Snark aside, yeah levels.fyi does have data and so do other sites. (Although levels is the standard in tech imo).
Still is incorrect though, b/c those sites are biased against older consistent data vs new data.
Example:
Look at averages for FAANG engineers that are poached from other companies, vs ones with years at that company. If you just looked at the average then it wouldn't work since you're a new applicant you should probably ask for 20-30% more than if you currently worked there.
Also saying Google/Levels is good enough puts aside the problem of what market rate is for smaller companies. How much should a well funded web3 company pay you? What about companies outside of tech where salary sharing is less common?
All of the info available to the candidate on Google also pales in comparison to the asymmetry of one person versus an entire department of people who make these deals for a living, and have actual research on what's going on with the market instead of randomly reported crowdsourced data.
We now apparently live in a bizzaro fantasy world where legislation is required to spare people the discomfort of negotiating a salary or asking for a raise. If a company offered to pay you X and you agreed, whose fault is this?
We used to call dealing with these kinds of situations "being an adult."
> If a company offered to pay you X and you agreed, whose fault is this?
If you were forced to trade stocks for a living but had only second-hand access to price information ("My cousin bought some TSLA at $200/share last year") while all the brokerages share order flows in real time, would you say you're getting hosed? Or that it's a fair market?
For example, I played poker when I was younger. I routinely did much worse than mathematically expected. I suspect I was being cheated by the other players, but I wasn't savvy enough to know how they were cheating me. My solution was to stop playing poker.
I know that when I trade stocks, I'm getting chiseled. So I don't day trade. I buy and hold, and rarely make a trade. Hence, the chiseling doesn't amount to much.
It's an analogy. "Trading stocks" is an analogy for "negotiating salary". Nearly everyone has to negotiate salary.
> I wasn't savvy enough to know how they were cheating me. My solution was to stop playing poker.
So you're saying people's options are to a) be cheated on salary or b) not work in paid employment? I respect that you have an opinion, but it's not an opinion that I have any respect for.
> Hence, the chiseling doesn't amount to much
Because we have open price sharing today and it's not possible to cheat you too much. You're benefiting from this even though you don't day trade. If we didn't have that, you and every other buy-and-holder would be shafted severely.
Sidenote: I notice in many of your posts that you're a big proponent of free markets (which I mostly agree with). How do you square that belief with this one where one party, by design, has far less market information than the other? I'm genuinely curious about this, because it seems contradictory.
(And yes, you might say "Companies choosing to share/not share salary is actually them competing on a free market", but that's an awfully limited viewpoint when we have other markets where prices are required to be open - such as real estate, and securities - without there being any suggestion that they aren't free markets)
Negotiating is not "forced". Forced is the word you used. It is inapplicable and so your analogy simply doesn't follow.
> So you're saying
No, I'm not. I was pretty clear on what I said. You don't need to invent positions.
> every other buy-and-holder would be shafted severely.
Then the market wouldn't exist, and the market makers would either have to be more transparent about the price or find another business to be in.
> How do you square that belief with this one where one party, by design, has far less market information than the other?
People often have the notion that a functioning free market requires perfect information. I don't know where this notion comes from. But it is clearly false. One never has perfect information. In the marketplace, this lack of information is called "risk". The amount of risk is always factored into the price.
That's why, for example, you'll pay more for a car from a dealer than from a private party. You're paying more for less of a risk. If you're investing, you expect higher returns for riskier investments, and lower returns for "safer" investments.
Me (and you) will negotiate for a higher salary for a riskier job, and would accept a lower salary for a more reliable job. A company will offer a lower salary for a riskier employee.
Again, lack of information is called "risk" and is part of the price of everything you buy and sell.
Other than starting their own business (which most people don't or can't do), how else do you propose people earn livelihoods?
> People often have the notion that a functioning free market requires perfect information
I didn't say "perfect information". Institutional investors have access to snap quotes accurate to a few milliseconds. Retail investors get delayed information. Information asymmetry is a spectrum. The stock market is on one end, and the job market is close to the other end (I can only think of healthcare pricing in the US that's worse than that).
Risk only matters when comparing two otherwise-similar employees. Otherwise supply and demand are the dominant factors in pricing. Hiring someone to make sandwiches is very low risk (you can easily verify that they make good sandwiches) compared to hiring a software developer (any interview process gives imperfect signal). And yet the sandwich artist gets paid less than the developer.
I ask you again: would you participate in a real estate market where you could only find out prices by asking friends and family, while the other side (let's say all institutional sellers) can share lots of information with each other? Would you invest in a stock market like that? Would it be good for you? Would you think it's fair? What if it was the only way to obtain housing (short of building your own house)?
