Leaked Google pay data shows how much employees report making

[skilled]

https://archive.ph/h2V8X

[saagarjha]

If I remember correctly a previous version of this article basically just copy/pasted the highest numbers they could, which meant that they focused on random typos. There was a running joke and a bunch of memes about some entry level engineer making 700k base, because I think it was very clear that they mistyped “178k” or “187k” as “718k”. For an L7 engineer bases go a bit higher but numbers that high, with that little equity, are unheard of. It’s highly likely nobody with an understanding of how compensation works looked through this table.

[sneak]

> "We compensate Googlers based on what they do, not who they are," said Google spokesperson Tamani Jayasinghe in a statement.

Isn't this famously false, given that they pay large disparities depending on someone's country in which they work? This only holds true within a specific country.

Doesn't Google also try to dock your pay if you move out of a HCOL city, too?

[DoughnutHole]

> We compensate Googlers based on how little we can get away with in the given job market where the employee lives, remote-working or otherwise.

Whether that’s fair or not is a matter of belief system.

Google’s Bay Area compensation isn’t a result of some intrinsically just meritocracy - they’re a wealthy business competing with other wealthy businesses over an extremely high-demand labor pool.

[powerset]

Who != where

[jncfhnb]

Ugh. Don’t show diversity outcomes without breaking them down by level at the same time.

[korkoros]

Considering that the company I work for tried to hide their gender pay discrimination by "releveling" all the women who were getting systematically underpaid, you should in fact report these data without disaggregation.

"Those people make less because they are all lower level" is not a mitigating factor for pay discrimination.

[waffleiron]

That also has some flaws if not combined with gender/race ratio in those levels. Underpaying for the same level isn't the only potential issue, but bias in hiring and promotions for more senior roles could be too.

[lsy]

Does BI not have anyone on staff familiar with statistics? The map with “minimum salaries” seems to just prove that a more populated office location will contain a broader range and more extreme outliers of self-reported salaries. A previous article on this topic claimed that Software Engineer had the highest max salary but there are probably just more people with that title at the company than any other title.

[KoftaBob]

The person whose ethnicity is labeled "Indigenous software engineer" cracked me up. I pictured a race of humans born with ctrl + c + v buttons on their fingers

[kepler1]

What strikes me about this story (and "reporting" in general) is how eager people writing stories are to stir up the worst kind of racial/gender-based implications without any further responsibility for analyzing or self-doubting the top level findings they're throwing in front of the audience.

You would think that anyone presenting statistics that call into question some kind of differential treatment by race, ethnicity, or gender would take a moment to point out the cautions in the data. Or even express some doubt about writing the story to begin with.

But no, for some reason, we are fascinated by the "0th order analysis" of inequities by race, almost want to see it blown up into incorrect interpretations and incentivize reporters to produce such stories.

I think there should be a code of ethics where reporters should be questioned about what they seek to accomplish with half-assed analyses like this, if they fail to accompany it with huge warnings about what it hasn't taken into account that could explain differences:

-- age

-- experience

-- selection biases in employees tenure (both hiring and departures)

etc.

Without this kind of info, all these stories do is shout an alarmist call that "this isn't fair" and then fail to produce any backup for the claim, but rile everyone up.

[blululu]

Less than 10% of the company self reported salary data over an unspecified time window, and a limited set of aggregate statistics are reported from this distribution. Certainly interesting information, but unfortunately I don’t think you can make honest inferences from these figures. Any comments or interpretations are little more than speculations and are basically deceitful.

[pylua]

In theory it is not possible to report 100% accuracy here, as I do not have to reveal my gender or race to the company I work for, correct ? That is unless not specified is a category.

I personally feel like it is not the companies business to know this about me. Is there a legal requirement around this ?

[compiler-guy]

The data is entirely self and voluntarily reported by employees. There are no double checks for accuracy or typos or attempts to make it representative beyond, “If everyone fills this out, it will be helpful for everyone.”

It is useful as far as it goes, but one can only draw limited conclusions from what is there.

Business Insider doesn’t really caveat it’s reporting very well here. And it should.

[cmilton]

I believe the data is being collected to help prevent discrimination based on any of those characteristics.

[hot_gril]

Legally, the company can ask your gender and race, but you aren't required to answer. It's illegal to use either of those in the hiring process, so they avoid even asking until you're already hired. And imo they shouldn't ask period.

I can't access the article, even via the archive link (infinite captchas), so idk what what BI is reporting. But the original sheet is employee-created, so identity stats are probably not coming from the company's own database.

[spoonofyoukw]

is there a link to the leaked spreadsheet?

[frays]

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

[givemeethekeys]

The only useful take away here for most people should be how little most other companies get away paying.

[renewiltord]

Enterprise sales has no commission at Google? Or is the commission small?

[ghaff]

It could be rolled under bonus which is quite high for sales. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some sort of incentive structure.

[sakex]

levels.fyi has the same info

[theGnuMe]

Well those numbers do not look good across ethnicity and gender.

[ironSkillet]

There may also be major selection bias in the statistics as the numbers were self-reported and voluntarily submitted as far as I can tell.

[alphanullmeric]

They look great if you intend to prove inequality of opportunity using inequality of outcome.