[nostrademons]

There's no such thing as downleveling or demotion at Google, and hiring & promotion rates are tracked by race and gender.

I would bet that the pay discrepancy here is entirely due to differing levels, which in turn is because Google's DEI efforts are ~5-7 years old and when new hires come in at L3, it takes that long or more to get to the high-paid levels. That and people who were hired a while ago are sitting on lots of appreciation in their stock grants.

[jeffbee]

> There's no such thing as downleveling or demotion at Google

There used to be. In the “member of technical staff” era, most new hires were down-slotted within a year.

[nostrademons]

Yeah, there was downslotting back when L5+ came in as MTS.

They got rid of it. I think they changed it to "everyone comes in at L3/L4, and if you're good you'll rapidly get promoted to your true level" around 2012, and then sometime between 2014-2020 it changed to "sure, you can come in at L6+ and we don't really care if you're incompetent".

[joshuamorton]

The numbers here don't take into account stock growth.

Leveling is likely the major component, but thats also a legitimate concern!