Before you click: Know that this is a lead generation tool. It doesn't give you an estimate right away. They collect your information and give it to their recruiters, who will supposedly shop you around to companies and return compensation estimates. You do not receive any estimates or information at the end of the signup process.
Not necessarily a bad thing if that's what you're looking for, but worth noting before you start entering your personal information.
Because this tool isn't freely providing the data, would be it reasonable to suggest it was posted here purely for lead generation purposes? I could go to https://levels.fyi if I wanted quite detailed compensation data (broken down by job title / years of experience / city, etc).
We could literally keep the the identical title, update the link to levels.fyi, and probably be saying something more factually accurate.
We don't freely share the data up front because we don't have the data up front. The service we provide is getting personalized estimates of how much a given company would hire you specifically for (not just a broad estimate).
Salary estimate websites that use survey data are great tools to use to get a generate ballpark but have their limitations.
Levels.fyi is one of the best if you're looking at FAANG tier companies and is one of the few that actually verifies salary data is correct with W2s or offer letters
This is correct that we don't give an estimate right away. We reach out to companies that are a good fit for a given engineer and ask for a personalized estimate since we believe that's the best way to get up to date information.
We work primarily with in house recruiters at the companies themselves and not 3rd party recruiters and do not share your contact information directly.
Percent ownership is a vanity metric and is only useful for telling people you own some percent of a company. Ownership is subject to dilution (so the 0.01% of XYZ inc today may be 0.005% next round, etc.), and becomes functionally impossible to calculate how much that's worth (or project it into the future).
When it comes to equity, the numbers that matter are: the number of shares, the exercise price, and the sale price.
If I have 10,000 shares of XYZ, inc. with an exercise price of $0.10 and I sell them at $1.10, I've made 10k in gains [10,000 * ($1.10 - $0.10)]. Good luck being able to do any similar math when you're granted 0.01% of XYZ inc., since any calculation you do will go through "how many shares at what exercise and sale price".
Edit: since you work at Google, just imagine if they tried to give you 100 GSUs over four years as 0.0000002% of Google...
I agree percentage of the company is not fully representative of your compensation, but as a single metric it's better than the number of shares granted for non-public companies. Ideally, I'd like to know everything -- shares outstanding, shares authorized, cap table, strike price, liquidation preference, etc. But if I can only know one metric, I'd rather know percentage ownership -- from that I can make reasonable guesses about dilution, strike/sale price, etc.
For public companies who usually give RSUs (like Google) # of shares are better because you can easily compute expected compensation. Since they are RSUs, you also don't have to worry about strike price. Public companies also publicly disclose how many shares are outstanding. Those metrics are harder to find for private companies.
Sure, but the ceiling is meaningless without a sale price, so why even factor in the ceiling when you can do that based on what a reasonable price per share would be?
Can I just name my number (X) and ignore anything lower than it? X, for me, would be $300k. And tools like these usually match you with middle market salaries, so they tend to be less useful for those with more competitive compensation.
That's a great idea. If you ping me at matt@tellmewhatimworth.com to let me know which profile is yours I can keep that in mind when building your report
On mobile (iOS) neither link works for me.
I'd also like to know what your business model is before I sign up - perhaps it is already in one of those pages?
You're absolutely right we could be doing a better job of managing expectations for what will happen next.
Right now since this is still in beta its pretty manual process but here is roughly what will happen:
- We review how you describe your ideal role and make sure we have enough information to know what kinds of companies to reach out to
- We create a blinded version of your resume (remove you contact information so no recruiters contact you directly)
- We search for companies/jobs that match your preferences and reach out to them to ask them to provide an estimate
- You'll have a google doc shared with you with estimates from different companies. This will be updated in real time as we get estimates
- You can decide to use your report just to better understand your market rate, use it to ask for a raise with your current boss, or connect with any of the companies that provided an estimate you would be interested in working for
Hope that helps! Feel free to reach out to matt@tellmewhatimworth.com if you have any more questions/comments/etc
If you’ve got a copy of my resume, even if you remove my name/email/phone number, I feel like it would be pretty easy to figure out who I am.
Especially, if people have interesting or unique work experience. Say they founded a startup or they are the author of a popular OS library. Even a niche product, finding the principal author is usually just a search away.
Only if your resume is super-mundane would it offer a modicum of privacy (and who wants to hire that?)
Purely on this basis I am not offering them my details. They will he persisted behind a login and this data is guaranteed to be sold to recruiters, once OP wants to make money from it.
If it was more legit it wouldn’t require the sign up form it has.
We share blinded resumes (no contact information included) with the companies that provide the estimates and receive a finders fee from companies we have a recruitment sourcing agreement established with.
That being said you are under no obligation to speak with any of the companies that provide you a salary estimate.
A major feature job boards always miss are exclusion lists. For example as a JavaScript developer I wish I could add Angular or React to an exclusion list so that results requiring Angular or React experience do not display for me. Also those job recruiters know to not waste their time contacting me.
It looks like this (almost) entirely relies on one's LinkedIn profile? As someone who doesn't keep current on LinkedIn, I'm not expecting a lot of info based on telling you "CTO in Other city, most important factors are team quality and business/market plan."
Not necessarily a bad thing if that's what you're looking for, but worth noting before you start entering your personal information.