[ftio]

This is very poor reporting indeed. BI claims this spreadsheet "gives us our best look yet at how much the tech giant is paying" despite the data being entirely self-reported by employees and completely unvetted. The odds that sample in the sheet is representative of the broader population are vanishingly small, even if the data were accurate.

Perfect example is the report that "The employee with the highest base salary reported being a level 7 software engineer with a base salary of $718,000 and a total compensation package of just under $800,000."

I suppose there might be some engineer making $720k in base and $80k in bonus/equity combined, but I've never heard of such a thing. There are obviously errors in the data. Yet BI doesn't question the data at all.

Disclosure: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

[hot_gril]

The people I see passing that sheet around are the same kind of people I see complaining about the company a lot. There must be a skew.