For someone making $400k, a whatever fee they have to offer wouldn't be worth 15 minutes of time. And the idea of uploading such a personal document as W-2 seems laughable. The more believable option is the informal offer letter with numbers: that could be shared, indeed.
> What is Salary Stream? A digest of verified salaries sent weekly. Users upload Offer Letters, W2s, etc. We extract the relevant numbers and the share the anonymous data back with you.
The whole point is that they verify them. In contrast with, say, Glassdoor. Which is why even a singular data point can be treated as meaningful.
> For someone making $400k, a whatever fee they have to offer wouldn't be worth 15 minutes of time
I mean, sort of. I don't see that as a reason nobody would do it.
FWIW, grants are usually targeted to a specific dollar value, though the stock movement between grant and vest does affect your results. (And if this significant dip is sustained, I would expect many companies to issue additional special grants to compensate.)
So, are the dollar amounts for stock we see on the website the literal amounts users entered at the time of grant or did they enter number of shares that are being translated to $ in real time?
But yes, you're right even the very very highest of salaries doesn't compensate enough to buy a modest 4 million$ house. You'd have to be in your 20s and rent a room with plans to leave in less than 10 years or just don't have a family.
That's a hell of a "just," considering just 5 years of that could be close to enough to live the rest of your life in Iowa/Missouri without working another day.
Yes, that's my point. It'll be much more shares than normal, and presuming the share price recovers (which it may not) these people will be much more highly compensated.
Yeah, I just started started working at Twitch about a month ago, and while I was interviewing with them I found more accurate results when I searched for Amazon salaries instead. I think part of the problem is there aren't many data points for Twitch on levels.fyi compared to other companies.
It's good information. Leaves me feeling hella bitter though since I'm paid less than half of that FB offer but could theoretically get the same offer. Just wish there was a more straight forward way to getting into these companies that pay so much.
Has anyone had success with mock interviews? (Done by people who actually hire - not random people) I've received endless feedback from recruiters saying it's my technical performance even when I've smashed every problem. (Guessing it's cultural but they can't write that down as I rarely receive a no during a phone interview - just no's during in person)
I made it into final round interviews with both Google and Facebook (in California), without much prep, and didn't get an offer from either.
Google asked me all algorithm problems (I told them I didn't have much system design experience), whereas Facebook did a mix of algorithms, system design, and soft/personal skills.
I think you misunderstood what I meant - I smashed the problems as in... I destroyed them. Optimal solution out of the gate. Optimal solutions on the board only slowed down by my ability to write.
It wasn't even memorization - I just practiced so much. I've done over 500 problems and over 200 technical interviews. I don't really "fail" them in the traditional sense these days.
In my experience interviewers are looking for a detailed thought process with a comparison of solutions that demonstrates your communication, not just an optimal solution. Do you provide that as well?
Yep. I always break down the solutions I purpose and ask them if they want me to code it up. I walk them through the solution. I give them trade offs between different solutions (if there is an alternative that has the same time/space complexity). Everything... :/
EDIT: But - really - I'm not looking for feedback or critiques in this format. I've done this endlessly with people online. Instead - it would be useful to me to recommend services or experiences with mock interview services. I'm having a hard time believing anyone can give me real insight here that I haven't corrected myself. (But that insight could exist through mock interviews)
My gf is a management consultant, and prepped a lot for her interviews. She learned that there is such a thing as prepping too much, as your performance can come across too stilted/canned/robotic.
Have you ever filmed your performance in a practice session?
I've given tons of mock interviews, so if you want a fresh set of eyes let me know.
what does smashed every problem mean? are you really getting the entire solution including optimization written up each time? i find it hard to believe that you're acing the technical and bombing the rest so egregiously that you're not getting offers.