It's really weird that you're against legislation requiring market participants to receive more information. Perfect information isn't possible, but why is more information bad?
This exact same logic could be used to advocate against a minimum wage or really any employee protections.
If I am an adult agreeing to go to work in a sweatshop, why is the government stopping me? Because the government recognizes that I am only agreeing because the power imbalance my employer has over me is a form of coercion.
If you've ever been an employer, you'd know that you have exactly zero power over your employees. They can and do quit whenever it strikes their fancy. Employee turnover is a constant problem for every business. This applies to min wage workers on up to million dollar workers.
The only real difference is the million dollar ones give notice, and the min wage workers just stop showing up.
>If you've ever been an employer, you'd know that you have exactly zero power over your employees.
This is a statement totally disconnected from reality for most Americans. Over half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Over half of Americans get their medical insurance through their employer. These two facts mean that most Americans do not have the financial security to quit a job without having another one already lined up.
Googling crowdsourced data like levels.fyi or Glassdoor has way more noise and sampling bias than the data companies can buy from places like TWN by Equifax. Even if you had access to the same data, you don't have access to their business information so you have no good way of understanding what you would be worth or the value you are expected to generate.
An applicant has as much job-related gambling when they take a job as the employer, especially when the job can just fire you. When applying, you have no idea if the management is terrible, if your particular manager is terrible, if the projects you're going to work on are terrible, if the procedures and standards for working on a project within the organization are stupid or will penalize your style of work, if the job will have high expectations and skimp on resources, whether your new company sucks at hiring and all your coworkers are going to be terrible...
Calling it a crapshoot on both sides is a pretty empty statement. When it comes specifically to compensation, the applicant is David and the company is Goliath.
Employee compensation is based on the value they provide to the company. Equity owners are compensated for the risk they take. I don't see any essential correlation between the two.
For example, if you pay Bob $10 to go to the store and buy a lottery ticket for you, and you win the $1m jackpot, do you owe anything more to Bob than $10 worth of value he provided? Let's say the ticket was a dud. Do you therefore owe Bob less than the $10 you promised him?
Prices are a function of supply and demand, not “value”. I pay very little for very “valuable” life sustaining food because I can get it cheaper from multiple sellers.
Sure, and in order to correctly value something, you need to know the relatively real time price history to infer how supply and demand curves are moving.
Not having that information means you will ascribe the wrong value, which means society is not allocating resources properly.
Your example is not relevant to this conversation because we are not talking about retroactively changing negotiated prices.
Labor prices stagnating relative to equity owners’ gains has to do with supply of labor vastly increasing due to globalization, and simultaneously, automation reducing demand for many types of labor.
Having transparent prices will help better inform labor sellers which labor markets have excess supply and which need more labor, in a timely fashion.
Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Note that companies struggle with data as well. There's dozens of companies that solely exist to provide better data to companies around salaries (Radford, OptionImpact, etc.). All of these have limitations as well (title matching, recency of data, etc.) and generally companies subscribe to multiple providers to get a better picture of what the market pays. Companies in fact purchase data from us as well (the same data you see on site but formatted in a way that's easier for comp analysts to use).
The reality is that there is tons of nuance that goes into pricing a job / candidate effectively. Each candidate has unique skills even if two candidates have the same title, level, etc. That's why it's almost never a fixed number and often a range.
Thank you for the context! I recently discovered that many employers share exact salary and level information with Equifax and assumed that those kinds of solutions were commonplace.
Also they have the money to buy information from various information aggregation companies which collect salary information from more reliable sources. They do not have to rely on (inherently unreliable) self reported figures from glassdoor etc.
> It is well known that companies often collude with each other and engage in "salary fixing".
That has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is the candidate doing some research to get a feel for salary ranges.
> They do not have to rely on (inherently unreliable) self reported figures from glassdoor etc.
Salary figures are inherently inaccurate, just like googling for the market price of your car can never be accurate, because the price you actually get is dependent on the individual characteristics of your car, and how much the other party needs to buy it, and how much you need to sell it.
The fact is, if you're going in blind to deal for a car, or a job, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Information isn't hard to come by for either. You don't need the government to hold your hand.
I believe the topic being discussed is asymmetry of information between employees and employers (with respect to salary). Salary fixing demonstrates this asymmetry pretty well, so it is on topic.
> Salary figures are inherently inaccurate, just like googling for the market price of your car can never be accurate,
I don't think this has got anything to do with the topic under discussion.
> Information isn't hard to come by for either.
I disagree. IMO it is harder to come by for individuals than large companies. I have explained why in my previous response.
