Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019 • Hacker News Board

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#11

Post by Zaheer » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

grammarxcore wrote: post #8

I feel like this list is skewed by cost of living. The top four cities are also very expensive cities to live in and around. 200k in the bay area is scraping by whereas 100k in the Austin area gets you a house in a reasonable amount of time. Are there any plans to provide adjustments like that?

Yes! We're working on Cost-of-living (CoL) comparisons and adjustments. We've just finished extensively normalizing our data (which we used for this report). The next steps are better analysis over it including things like CoL.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#12

Post by crw5996 » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

hotdogs wrote: post #6

Zaheer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Argo AI & Duolingo are based out of Pittsburgh. Uber & Google also have a decent sized presence. Some more context on their tech scene here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pittsburgh-tech/a-tech-bo...

Huh, it's been about a decade since I last visited Pittsburgh, I had no idea. Thanks for sharing.

Pretty much all the big tech companies have a presence here.

From what I can remember, Microsoft (Azure Storage), Amazon (ML Alexa Teams), Google, Uber (ATG), Argo AI, Aurora, Facebook (Oculus), Duolingo, and Apple are all have offices in the city.

In the suburbs I think Netapp and Oracle have offices.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#13

Post by Zaheer » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

crispyporkbites wrote: post #7

Is there data on the UK / London available?

https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer

Note that the figures are in US Dollars. In next few months we'll be adding better currency support.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#14

Post by chimeracoder » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

Looks like they're including RSUs for private companies as equivalent to cash, which dramatically skews the data.

For private companies, RSUs aren't liquid, and ISOs actually cost money to exercise, so they arguably have negative value. Treating them as cash-equivalent makes these rankings very misleading.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#15

Post by Zaheer » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

libso wrote: post #9

How is the level mapping between various companies decided?

Within a company, levels codify the hierarchy, scope & responsibility of employees. The question we try to answer with our mapping is: "If an employee at company X were to switch to company Y, which level would they come in at?". The answer then is: what is the equivalent scope / responsibility across companies. There's several other factors (company size, interview performance, etc) that go into actual leveling when you switch companies and thus we really emphasize that this is a rough guide. I think we've settled on something that's generally agreeable for most folks. We constantly take feedback though and adjust based on what we hear from users switching between companies.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#16

Post by Trias11 » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

Can we separate salary from stock-based comps?

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#17

Post by oarabbus_ » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

crispyporkbites wrote: post #7

Is there data on the UK / London available?

Honestly if you're a software engineer in the UK and you're concerned about salary... you should move to the United States.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#18

Post by Zaheer » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

crw5996 wrote: post #12

hotdogs wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, it's been about a decade since I last visited Pittsburgh, I had no idea. Thanks for sharing.

Pretty much all the big tech companies have a presence here. From what I can remember, Microsoft (Azure Storage), Amazon (ML Alexa Teams), Google, Uber (ATG), Argo AI, Aurora, Facebook (Oculus), Duolingo, and Apple are all have offices in the city. In the suburbs I think Netapp and Oracle have offices.

Significant concentration of AI & ML teams probably raises the median (thanks to CMU). Some of the hottest skills in the market today.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#19

Post by braindeath » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

hotdogs wrote: post #2

What's in Pittsburgh driving the median so high? I know Carnegie Mellon is there, but I was not aware of any sort of commercial tech hub.

Uber, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all are present. What’s clearly wrong or at least misleading about this data is that they represent only a small fraction of the tech workforce in pgh. Other than Uber and Google these are only small offices. They also happen to be some higher paying jobs within those organizations. The reality is that most tech people in Pittsburgh are looking at jobs at UPMC, PNC, NetApp or a handful of smaller companies and poorly funded startups, few of which pay particularly well nor have worthwhile equity comp even relative to the low COL small markets.

This 170k median doesn’t fit with other stats available, and is only true if your sample is limited to FAANG and unicorns, which exists, but is small in Pittsburgh.

Re: Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019

#20

Post by oarabbus_ » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #14

Looks like they're including RSUs for private companies as equivalent to cash, which dramatically skews the data. For private companies, RSUs aren't liquid, and ISOs actually cost money to exercise, so they arguably have negative value. Treating them as cash-equivalent makes these rankings very misleading.

They would be remiss not to include this when making a statement about total compensation.