Maker here. We do some validation across salaries and take down obvious outliers as well as only include 1 standard deviation on our charts. We've found this filters out majority of the noise. We've talked to employees, hiring managers and compensation analysts at several well-known tech companies who have all said that our compensation data is likely the most accurate that is publicly available. We're working on items to ensure data validity even more in the coming months.
I find the site super helpful, so thanks for your work!
Have you considered letting people also report refresher equity grants? It would be interesting to see how they vary at different companies.
Another thing I’ve noticed on other tech career forums, is that a lot of people seem to report their equity based on the value it had once it vested rather than the value at the time of the initial grant, which obviously can inflate the numbers since the same growth isn’t guaranteed going forward. Any sense if this happens much with levels.fyi data?
Thanks! The compensation figures we collect are 'Total Compensation' and so we expect users to include that as part of the reported figure. Many companies factor refreshers into the total compensation they allocate to employees.
This relates to the first point in some ways. The vested value is actually what we care about. Part of the reason why tech salaries have skyrocketed in recent years is due to this. For employer B to attract someone employee at A, they have to match the employees current vesting value (otherwise it wouldn't make sense for employee to switch). The stock market has rallied (with ups and downs) for several years not and has driven the compensation up as a result.
Interesting. Yeah, obviously the vested value is what matters to people at the end of the day.
In that case, maybe some kind of conversion view would be useful? Like splitting up: here is what you would expect an offer you receive today to look like (base, target bonus, and 4-year equity grant), and here is what your comp might look like at years 2, 3, or 4 at the company based on reported TC that factors in equity refreshers and recent stock appreciation.
My thinking is just that one of the obvious times when this tool is super useful is when you get an offer and you want to see how it compares to other offers the company has given out recently at the same level. But the offer you get will just be an initial grant and won't include stock appreciation or refresher grants (if there are target refresher grants, those would be listed separately in your offer). It would be cool if levels.fyi had some kind of normalized view to be able to do that direct comparison.
