Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

tldr.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 114 posts

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#61

Post by borroka »

zests wrote: post #25

It feels like there are two classes of engineers in the US. One class of engineers makes 60k-120k and the other makes 150k-500k. Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.

For every job that it's open in one of the FAANG, recruiters get thousands of applications. It sounds like many are trying, but the vast majority never gets a call back. Others cannot pass the interview. Others again are not interested in working in a very demanding environment.

I worked at a FAANGs, now I work in lower-tier tech company. I make 3/4 (low-ish upper tier) of what I used to make, I work 1/8 of the hours I used to work, work stress is non-existent. Many people, many reasons.

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#62

Post by daniel-thompson »

zests wrote: post #25

It feels like there are two classes of engineers in the US. One class of engineers makes 60k-120k and the other makes 150k-500k. Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.

I did it a few years ago.

For me, the former type of job required very little actual work. It was comfortable. It was easy. It paid well enough for a single young person. My nights and weekends were free to pursue other interests, some of which were very time-consuming (e.g. flying helicopters part-time in the military).

The big turning point for me was having kids. The inherent danger of flying caused me to leave the reserves. The increased monthly budget required for kid-raising got me out of my comfort zone. I looked for a new job for the first time in 10+ years. My TC now is double what it was when I started that process 2.5 years ago and I'm well into the latter category. Partly that's due to moving to a name-brand company. Partly it's just a great market for SWEs. Partly it's years of 3 - 5% COLAs that made me fall behind market rates.

Switching jobs is hard mentally & emotionally, especially if you're basically comfortable already. I suspect that's why many people don't do it.

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#63

Post by joshvm »

wc1b5ja wrote: post #12
Zaheer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes many of the top tech companies are now hiring across Europe (and in fact have been). Ex. https://eng.lyft.com/introducing-lyft-engineering-kyiv-2884d... Salaries are definitely adjusted. To get a feel for salaries: - https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Netherland... - https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Ukraine/ - https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/

Somewhat related - do you know if those companies will hire US-based engineers for the same European positions? Or are those positions primarily set aside for engineers already in Europe?

This is partly a labour law thing. The EU benefits from freedom of movement and work, so people can apply to different countries without worrying about immigration. Residents outside the EU (third countries) may have to prove why they'd be a better choice than an EU applicant; rather the onus is on the company. That will also depend on the role and the employee but generally companies will prefer to hire locally if they have international offices. It's easier to move an existing employee to a different country than hire internationally, usually there are specific visas for that case.

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#64

Post by zuhayeer »

vmception wrote: post #41
zuhayeer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#65

Post by ludamad »

zuhayeer wrote: post #19
ludamad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median compensation around Toronto for C$158,000 seems quite high. Real numbers of course might shed light on surprising facts such as this. How do you combat the bias of people feeling that higher salaries are more important to report, however?

Yeah fair point, we need to collect more salaries overall to present a more accurate picture of the labor market. One way we plan to tackle this is to provide more incentives to share your salary. Perhaps this is more of a social stigma issue around sharing your salary, but we encourage everyone to submit their salary, it helps everyone else out: https://levels.fyi/addcomp.html

If you consider US political polling, one key correction is demographics of people who respond well to optional polls. Of course, they have eventual ground truth and are only predicting a 1bit outcome. Still, do you guys have any thoughts on corrections on the data you get in?

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#66

Post by sxp »

zests wrote: post #25

It feels like there are two classes of engineers in the US. One class of engineers makes 60k-120k and the other makes 150k-500k. Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ covers this well.

This skew is not obvious to people outside Silicon Valley, but it's discussed more now that sites like levels.fyi are providing data. Even more shocking is the split between SV/NYC/SEA salaries and the rest of the world. When the Google internal Salary Spreadsheet was created, people were amazed and the difference in salaries between LON/EU SWEs and US SWEs given that both groups are equally skilled.

Getting a FAANG job is hard, but it's worth it for the ability to retire after a decade of hard work compared to working for multiple decades at a normal tech company.

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#67

Post by rawtxapp »

zests wrote: post #25

It feels like there are two classes of engineers in the US. One class of engineers makes 60k-120k and the other makes 150k-500k. Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.

Anecdotally, it's either they can't relocate because of reason x,y,z (family usually) or they can't pass the interviews for those highly paid positions (or some people just aren't pursuing money above everything else).

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#68

Post by eldavido »

paxys wrote: post #33
zuhayeer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 of…

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.

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#69

Post by dilat »

borroka wrote: post #46
dilat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Netflix compete for post-senior talent with only one level? (i.e. “staff” and beyond)

One level, but different compensation. For SWE IC, it can range between 300k and 700 (plus in some cases). The same for higher levels, there is a big variance in comp. You can use up to full salary to get options (not shares) at 40% (used to be, I don't know now).

Oh… so they basically have levels, just informally? Or are the expectations actually the same for two people making 300 and 700?

Re: We're Levels.fyi, the most accurate resource for tech salaries, ask us anything

#70

Post by eldavido »

daniel-thompson wrote: post #62
zests wrote: post #25

It feels like there are two classes of engineers in the US. One class of engineers makes 60k-120k and the other makes 150k-500k. Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.

I did it a few years ago. For me, the former type of job required very little actual work. It was comfortable. It was easy. It paid well enough for a single young person. My nights and weekends were free to pursue other interests, some of which were very time-consuming (e.g. flying helicopters part-time in the military). The big turning point for me was having kids. The inherent danger of flying caused me to leave th…

I think this is a big part of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley ~10yrs and I'm surprised how little actual work people do at these 60-80k jobs.

It really isn't comparable. The way SV people work, the expectations, level of responsibility, selectivity in hiring, and sometimes hours/stress, are of a kind only found in law or medicine elsewhere.

Post reply on HN