Yeah - you'd be surprised. I got accused of cheating more than once because I'd come up with the optimal solution in less than a minute. Never even saw the problems. I spent a lot of time prepping.
you're interviewing wrong and i'm surprised that you haven't figured it out given 200 attempts. put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer - interviews aren't their main focus in the company and hence they're not invested in being excellent interviewers. they're most likely trying to do a good enough job such that it counts towards promotion and simultaneously not have a horrible time during the interview. so they have roughly a script that they'll follow
1. give the imprecise problem statement
2. give the opportunity for clarifying questions (points added or subtracted from interviewee for asking relevant/irrelevant/interesting/mundane question)
3. give the opportunity for naive solution (points added or subtracted for facility in implementing and runtime discussion)
4. introduce challenge portion (optimization or constraint or whatever)
5. give another opportunity for clarifying questions
6. give opportunity for talking through a solution
7. give opportunity for writing solution
assuming you make it this far
8. give the opportunity for discussion of trade-offs in time/space/code complexity/latency/etc.
that's 6 opportunities to demonstrate that you're smart, fastidious, affable, etc but only 2 of them are really technical. if you're aiming for writing the best/most optimal solution as fast as possible then you're aiming for the wrong thing - it's not a standardized test but an interview (i.e. two people are involved). you should be aiming to impress the interviewer! those aren't the same (the first is a component of the second).
if you'd you should put your contact info either here in a response or in your profile and i'll reach and we can chat about interviewing (i'm not a coach or a business but i do interview well so maybe i can help you a little).
Considering I've received detailed feedback from maybe five interviewers - it's hard to decipher what the issue is. I've just tried to brute force my way through most of it since that's all you /can/ do when you get no feedback.
If someone follows the routine you set out - I follow it very thoroughly. I know it well and it's what I used to practice for when I first started. Unfortunately, a lot of interviewers don't follow that routine at all. I'd say 80% don't follow any particular routine and 30-40% immediately go to their cellphone as soon as they put the problem statement on the board. I've seen this at Facebook, Google, Uber, etc. I've seen people go from smiling to random coworkers they don't know to immediately frowning as soon as they see me and shaking my hand with regret. I'm not wearing a MAGA or "I love tabs" hat! It's really weird. It happens far too often and is why I'm looking for mock interview resources and people's experiences with them.
Sadly - I feel like even doing it online will only give me a minor edge since, again, I don't fail phone-based technical interviews much at all. It's been really hard to get back into the interview prep game since I've only really received offers from startups. (And that leads to a really lackluster lifestyle)
Yeah, I'm the opposite. I never get to the optimal solution in any interview. I've gotten multiple job offers from large well compensating tech firms and work for one now.
The main thing I do im interviews is be realy clear about how I'm engaging with the problem. And this is what I look for during an interview too. I almost never need the optimal solution in real work. n^2 on ten things is just as good as long(n) for many applications. So your ability to get me that perfect implemention is negligible.
But the thing I'm going to have to do every day is talk about a problem together, read your code, have you explain a solution to me.
I've worked with the 10xers writing code no one can touch and I've worked with an entire team of average coders who are using good methods and writing maintainable code and I'll take the later every damn day of the week.
It’s quite common for people to think they nailed a question when actually they did poorly, in the eyes of the interviewer. Even if you are getting the “correct solution”, the interviewer will usually have some followup discussion designed to make sure you really understand the solution well. Often this catches out people who practice so much they’ve seen the answer before. This is my guess for what’s happening, at least.
I walked out of an interview before thinking I nailed one of the big questions. I answered it so well and in such an orderly fashion they asked if I had seen it before, which I hadn't. I received feedback that they would pass and one reason is that I wouldn't admit that I had seen that question before.
I guess I wasn't prepared for having my integrity (literally) questioned.
No loss for me. It was really off putting how suspicious they were of someone who knew the answer better than they did; like it just wasn't possible. Instead of disbelieving me, they should have just moved on to some other questions for confirmation, even if it meant calling me back in.
I've found that people are suspicious for a couple of reasons:
1. They are bad actors and they expect other people to be also.
2. They've been burned by someone and now they are suspicious of anyone.
When confronted by a person who doesn't trust me, I ask about the 2nd situation i.e. have been burned by a past employee? If they have, I cut them some slack.
Does it even mean anything. The economic discontinuity that the virus will introduce is likely to alter all of these numbers in ways we can't predict. Most likely push salaries much lower after the layoffs hit on a wide scale.
I don't know how great this is to share, although I am curious about the numbers, as I'm sure it will depress some people. A lot of pay is based off personal intelligence and interviewing skills, which cannot be shown with quantitative numbers like years of experience.
Let's take LYFT's example - on landing page - salary is $420k but on inside page - it's $396k. What's the vesting period on those stocks? I'm almost sure it's not 1 year. And, that salary is for the first year. They will not be giving you $200k worth of shares every year or do they?
