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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I seem to recall that Lyft had some of the most insanely overpaid listings in the SF area in terms of raw compensation - maybe shave 3% off those salaries above 200k instead of half what the interns make.

Edit, found it: https://www.levels.fyi/2019/

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They did that too, search for "10 percent"

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241351/lyft-layoff-furl...

10% cut across the board, 20% for VP+ and 30% for executives. No cut on equity. Lyft has left no stone unturned to save money where it makes sense.

source: news + work at Lyft

I find these “total compensation” member-measurement rankings very misleading because much of these reported sums is actually in stock.

Someone who was hired by Lyft in 2019 got RSUs at double today’s stock price. A quarter or more of their total compensation has vanished.

Going the other way, someone who joined Amazon in 2017 got stock at 1/3rd of today’s price. Their total compensation has probably doubled as a result.

I guess sites such as Levels.fyi like to report total compensation numbers without context because most of their viewers come there to gawk tabloid-style rather than for actual information.

It's an imperfect measurement but I'm not sure there's a better alternative. Some people like to include stock appreciation when discussing compensation, which seems even more misleading since that isn't what was written on the offer.

Recipients have to play investor to price in the risk and volatility of the stock (ie. if Lyft and Google both gave the same offer, Google's is far less risky but with potentially lower returns).

Breakdowns are available on the rest of our site (check out http://levels.fyi/comp.html). We just used total packages for our end of the year report to deliver more focus to the totals since that's the main objective of using a median value (ie the median total package isn't guaranteed to reflect the middle stock package or median base salary. That said, total compensation is what candidates look at when switching companies and what recruiters have to match if they really want to attract a candidate. This along with the bull run stock market is what has led to such an increase in comp over last few years.

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