u/honkeem

I know it's OpenAI, but this is wild

Hey all,

You might’ve seen the headlines this week about Nintendo raising salaires by 10%, but the full story is a little more nuanced. At the 2026 shareholders meeting, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa clarified that the 10% base salary increase actually took place in April 2025. Nintendo did implement further salary increases in April 2026, particularly to starting salaries, but no specific percentage was disclosed.

But this news from Nintendo gets more interesting when you acknowledge the bigger picture.

While one-third of U.S. video game industry workers reported being laid off over the past two years, per GDC's 2026 State of the Industry report, Nintendo had a staff retention rate above 98%.

Xbox cut 9,000+ employees in July 2025 on top of 1,900 gaming-specific cuts in 2024. PlayStation cut 900 jobs, hitting Insomniac and Naughty Dog directly. Studio closures across the industry were common news in that time, Nintendo was the outlier.

There is some tradeoff here though.

According to Levels.fyi data, Nintendo US engineers earn around $220K in total compensation, and all of it in base salary. That's actually above EA ($208K) and well above Activision ($165K), but significantly below big tech, where equity can push senior SWE packages to $350K-$450K+.

Whether the lack of equity grants is a result of Japanese compensation philosophy trickling down to US employees, or something else, the fact remains that compared to larger tech companies, compensation at Nintendo is below the bar. Their job security, however, is top tier.

In a market as unstable as this one, would you give up some pay for a more secure role at a company like Nintendo? If so, how much?

Some interesting data from Ramp and Revelio Labs just dropped. Ramp’s lead economist Ara Kharazian dug into the data in collaboration with Revelio Labs analyzes firm-level AI spend data across 21K U.S. businesses to measure AI’s impact on jobs.

Of course, there’s the prevailing narrative that AI is killing off our jobs because of some of the fearmongering AI CEOs like Dario from Anthropic, just to name one. But the Ramp data provides an interesting insight: the companies that have been spending the most money on AI have also been growing headcount the most too.

Even more interesting is the fact that these heavy AI adopters are also hiring more at the entry-level than anything else.

The Levels.fyi data has also shown that the companies at the forefront of AI have actually been compensating their talent much higher than other companies. No matter how much Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, says that software engineering is dead 6 months from now, it doesn’t change the fact that Anthropic is compensating its engineers at the top of the market right now even before you consider its wild equity growth. Anthropic, OpenAI, and other big AI players have been raising the soft ceiling on base salaries far beyond its previous $300K threshold. New H-1B data even shows that Anthropic has been paying their most exceptional hires >$1M in just base salary.

A lot to think about here, because it’s still the reality that companies have been running mass layoffs while blaming it on AI. A lot of these companies are also guilty of overhiring in the post-pandemic boom, but claiming that it’s due to AI-powered efficiency gains looks better for the stock market.

Super interesting stuff! If you’re curious, you can read more about the data here: https://ramp.com/data/ai-jobs-impact

Hey all,

There was some talk about this last year actually, but recently there's been a resurgence in discourse on X about "the death of FAANG." Really though, with some monster IPOs on the horizon from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, it's worth taking a deeper look into what might be going on here.

FAANG, which stands for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, used to be the primary list and acronym that people would use when discussing the most prestigious and valuable companies in tech. The new acronym, MANGOS, stands for Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. The meteoric rise in valuation for some of these companies has led to them being valued alongside the most valuable companies in the world, all while still being private, and they've also shifted public sentiment on what companies would be the most prestigious to land at as a software engineer.

It's worth noting too that the prestige signal has always been at least loosely correlated with comp, and the comp data supports this shift. OpenAI and Anthropic have been compensating their talent at rates which has forced the rest of the industry to try and keep up, like raising the $300k base salary soft ceiling.

It's interesting how even the most valuable consumer tech company in the world like Apple has slowly shifted away from the conversation simply because it hasn't kept up with AI. Of course, I don't think any of these old guard companies are going to suddenly disappear and stop being a high tier employer, but it's worth thinking about how quickly sentiment has shifted on the best companies to work for in tech.

What do y'all think? Have you been seeing this discourse anywhere else too?

Hey all,

Anthropic announced its S-1 filing this past Monday, finally making some real moves toward an upcoming IPO. Based on its Series H closing at $965B, this means that some engineers who joined in 2023 are sitting on ~$63M in equity solely from how much the company grew while still private.

I looked through the Anthropic SWE data that we’ve received at Levels.fyi and charted the equity growth organized by which fundraising round each engineer joined at. The chart shows the data points with the highest growing equity grants from offer date to present.

The engineer who joined in July 2023 with a $600K total grant now is sitting on an eastimated ~$62.7M after just 3 years of growth. The 2024 cohort, who came in at an $18.1B valuation, is sitting on an estimated $27M to $38M. Even engineers who joined at the $61.5B Series E in early 2025, who were a few rounds late to the party, are looking at $7M to $16M on original grants of $800K to $1.7M.

Of course, these are still paper gains subject to vesting, more potential dilution, and taxes. I applied a 15% dilution cut, compounding per round, to hopefully provide a more realistic picture of this insane growth. Again, these are the highest performing data points that we’ve received, and they are

Anthropic is the extreme example with what I’m pretty sure is the fastest growing company trajectory ever. What’s crazy though is that OpenAI, xAI, and a handful of others have posted valuation trajectories that also would have been thought impossible just a few years ago. For engineers with equity at the right place, this cycle has created generational wealth on unbelievable timelines. Congrats to our Anthropic engineers, if you’re here!

Explore Anthropic offers on Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/software-engineer

Data based on Levels.fyi submissions from Anthropic software engineers, all figures are rough estimates.

