucks with just 10 years experience as a T7 at Google? What does a "Senior Staff SWE" do? Are there a lot of them?

Most people won't reach T7 in 10 years. The expectation for each level is: L3: you are expected to do projects assigned to you well L4: you are expected to lead a project in your team well L5: you are expected to lead a project across multiple teams in your organization well L6: you are expected to lead a project across multiple organizations well I think the L6 engineer is basically a CTO role in many other companie…

I'm confused. Are you posting the "meets expectations" descriptions for each level, or the "qualifies for promotion" level? L4 is mid-level and L5 is senior. I have never heard of mid-levels being expected to lead anything, or seniors being expected to lead cross-team projects. Maybe that is my non-Google experience talking, though.
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