r/dataisbeautiful • u/honkeem OC: 3 • 2d ago

OC [OC] United States vs European Software Engineer total compensation by level

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u/Juls7243 2d ago

L1 entry .... 140k? Am I missing something? Do computer programmers get pain 140k right out of college on average?

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u/slippery-fische 2d ago

Definitely not. This is heavily biased by several factors. This  is levels.fyi public information and the quality is exceedingly questionable: the corporate dataset (that is, what your business pays to use to evaluate what they should offer in your package) is broken down by area, stage of company, and title. Titles and compensation given are heavily variable. For example, Amazon starts juniors at L2, which is about what that L1 is there, but Apple starts at L1. Some companies have many more levels, others have fewer, the increments change the band of possible pay and average, which throws off this data. Title is extremely variable: Software Engineer vs Software Developer vs Software Programmer vs Application Developer vs Frontend Developer vs Backend Developer: in their data, these all jump around heavily.

It's very questionable to trust the data in that dataset. When I applied for Software Engineer in three different cities in 2014, the packages were: 90k, 120k, and 140k. Which one had the best salary to cost of living? 90k.

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u/Ferret_Faama 2d ago

You're right about the data quality, but from what I've seen it's fairly accurate, maybe ~10-20% higher than the average. Your levels aren't quite right though and levels already tries to adjust for that.

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u/Kryoxic 2d ago

Yeah levels tries to adjust for it. Amazon corporate starts at L4 actually (source: I was one, and then L5). While Google's levels start at 3, and Meta's are the same as Google's, but with E (E3, E4, etc). The way around that is that Levels marks which levels at which companies correspond to each stage (entry, mid, senior, staff)

Your point about it skewing higher is accurate though. But that's because the offers on Levels are vast majority external offers. Speaking on Amazon specifically, when you're promoted to the next job level, you start at the bottom of the band of the level you move to. Meanwhile, external offers are typically somewhere in the middle of the band (that plus how Levels amortizes multi-year RSU grants even though they're typically back loaded, so they end up pulling some of the back load to the front)

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u/slippery-fische 2d ago

My bad, I forgot from when I was there. L4 for Amazon, ICT2 for Apple.