tl;dr: TechPays is joining Levels.fyi: so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to Zsombor for building this project with me for so many years.
Pay transparency has always been an issue in tech, especially in Europe. For a while, I assumed that the most that a senior+ software engineer could make in London or Amsterdam would be in the realm of £100K / €100K. Once you reach that level, you've made it. You’re now at the very top of the market! Or are you?
So when I was making £93K in London, working as a principal engineer at Skyscanner in 2016, I was not expecting that I could be compensated meaningfully better. Pay surveys kept confirming that I'm well above the median, and into the 90th percentile of pay grades.
Imagine my surprise when I got an offer from Uber, in Amsterdam, that effectively doubled by compensation, into the realm of around €220-250K ($260-295K). By year four, I made €278K ($326K):
It felt like I discovered a "secret, upper-tier" of the market that no one else knew about. When I became a manager at Uber, and started hiring for my team, several strong software engineers were hesitant to move forward with the process, because they assumed that they were at the very top of the market – but they still made ~half of what we would have offered! I had no way of telling them "your data is wrong, this place pays a lot more!" and so several of them just never bothered to interview, assuming the most raise they would get would be 5-10%. When they could have potentially doubled their compensation…
I saw first-hand that not having good compensation information works against us, developers, and decided to try and change this. I collected data points from closer to 200 engineers working in the Netherlands, and explained that there's a third, "hidden" tier of compensation in The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe.
After the success of the article, I decided to "open source" compensation data points I collected, and thus TechPays was born:
I built this site together with Zsombor Erdődy-Nagy. We paid attention to support compensation anonymization, capture freelancer compensation, and break down how compensation packages were put together. We've received so many heart-warming stories on how you've been able to negotiate better compensation packages, thanks to having access to this information.
Knowing that we're making a difference kept us going for a few years, as a side project. However, over time, both Zsombor and I got busier with other projects. For me, it was The Pragmatic Engineer taking up more of my time. We wanted to find a way to keep TechPays running, and get the care it deserves.
Levels.fyi will be taking over operating TechPays – and taking learnings about European compensation packages, and integrating into their global pay transparency platform. I've known Levels.fyi founders Zuhayeer and Zaheer for years, and we share our drive to make compensation as transparent as possible, across the tech industry.
With TechPays, there are no changes: you get to browse the data, as before. And expect even more, high-quality data points on Levels.fyi, for Europe, and globally.
To get more details on compensation, check out Levels.fyi. And read the Trimodal nature of tech compensation in the US, UK and India, based on Levels.fyi data points:
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