$420 is the compensation for that particular individual. The newsletter features verified compensation numbers of individuals. The number on inside page you're referring to is the average total compensation for that Lyft at the same level. The compensation is yearly. Note that this is a senior candidate (third level in Lyft's hierarchy).
I think it really is what it seems. I got a similar offer from Uber a few months before their IPO - level 5a position, base salary $200k, $710k shares of RSU's vesting over 4 years, and performance based bonus with a target of $25k (it's not guaranteed the bonus target will be the same every year, but this is an annual bonus not signing bonus). So total comp just over $400k.
I'm sure some people are inflating values on levels.fyi and some people are probably mixing up the 4-year vesting amounts of stock with per-year comp.
But this example seems legit. Salaries like this are very real (and very crazy)
From what I heard, they only put the number of shares and an estimated value in the offer letter, so that amount is only accurate at the time they give the offer - since Lyft's shares have dropped in value it's probably worth significantly less now. Some companies give refreshers to compensate, but not sure if Lyft does.
The headline number is annual total compensation. So yes, ~$200K of shares will vest every year. The normal deal is 4-year grant with even vesting (sometimes after a 1 year cliff), so in this case it would be an $800K equity grant over 4 years. Some places like Amazon and Netflix do it differently, but that's the standard.
They usually use the stock price on the day of the offer or the day you start or something similar. So in this example, if the stock price was $100 on the offer date, you would be granted 8000 RSUs on signing, vesting over 4 years. What they are actually worth on the day they vest depends on the stock market, which means each vesting usually results in a slightly different amount in actuality (even though the # of shares per vesting is constant).
Yes, every year. When your expenses are 7+ figures annually even small scale changes make a big difference. I work for another large company and we have a small change (~2 week effort and ~200 LoC) that is going to save the company $500k-$1M/year. So it's a no-brainer for well-run, high scale companies to pay competitively. And that's not even taking into account the rest of the year's worth of engineering time
The thing I find funny is I've worked at much smaller companies, worked way harder, made much less of an impact, and got paid much less (justifiably so - a scalar on a small number is still a small number). It's really just comes down to solving the right problems at the right scale
Wow, this is great. It's awesome to make that much money, but it'd be pretty hard to convince yourself to work hard enough for that stock and bonus when your marginal tax rate is over 40%.
> Wow, this is great. It's awesome to make that much money, but it'd be pretty hard to convince yourself to work hard enough for that stock and bonus when your marginal tax rate is over 40%.
I mean, it's still a lot of money and at a FAANG you'd be working less hard than someone at a startup while making twice as much money. (This is why it's hard for startups to hire people.)
67 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] threadThe whole point is that they verify them. In contrast with, say, Glassdoor. Which is why even a singular data point can be treated as meaningful.
> For someone making $400k, a whatever fee they have to offer wouldn't be worth 15 minutes of time
I mean, sort of. I don't see that as a reason nobody would do it.
It's worth it if you can pull up the median, improving the chances of getting a better offer down the road.
But yes, you're right even the very very highest of salaries doesn't compensate enough to buy a modest 4 million$ house. You'd have to be in your 20s and rent a room with plans to leave in less than 10 years or just don't have a family.
You just don't get your salary again in stock options :P
Is that because a lot of people want to work at Twitch, and/or because Amazon doesn't pay that well?
You can subscribe at https://www.levels.fyi/verified/
Has anyone had success with mock interviews? (Done by people who actually hire - not random people) I've received endless feedback from recruiters saying it's my technical performance even when I've smashed every problem. (Guessing it's cultural but they can't write that down as I rarely receive a no during a phone interview - just no's during in person)
I made it into final round interviews with both Google and Facebook (in California), without much prep, and didn't get an offer from either.
Google asked me all algorithm problems (I told them I didn't have much system design experience), whereas Facebook did a mix of algorithms, system design, and soft/personal skills.
It wasn't even memorization - I just practiced so much. I've done over 500 problems and over 200 technical interviews. I don't really "fail" them in the traditional sense these days.
Maybe I have a really punchable face - who knows.
EDIT: But - really - I'm not looking for feedback or critiques in this format. I've done this endlessly with people online. Instead - it would be useful to me to recommend services or experiences with mock interview services. I'm having a hard time believing anyone can give me real insight here that I haven't corrected myself. (But that insight could exist through mock interviews)
Have you ever filmed your performance in a practice session?
