Levels.fyi

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Ever heard of a BONUS for taking paid time off? I was reviewing a salary submission from Mexico that was accompanied with a proof document. Two benefits on the offer stood out: 💰 Aguinaldo equivalent to 20 work days. This is a year-end bonus that the employer provides towards the end of December. Notably this is separate from the performance bonus, and isn’t limited to specific levels. 🌴 Prima Vacational. This is a vacation PREMIUM of 30%. I had to dig into this a bit to believe it, but this is essentially a 30% bonus when paid time off is used. An incentive to take a breather! Turns out these are extensions of Mexico’s labor laws. The employer is providing 5 days more than the required 15 days of Aguinaldo and 5% more than the required 25% of Prima Vocational. There's actually a lot more that labor laws included, but compliance levels seemed to vary. These two were highlighted in the offer, and from some quick internet searching, seems like are relatively common. Interesting to see how certain benefits extend government programs, similar to how 401Ks can extend the benefits of traditional IRAs in the US.

Yesterday we made it to the front page of HN with our choropleth map of software engineer pay in the US, resulting in over 30k unique visits to our page within 24 hours. One of the biggest things that came up was why the regions were broken up the way they were on the map. We use Nielsen's DMA (Designated Market Area) mappings within the US to separate out regional areas which was used for TV / media market surveys. We happen to use DMA categories for our regional pages on Levels.fyi which is why it was easiest to start with since we already had this data captured. The features can sometimes be a bit off and seem like they're grouped very far and wide (you'll notice there's a bit of Denver within Nevada and its just a vestige of how it used to be categorized), but it still provides a bit of a broader level grouping than something like zip code. We've also been considering using Combined Statistical Areas using population instead, but the benefit with DMAs is that it offers full coverage of the entire US whereas some major tech hubs are still missing from CSAs if relying solely on population. We're planning to create some of our own regional definitions and borders using our own submissions and that should offer some more tighter bounds. Heatmap Page: https://lnkd.in/gAtF54VH HN thread: https://lnkd.in/dGXdZXXn Excited to continue our work on this, what other regions would you like to see?

Check out what one of our Hackathon finalists had to say about his experience! We were super excited to host such a fun event and we’re happy to say it turned out better than expected. If you missed out, stay tuned for our next hackathon which we hope will be bigger and better than the first!

Equity is how people become rich. As companies like Zoom, Salesforce, and Workday cut back on their stock grants, it got me thinking about the incentive structure that’s been around for a long long time in tech. And one we closely look at as a part of total compensation on Levels.fyi. In the leveling graphic below, you can observe the compensation progression for software engineers in the Bay Area. You’ll notice base salary increases quite linearly, while stock based compensation rises exponentially. The divergence in the growth of compensation components, particularly stock-based compensation, shows how companies tie financial rewards to their long-term success. While base salary follows a more predictable path, stock compensation becomes an increasingly significant factor as engineers take on larger roles and make more impactful contributions. As your influence on the company’s success grows, so does your share in that success. What’s striking is how much faster equity outpaces salary at the higher levels. Getting to actual generational wealth involves some ownership of equity with some longer term bet for growth. You can’t simply be trading time for money. View the breakdown of pay across levels and slice more data on our benchmarking tool here: https://lnkd.in/gC4EGrB7

“I’d like to filter compensation data by company size or funding round” This came up when sharing our Compensation Benchmarking Tool (https://lnkd.in/gTFZi_Q2) with an enterprise customer. “You can do that” I replied, “but for the most part, I would steer away from it.” Here’s why: Let’s say a company raises a big funding round. It’ll make news, get an algo-boost, and is a moment to celebrate. But what if the company raised that $ primarily for CapEx spend (ie: warehouses for storage or buildings for a co-working space)? That money from the big round isn’t going primarily to employee pay. Now let’s think of a hypothetical AI startup. Their primary spend is on compute resources and brains. And brains scale better. Even with a funding round that’s potentially smaller, their main asset that spend is going towards is going to be the highest talent employees they can possibly get. In neither of these situations is the company size or funding round going to be the primary driver of how spend is allocated. The thing that really matters is your precise talent competitors. It’s an important fact to remember as an employer as well as an employee, and we’ve focused a huge amount of our time on getting this right. It doesn’t hurt that we also allow size and valuation filters in case you’re curious.

🚨 BREAKING: Amazon tells employees to return to office full time, 5 days a week. “Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward — our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances,” Jassy said. Our community discusses the news here: https://lnkd.in/gkXzJuV7 #RTO #WFH #amazon #datadriven #recruiting #hiring

As more summer software engineer internship applications go live for 2025, I'm recalling Alina's post about the trimodal distribution of pay within tech internship opportunities. Most companies fall in the first curve paying between $20-$35 per hour. In the middle sits tech, finance, and consulting firms paying roughly between $45-$60 per hour. And then at the very top are the trading firms and hedge funds which often vastly out-compensate the first group paying $75-$150 per hour. View the full post here: https://lnkd.in/gM9qT7as View internship pay rates and applications here: https://lnkd.in/gXcymhha Our article draws inspiration from Dan Luu's "Is dev compensation bimodal?" and Gergely's post on "The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe": https://lnkd.in/gzhpj4mM

How much is remote work worth? With the return to office being a sticking point for those accustomed to remote work—just how much is a fully remote arrangement worth according to the data? Isolating experience and location offers made in the past year to entry-level software engineers in the Bay Area capped at around 300-350k total comp. Hybrid role offers came to around 350-400k. Fully in-person arrangements were at around 400-500k. For new-grad offers made within the past year, the data shows that a fully remote work arrangement could be valued at 100k. If insights like this could help you in your job search, make sure to check out Levels.fyi.

Your globally distributed, multi master cloud SQL database powering 1000 monthly unique users v/s Levels.fyi using Google Sheets as a database 😂