I pulled some salary data to see what hardware engineer compensation at the mid-career level looked like across different industries. Most of the time I'm looking at software engineers in tech, so I thought it'd be interesting to dig into the hardware engineer and semiconductor data especially given the market right now

Broadcom is in the lead primarily due to their heavy stock compensation and how high their stock has run recently. Speaking of stock runs though, I might dig into the Micron data to see what US engineers are making right now, but I imagine it'd be on a much smaller scale because of lower data volume.

Fair data disclaimer: this is self-reported data which includes post stock-growth and new offers alike. "Hardware Engineer" in this case is a catch-all classification, but within this title there are a lot of data points labeled as ASIC Engineers, Analog Engineers, SoC Engineers, and RF Engineers. Verification, FPGA, and digital/analog design roles are present but in smaller samples. The generic title here is worth calling out as a data limitation.

The Meta layoffs were telegraphed, but this is the first I'm hearing about the ClickUp layoffs, ~2 hours after the CEO posted on X.

It's a pretty long tweet which covers a bunch of what we've already seen from other lay off memos at other companies, but the most interesting thing about this announcement in particular is the claim that "most savings from this change will flow directly back into people who stay."

ClickUp CEO and founder Zeb Evans claims the company will be introducing million-dollar salary bands for those who create outsized impact using AI. Honestly, if you read the whole memo, it's a pretty detailed take (at least, compared to what other execs have said), although I'm skeptical of how much money is actually going to be funneled back into the employees who stay as opposed to the AI costs that they're inevitably incurring.

My sincerest condolences to anyone who might've been affected. This is a rough time for the industry as a whole.

Read the tweet for yourself here

Hoping anyone who was affected is able to find a new role faster than they would've expected :/

Although companies have been running this playbook of "record profits -> layoffs anyway" using the AI narrative, Meta's MCI and employe tracking is wild. Really seems like a stressful company to be at right now.

More details from NYT here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/technology/meta-layoffs-ai.html

A lot of people think that it's only the engineers that get paid a ton in Big Tech, and while you'd still mostly be right (they get paid disproportionately more, obviously), it'd be incorrect to say that non-tech roles don't get paid a lot at these same companies.

This is self-reported data and some of these data points include stock growth, but it's still worth noting that the company you end up at usually dictates how much you'll be paid more than your title and, sometimes, even more than your experience. These same jobs can get you paid like 50% less even though you're doing mostly the same work, just because of the company you are at.

I pulled new offer data from Levels(dot)fyi to see whether AI chip demand is showing up in actual compensation numbers. Filtered for new grants only (no stock appreciation), controlled for YoE and location concentration:

• 0–2 YoE: Hardware up 14% since 2023. Software up 6%.
• 3–5 YoE: Hardware up 9%. Software up 2.5%.
• 6–10 YoE: Both around 8–9%. Senior demand rose across the board.

A note on sample composition: a decent portion of this dataset comes from semiconductor companies like NVIDIA and Broadcom which is part of why this felt relevant to post here specifically. The numbers skew toward larger tech and semiconductor companies, so keep that in mind when reading the trends.

The premium appears concentrated at the entry and mid levels, which aligns with companies competing for early-career hardware talent before it moves into software tracks. At senior levels the market converges.

At the high end, some senior Broadcom hardware engineers are reporting $495K+ in total comp. NVIDIA hardware comp has moved significantly as RSU grants vest on top of base increases.

This is self-reported offer data, so of course there will be some sampling bias toward high earners, but I wanted to hear from people in the industry: Does this match what people here are seeing in the offer market?

Hey all,

We crossed Redfin’s recent home sale prices from the Redfin Data Center with our own SWE compensation data across 20 major tech metros. The trend line came out quite interesting, and along a somewhat reasonable pattern. As you’d expect, home prices rise as compensation rises, but there are a few cities that stand out a bit: Seattle and San Francisco.

SF is minting millionaries faster than any other city on earth right now. AI talent wars, equity windfalls even before companies IPO, and $275k+ median SWE comp. Yet, the city isn’t building housing fast enough to absorb it. The result is a $1.7M median home price with an even higher upper range that people are struggling to rationalize even with these wild TC numbers.

Seattle, despite being another tech hub, is on the other side of the trend line. Median TC is $255k, just behind SF, but median home prices are ~$835k which is roughly half of SF. Most people throw the cities into the same “expensive tech hub” bucket without doing this math, showing that Seattle is actually better deal by far.

Denver, Austin, and Raleigh are the definition of efficient, sitting close to the trend line. But, with tech roles being a bit more sparse than other tech hubs, it’s a less reliable bet. SF and Seattle are the outliers, but it’s interesting how they’re on completely opposite ends of it.

Location is one of the most underrated levers in total compensation! This data makes the gap visible in both directions.

We also have our SWE heatmap, which lets you view SWE comp organized by US metro for a similar visualization. Check it out here: https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/

Where does your city fall?

Hey everyone!

We're super excited to announce that Levels.fyi is acquiring TechPays. Gergely Orosz and Zsombor have truly built something special for Europe, and we're honored to take that mission forward.

Something you learn when you work with tons of pay data is just how differently pay is discussed depending on where you are in the world.

In the US, everything is annual, but in Europe, the convention is to discuss it monthly, among other things. Not to mention equity structures, tax treatment, pension contributions.

These might sound like small differences, but they really aren’t! It’s important for sites like ours to reflect how people actually talk about their pay.

TechPays has been doing that for European tech workers for years. And bringing them into Levels.fyi is us doubling down on a commitment we've had since the beginning: bringing pay transparency to everyone.

Full announcement here: https://levels.fyi/blog/levelsfyi-acquires-techpays.html