I'm a senior engineer on 7-figures, and I know many others who are as well. But every time I sort salaries for the FAANGs I see the top-end is mostly missing. My own salary would be the highest listed at my company, but I also have reason to believe that some other engineers here are paid even more than I am - so all our high-end salaries are missing.

This isn't a criticism of levels.fyi, which I think is important for a number of reasons (avoiding exploitative wages, providing data to help avoid wage discrimination based on gender, rewarding companies who do indeed pay well, etc.). But these good things may not work so well when the dataset is incomplete, and missing how high these salaries really go. It's skewing low.

My question is: why are top-end salaries missing, and is there a way levels.fyi can fix it?

Is it just statistical? There's so few of us, so if only 1% of people submit to levels.fyi you end up with hardly any top-end data. Maybe that's the case. But I think there may be more to it.

When you are on $1.389M/year (for example), you realize that you're likely the only person at the company on that exact salary (especially once you start adding job tags), so posting it is no longer anonymous to others at your company. You could fudge it, drop $60k for example, but then giving false data to levels.fyi (even if minor) seems to defeat the point (and may not get past their verification anyway).

As a more concrete example, a single Facebook engineer has posted $4.49M/year. I think that's good for FB, at it shows the true top-end. But I also bet they are the only FB engineer on that, and a lot of FB people know who it is. So they aren't exactly anonymous, are they? And I imagine others in the top-end would have a problem with sharing their own comp in the same way.

What can be done about it? Allow the top-end to post ranges instead? (e.g., $1.3-1.4M, $4.4-$4.5M, etc.) Allow the top-end to post data without the company name? (That would break a bunch of things, such as examining each company for their top-end, but at least the data would be in the system somewhere.) Find out if there's other reasons people aren't sharing?

When you click "Add Compensation" it has two paths, with "Anonymous" at the top. Imagine a third path that, instead of "Anonymous", said "Share your real name with other staff at your company". That's what the top-end is basically asked to do.

Thoughts?