kevingao1

agreed -- there's no uniformity in how companies fill out these apps; for example, as I briefly mentioned in the post but didn't look far into, even the company name "Google" was typed in 3 or 4 ways

one piece which i tried to mention here is that salar.ly and LCA don't incorporate equity, incentive bonuses, and other pieces of compensation; this is just the base salary submitted in the application. for example ex-Google friend immediately felt like Google was too low, since a significant % of their comp is tied to incentive bonuses; and for startups, you'd have to consider the dollar value of equity

that's really interesting; there are so many caveats with the data that i almost thought it wasn't worth sharing, but we can let people draw conclusions themselves (and hopefully follow-up with other analyses, comments, etc)

if you don't mind, %-wise, how much more were you paid than your LCA? and do you think this is representative of others?

i agree, despite industry complaints about how "high" they are and how quickly they've risen; having been on multiple sides of this, i think the value that a good engineer adds is still not reflected in compensation, especially in smaller companies (eg, less than a few hundred people); it's part information asymmetry, part culture

agreed -- it varies significantly based on company culture, size