[delroth]

> It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.

You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their reported salary by being promoted within the company or by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting hired at a higher level at a competitor.

I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google, after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like, around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly grant refreshes).

[somanyphotons]

Managers who are handing our perf-review changes in comp are often very constrained when handling those who negotiated well. They'll typically get inflation level raises for a long time until they're lower in their band

[compiler-guy]

I've always called that a "diagonal promotion" because it's over-and-up.

It's also the only way I have ever gotten a significant increase in compensation, responsibility, and title.

[scarface_74]

Over the past 7 years, it wasn’t comp I was optimizing for over a certain amount it was increasing in scope and impact and autonomy when it came to managing projects and getting closer to the “business”.

I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.

I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).

Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.

My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.

[vkou]

Those L5s negotiated a good hiring wage, but would see stagnant growth until they hit the median of wages for level + performance rating in their location.

Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively squishing the pay bands.

[Rebelgecko]

They also have the advantage of getting L5 pay immediately, while for someone who got promoted internally it can take 4-5 years for all the equity to catch up

[ctrlw]

The signing bonus stock grants may also have compensated them for giving up the stock grants of their previous employer, so they probably still received less than you had accumulated.