https://i.imgur.com/eC3slkQ.png
This was surprising to me as I always thought of levels.fyi being oriented towards job seekers. I question how they can both sell salary data to companies and also offer salary negotiation coaching. Seems to me like these two customer groups want the exact opposite of the other.
By not sharing your data point, all you're really doing is saying you don't want to participate in pay transparency. (Nothing wrong with that, of course)
> Our data offerings provide employers with the same data you see on our site but in the format they need to make compensation decisions. All data points remain anonymous. Our paid offerings allow us to invest in maintaining Levels.fyi and further our mission: Helping people make better career decisions.
The main difference is that we provide data in a spreadsheet type format for employers with additional filtering criteria like metro codes, etc. It's a win-win-win all around. We get some revenue to help maintain the site. Companies get realtime compensation data to pay people fairly. Professionals continue to benefit from the site to get paid more and have data to negotiate better against companies.
We've have dozens of calls with companies this past year. The #1 reason why they purchase our data is because existing salary surveys (ex. Radford, Mercer, etc.) are stale and are too broad. Top tier tech talent which our site mainly attracts often get paid more than rest of the market. This is the bi/tri-modal nature of pay that others have written about. HR / Eng Managers / Comp analysts often buy our data to justify internally that they should be paying more.
I’d also add that it seems a little hard to square the circle here around how this feature is aligned with the stated mission. Does this product help people make better career decisions? It’s also fine if this particular move is about making money. We all need to make money.
Levels has done a lot of great work, and I hope there’s a way for y’all to be compensated for all the effort you’ve put in. Have the costs of the site gone up significantly? I remember reading an Indiehackers post about how you were able to provide the site to users for something like the cost of a cup of coffee a month. If the cost structure has changed, it would be awesome to explore alternative funding approaches. I’d gladly pay y’all $10/month to maintain the site.
It's an easy revenue opportunity for us and costs have certainly gone up as we've hired more folks. Our focus remains on serving professionals and majority of our revenue comes from professionals directly. Happy to discuss all this over a call as well if you're interested. Feel free to email me at: my HN username at levels.fyi.
I'd also reiterate that HR / Eng Managers / Comp analysts often buy our data to justify internally that they should be paying more. An official way to provide the data allows us to be a data source to justify internal change. Otherwise employers are left to use stale data and remain unknowingly uncompetitive.
It feels a bit rude to mention compensation early on when I get an offer. But sadly I have to do it.
I disagree. Both sides want to [obtain/provide] work that is priced fairly. Companies of the kind you see on levels.fyi are not trying to find the cheapest programmer around. They spend big bucks to get - and retain - the best.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
But of course, there is pressure. I'm confident the advantage is now in the hands of engineers, though.
Today I had a job interview. The grinning face that a bunch of business people make when they finally find an engineer who would work for them is almost comical. I'm sure they started dancing as soon as the call ended. I did too, the money is out of this universe (not really for US people, but certainly from EU perspective).
BTW: The whole scheme IMHO is a big fuck-you to the listed corporations, anyways (I'm not saying it's intended as such). The big companies used to demand (around 2010) that you never discuss your salary with your colleagues. There used to be weird machinations going on with salary negotiation. Surveying and then publicizing it and then taking money from the big corps for some of the data is like showing a middle finger.