How Levels.fyi is Demystifying Silicon Valley Salaries

Salaries are a taboo subject, no matter whether the topic comes up during the job hunt or even when asking for a promotion or raise.

A 2017 survey found that 33% of Millennials have shared their salary with a coworker, compared to just 8% of Baby Boomers. The apprehension around discussing salaries doesn’t stop in the office — 34% of cohabiting couples can’t correctly identify how much money the other makes.

The less we talk about money, the more siloed we become and the harder it is to compare ourselves to our colleagues and demand fair compensation.

Knowing only your salary also forces you to battle for money on your own and can result in smaller raises and bonuses. Prospective employees, on the other hand, come in blind or equipped with vague and opaque salary ranges found on career websites that could lead them to starting the job with a lower salary.

“I think companies intentionally want to keep a lot of this information hidden and asymmetric. It’s obviously in their favor if they don’t disclose the full information to candidates,” Zuhayeer Musa, the founder of career transparency platform Levels.fyi said to Fortune.

A common pain point

Musa co-founded Levels.fyi in 2017 with Zaheer Mohiuddin after his job search gave way to a common question with frustratingly few answers: At what level can an employee at one tech company be placed at another?

“After a little more digging, we found similar questions across the web and realized there just had to be a simpler way to map engineering job titles to experience levels,” Musa wrote. “It struck us that there was a rather large information gap and that Zaheer's annoyance was actually an opportunity.”

Employee levels across tech companies are rigid and vary greatly. For instance, Microsoft’s tech talent is placed in a proprietary progression system that spans from level 59 for new employees to level 80, while a company like Apple instead uses ICT levels that start at two and go to six.

The differing formats between companies make it difficult for job hoppers to envision their place within a new company and their earning potential, as each level comes with its own salary band. “It’s very important to make sure that the level you come in at is correct because your pay can be an order of magnitude off if it’s not,” Mohiuddin said.

This pushed the friends to build a simple visualization tool for people to compare career levels across big companies, like Meta and Google. Musa explained that their initial aim was to make it easier for job candidates to determine appropriate positions to seek out or transition into. He also saw a use case for HR departments to more easily identify and match outside candidates with open positions.

Levels.fyi’s evolution

It wasn’t long before the duo’s initial vision took on a new purpose.

“Very quickly we started receiving emails asking us to expand to other companies, different types of career tracks, and to include even more granular information, such as salaries. We realized that job-seekers and recruiters had a need for greater transparency in the job market, and that we were in a unique position to facilitate it,” Musa said.

The company then set out to aggregate pay data by crowdsourcing information, including verified offer letters, payslips and W2s from tech company employees. However, the founders concede that finding accurate information was their biggest challenge.

“Because of the very nature of the problem, we didn't have the most accurate data to start with, but it was still valuable for users and necessary to get the ball rolling,” Musa said. But as Levels.fyi grew, more and more submissions rolled in and the company was able to hone in its estimates.

Now the company has amassed a wealth of anonymized data that it has been able to profit from by selling it back to the very tech companies that spurred its creation. Tech companies rely on information like Level.fyi’s to decide on what to pay employees and how to design attractive compensation packages to attract talent.

More recently, Musa and Mohiuddin employed their horde of data in a new way and launched a salary negotiation and offer evaluation service for users. For a fee, job hunters can book a 30-minute one-on-one session, two follow-up calls and even email support from an experienced recruiter to guide them through the interview and negotiation process.

“Eventually, we want to be the go-to website for anyone looking for a career switch or job transition,” Musa revealed. “We have a long way to go, but we're taking steps to give people access to the information they need to make big career decisions.”

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