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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
“ 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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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)
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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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.