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?
Missing stock grants and RSUs, which make up a majority of Big 4 total comp.
Compare career levels across companies
101–110 of 428 posts
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Did you have strong competing offers? From the discussions on Blind most folks get strong offers from Google only if they have another really strong offer. Keep in mind most of our data presented right now is Bay Area-centric. We're working on filtering all views of data by location still.
There was a sheet shared around in Seattle some time ago with salary information. Some interesting points that came out of that were that salaries for women and minority engineers were significantly lower. Also, there were clearly a lot of misreported numbers (some exorbitantly so).
There are actually multiple sheets. Here's one: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-CqO6Px-0yA2421OOtJo...
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Your L4+ levels seem pushed up by one to two. Levels should align to manager equivilent scopes. Based on my own experience at peer company and https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-job-levels-in-Googles... L4: Capable of independent work on a project and coordinating with a small group (1-2 others). (note this is PhD starting level) L5: Capable of leading your team (e.g. as a tech lead). Maps to entry-level manager…
Your comparison to a 100eng company seems off.
There are L8s that lead orgs of more than 100 people they'd map to cto or ceo. Indeed given my own experiences, many L6s have L5 TL/M reports. I'd say L7 is the better mapper to vp of eng at a 100 eng company. That allows you to have 2-3 VPs under the CTO.
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#104Hi, 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. Curio…
Fitting username.
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#105Huge fan of this site, for two reasons: - It lets “outsiders” to the tech scene understand salary and levels at big companies. If you went to MIT you probably already have frat brothers/sorority sisters or an alumni network that consists of senior engineers at these big companies that know the promotion and compensation schemes well. But if you were an equally smart student who went to a non target school, many of th…
I agree that it is a great site. This is the kind of thing the Internet was, or at least should be, made for. I would also encourage people who like this kind of thing to think, or take it, one step further. Because even in countries where salaries (tax returns really) are public information getting a decent, or even predictable, salary remains a problem.
Some of this is that there is a difference between data and information. Even though you have the data, the information asymmetry remains. After all your interests are often at odds with people whose job it is to look after the company's interests and sometimes with other people in the job market as well. But maybe most of all it is a practical problem. And it isn't usually information that solves practical problems, but what you do with the information you have.
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your L4+ levels seem pushed up by one to two. Levels should align to manager equivilent scopes. Based on my own experience at peer company and https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-job-levels-in-Googles... L4: Capable of independent work on a project and coordinating with a small group (1-2 others). (note this is PhD starting level) L5: Capable of leading your team (e.g. as a tech lead). Maps to entry-level manager…
To be clear, there are different levels for managers and engineers. An L7 engineer is a seriously dope engineer (like the kind of person you'd want to found a hard technical company with; think low-level problems like DMA). An L7 manager maps to a senior engineering manager. I have talked to a couple L9 engineers and they're monstrous. L9 managers are directors or VPs.
Can you give an example of a project an L9 engineer would work on?
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Curio…
Fitting username.
I've downvoted this because it seems like you're trying to be insulting to this person on the basis of an assumption about their gender. That doesn't seem worthy of HN.
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#108Here'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'…
UK software salaries are a joke.
I get a lot of feelers from agents looking for 5-10 years experienced, capable software guys and looking to pay in the range of your grad salary for them. The embedded world seems particularly bad for this but it's rife throughout. The US, Canada and Australia all pay far better, often multiples of what's on offer at home.
The only way I've found to come close to the pay I could get overseas is to become a contractor and try to land work in or around finance. Even then it's hard outside of London.
The problem in the UK is, AFAICT, that managers and company owners see software guys as grunts, floor staff, no different to hiring other generic office staff. They pay poorly, they have low expectations and they get people in who are broadly in line with that - demotivated, poorly skilled, unproductive. It's a viciius circle of low expectations and low rewards.
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#109Huge fan of this site, for two reasons: - It lets “outsiders” to the tech scene understand salary and levels at big companies. If you went to MIT you probably already have frat brothers/sorority sisters or an alumni network that consists of senior engineers at these big companies that know the promotion and compensation schemes well. But if you were an equally smart student who went to a non target school, many of th…
There are two problems with these:
1) If you aren't at one of these companies, it's not a fair comparison. It's really difficult to find a pre-IPO company who is going to compensate you like these, if for no other reason than that options are just not something you can easily stick a dollar value on.
2) It's kind of depressing. It's very easy to find people at similar experience levels as you making FAR more money (perhaps 50%, or even double), because you aren't at a FAANG company (or whatever we're calling them now). It can really make you feel like you haven't learned/grown/accomplished anything in your career when you see people starting at a similar comp to what you get for a decade+ of experience.
Some people act as though these companies are an easy alternative for anyone, but the reality is that there are only a handful of them. For me, with a ruby background(+), I'm not particularly interesting to any of them, and I know I'm not the only one.
It's neat that between Facebook/Apple/Google you can compare apples to apples, but for a lot of people, it's really an apples to oranges comparison, and a frustrating one.
Also, I imagine it's that much worse for people outside the Bay Area.
(+: While I'm happy to learn new languages on the job and not tied to any stack, it's still not easy. For instance, a Google recruiter once told me to spend a few months becoming a Python expert, and then they'd interview me (in Python); another time a Microsoft recruiter insisted that I do the interview in Java and then got frustrated when I struggled with syntax I hadn't touched in 5 years.)
Re: Compare career levels across companies
#110Can 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?
Just rumors I've heard but the people who make that much (and I've heard some crazy numbers) are people who have a lot of knowledge of proprietary systems internally in Google. I don't know if there are actually a lot of them though.
I mean, think about the leverage you would have as one of the top owners/maintainers of proprietary systems at one of these companies. Tons of direct value to the company in both keeping your brain in the building and also not having you go to a competitor.