r/levels_fyi

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

I made this tier list using talent movement data instead of surveys or reputation vibes.

For each company pair A -> B, I looked at public career-history evidence: people currently at company B who list company A somewhere in their prior work history. Then I ranked companies based on directional talent movement and source quality.

Some placements surprised me, especially around AI labs, quant firms, Big Tech, and subsidiaries.

Methodology is here if anyone wants to critique the math:

https://talentflow.fyi/methodology

What looks obviously wrong to people here?

Hi everyone, I’m an ex-FAANG engineer who's cleared multiple senior to staff+ system design rounds. When prepping for my recent interview loops, I realized that system design prep was harder than it should be.

I built PerfectSystemDesign.com to codify the principles I used to clear system design interviews from FAANG companies (incl. OpenAI) and startups alike. This is a culmination of prepping with various resources such as hellointerview, systemdesignprimer, actual mock interviews with other FAANG engineers, system design newsletter, Alex Xu's system design book and many more. What I found worked is to follow a proven format/model, and keep practicing in excalidraw with a feedback loop. I've now wrapped all of that + per-question grading rubric, into an easy-to-use webapp. I'll be adding the recently asked questions soon.

It's free for now, so feel free to use it and let me know what you like and what you'd like to see.