Hello!
As we continue to explore compensation trends, today we're looking into the meat and potatoes: salaries.
Median individual salaries
Legal, strategy, product, and engineering-in that order-have the highest median salaries for individual tech employees across job functions, levels, and company valuations. While engineering costs companies far more overall, legal roles at early startups tend to be highly leveled (a startup is far more likely to hire an engineer straight out of college than a general counsel). Engineers are overrepresented at the top end of the salary scale, however-over 40% of employees making $500,000 or more are engineers.
Six job functions have median salaries below $100,000, while five have a median of over $150,000..
Employee salary growth
Tech employees typically begin making six-figure salaries around level 3 (keeping in mind that startups take a wide variety of approaches to leveling their employee base).
In the aggregate, salaries jump by about 15% per level as employees rise up the ranks. The seeming plateau between levels 9 and 10 is likely a byproduct of the dataset narrowing considerably at these levels, as most small startups don't divide their senior executives into VP and SVP categories.
Median salary by valuation
The median salary is somewhat less dependent on company size than level or function. While smaller companies do have lower median salaries, the gap is nearly erased by the time the company hits $50 million in valuation. In fact, larger companies see the median salary modestly decline as more of their workforce is made up of employees just beginning their careers.
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Brent Devey
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