I've given tons of mock interviews, so if you want a fresh set of eyes let me know.
you're interviewing wrong and i'm surprised that you haven't figured it out given 200 attempts. put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer - interviews aren't their main focus in the company and hence they're not invested in being excellent interviewers. they're most likely trying to do a good enough job such that it counts towards promotion and simultaneously not have a horrible time during the interview. so they have roughly a script that they'll follow
1. give the imprecise problem statement
2. give the opportunity for clarifying questions (points added or subtracted from interviewee for asking relevant/irrelevant/interesting/mundane question)
3. give the opportunity for naive solution (points added or subtracted for facility in implementing and runtime discussion)
4. introduce challenge portion (optimization or constraint or whatever)
5. give another opportunity for clarifying questions
6. give opportunity for talking through a solution
7. give opportunity for writing solution
assuming you make it this far
8. give the opportunity for discussion of trade-offs in time/space/code complexity/latency/etc.
that's 6 opportunities to demonstrate that you're smart, fastidious, affable, etc but only 2 of them are really technical. if you're aiming for writing the best/most optimal solution as fast as possible then you're aiming for the wrong thing - it's not a standardized test but an interview (i.e. two people are involved). you should be aiming to impress the interviewer! those aren't the same (the first is a component of the second).
if you'd you should put your contact info either here in a response or in your profile and i'll reach and we can chat about interviewing (i'm not a coach or a business but i do interview well so maybe i can help you a little).
If someone follows the routine you set out - I follow it very thoroughly. I know it well and it's what I used to practice for when I first started. Unfortunately, a lot of interviewers don't follow that routine at all. I'd say 80% don't follow any particular routine and 30-40% immediately go to their cellphone as soon as they put the problem statement on the board. I've seen this at Facebook, Google, Uber, etc. I've seen people go from smiling to random coworkers they don't know to immediately frowning as soon as they see me and shaking my hand with regret. I'm not wearing a MAGA or "I love tabs" hat! It's really weird. It happens far too often and is why I'm looking for mock interview resources and people's experiences with them.
Sadly - I feel like even doing it online will only give me a minor edge since, again, I don't fail phone-based technical interviews much at all. It's been really hard to get back into the interview prep game since I've only really received offers from startups. (And that leads to a really lackluster lifestyle)
The main thing I do im interviews is be realy clear about how I'm engaging with the problem. And this is what I look for during an interview too. I almost never need the optimal solution in real work. n^2 on ten things is just as good as long(n) for many applications. So your ability to get me that perfect implemention is negligible.
But the thing I'm going to have to do every day is talk about a problem together, read your code, have you explain a solution to me.
I've worked with the 10xers writing code no one can touch and I've worked with an entire team of average coders who are using good methods and writing maintainable code and I'll take the later every damn day of the week.
I guess I wasn't prepared for having my integrity (literally) questioned.
No loss for me. It was really off putting how suspicious they were of someone who knew the answer better than they did; like it just wasn't possible. Instead of disbelieving me, they should have just moved on to some other questions for confirmation, even if it meant calling me back in.
1. They are bad actors and they expect other people to be also.
2. They've been burned by someone and now they are suspicious of anyone.
When confronted by a person who doesn't trust me, I ask about the 2nd situation i.e. have been burned by a past employee? If they have, I cut them some slack.
> We're really sorry but we've had a surge of applications recently and are temporarily booked out of interview times.
Let's take LYFT's example - on landing page - salary is $420k but on inside page - it's $396k. What's the vesting period on those stocks? I'm almost sure it's not 1 year. And, that salary is for the first year. They will not be giving you $200k worth of shares every year or do they?
I'm sure some people are inflating values on levels.fyi and some people are probably mixing up the 4-year vesting amounts of stock with per-year comp.
But this example seems legit. Salaries like this are very real (and very crazy)
They usually use the stock price on the day of the offer or the day you start or something similar. So in this example, if the stock price was $100 on the offer date, you would be granted 8000 RSUs on signing, vesting over 4 years. What they are actually worth on the day they vest depends on the stock market, which means each vesting usually results in a slightly different amount in actuality (even though the # of shares per vesting is constant).
The thing I find funny is I've worked at much smaller companies, worked way harder, made much less of an impact, and got paid much less (justifiably so - a scalar on a small number is still a small number). It's really just comes down to solving the right problems at the right scale
I mean, it's still a lot of money and at a FAANG you'd be working less hard than someone at a startup while making twice as much money. (This is why it's hard for startups to hire people.)