Glassdoor has Goldman Sachs salaries topping out at around $350K for VP-level people, although that doesn’t seem to include bonuses, which seem to be about a 1.6 multiplier on your salary at the VP level (and are also taxed a lot more heavily, I hear).
I have no idea why the Glassdoor data is so much more pessimistic than your other citations. Off-topic, but I heard from a Google employee that $500K-ish salaries are within reach for driven managers at Google… and the senior product manager salary data from Glassdoor looks similar to the data for GS VPs.
Just as a clarification for those who don’t realize, the title of vice president is given out much more liberally in finance than in other sectors. In particular, Goldman Sachs has 5000 VPs (or maybe 12,000?).
I’ve noticed Glassdoor to be pessimistic in several other cases as well (where I have hard info contradicting them). It’s bad enough that I half-suspect that the numbers are made-up.
I don’t know anything about the actual salary figures, but bonuses are actually not taxed much more highly. That’s a common misconception. It’s just the way the business has to handle the withholding that changes. Bonuses are considered “supplemental wages”, so employers have 2 options for how to handle their withholding.
The aggregate method: Bonuses are added to your regular paycheck. This amount is then annualized (amount for pay period number of pay periods in a year) and then taxed at the rate appropriate for someone making the annualized amount every year. If you get one big bonus in a monthly paycheck by the aggregate method, you take (bonus + regular monthly salary) 12 and have your tax withheld at that rate, which is much higher.
The flat percentage method: Most larger employers do this. Employers who choose this method withhold 25% of any bonus under $1 million across the board and 35% of each dollar above the $1 million mark. For those who receive their bonuses in large chunks, this is beneficial to the employee. It’s also easier for the employer.
However, when it comes time to file your personal income taxes, regardless of which method was chosen above, you only have one number that represents your total income for the year and you are taxed on that according to the marginal rate schedule that applies to everyone for that year. If your employer used the aggregate method and you had a giant chunk taken out of a small number of bonuses, you’ll get a lot of that back.
At the end of the day, for the IRS, employee compensation is employee compensation. It doesn’t matter how your employer classified it.
Glassdoor rarely properly includes the top paid employees (those people don’t fill out the survey). According to Goldman’s own figures, mean compensation per employee (across all employees) is ~$400k. It’ll be significantly higher if you’re in front office. Your expected earnings from a Goldman job are roughly the mean earnings multiplied by the expected number of years you’ll stay at the firm.
Why? It seems like if anything the most salary-obsessed people would be driven to achieve high salaries and driven to compare their salaries on Glassdoor.
They’re probably interested in comparing their salaries with those of other very-well-paid people. If Glassdoor currently doesn’t attract interest from many of those, that probably means it will continue not to.
Agree—Glassdoor is mainly designed to appeal to job seekers. The way they get their data is by only granting access if you reveal your salary. So the salary data ends up tilted towards the people who are seeking jobs.
There’s also a sampling problem. Google has ~10,000 engineers, but there’s probably only ~100 who earn $1mn+. Large companies normally only have a couple of responses, so even if you sampled everyone randomly, you’d only get ~1 top earner in the sample.
Still interesting to know that there are so many GS VPs getting paid so little though, isn’t it? I would expect that if what you say is true, and GS VPs are well-paid like the consensus from other sources indicates, we’d see very few salary reports from people at the VP level (they’re not seeking jobs!) But in fact there are 102 VP salaries, contrasted with 127 Senior Analyst Salaries and 536 Associate salaries… it seems like associates occur at at least a 5 to 1 ratio with VPs within the organization, if not a higher ratio.
Does Glassdoor actually do anything to verify that (e.g.) someone claiming to be a VP at Goldman Sachs actually is? It seems like that would be difficult. But if they don’t, then we have a fourth candidate explanation, which I think is probably the right one. Not “GS VPs are paid surprisingly little”, nor “Only underpaid GS VPs bother with Glassdoor”, nor “GS VPs understate their salaries on Glassdoor”—but “People who aren’t GS VPs are going to Glassdoor and lying about their role and compensation”.
(May I just remark that for those of us who are neither in the US nor in the finance industry, it feels really really weird to be talking about what a terribly low salary $350k/year + substantial bonus is?)
[EDITED to fix a grammatical screwup arising from messed-up redrafting.]
Glassdoor has Goldman Sachs salaries topping out at around $350K for VP-level people, although that doesn’t seem to include bonuses, which seem to be about a 1.6 multiplier on your salary at the VP level (and are also taxed a lot more heavily, I hear).
I have no idea why the Glassdoor data is so much more pessimistic than your other citations. Off-topic, but I heard from a Google employee that $500K-ish salaries are within reach for driven managers at Google… and the senior product manager salary data from Glassdoor looks similar to the data for GS VPs.
Just as a clarification for those who don’t realize, the title of vice president is given out much more liberally in finance than in other sectors. In particular, Goldman Sachs has 5000 VPs (or maybe 12,000?).
I’ve noticed Glassdoor to be pessimistic in several other cases as well (where I have hard info contradicting them). It’s bad enough that I half-suspect that the numbers are made-up.
I don’t know anything about the actual salary figures, but bonuses are actually not taxed much more highly. That’s a common misconception. It’s just the way the business has to handle the withholding that changes. Bonuses are considered “supplemental wages”, so employers have 2 options for how to handle their withholding.
The aggregate method: Bonuses are added to your regular paycheck. This amount is then annualized (amount for pay period number of pay periods in a year) and then taxed at the rate appropriate for someone making the annualized amount every year. If you get one big bonus in a monthly paycheck by the aggregate method, you take (bonus + regular monthly salary) 12 and have your tax withheld at that rate, which is much higher.
The flat percentage method: Most larger employers do this. Employers who choose this method withhold 25% of any bonus under $1 million across the board and 35% of each dollar above the $1 million mark. For those who receive their bonuses in large chunks, this is beneficial to the employee. It’s also easier for the employer.
However, when it comes time to file your personal income taxes, regardless of which method was chosen above, you only have one number that represents your total income for the year and you are taxed on that according to the marginal rate schedule that applies to everyone for that year. If your employer used the aggregate method and you had a giant chunk taken out of a small number of bonuses, you’ll get a lot of that back.
At the end of the day, for the IRS, employee compensation is employee compensation. It doesn’t matter how your employer classified it.
I’ve heard tell of employers going on glass door and artificially deflating the numbers, to give employees less negotiating power.
I have no evidence of this however.
Glassdoor rarely properly includes the top paid employees (those people don’t fill out the survey). According to Goldman’s own figures, mean compensation per employee (across all employees) is ~$400k. It’ll be significantly higher if you’re in front office. Your expected earnings from a Goldman job are roughly the mean earnings multiplied by the expected number of years you’ll stay at the firm.
Why? It seems like if anything the most salary-obsessed people would be driven to achieve high salaries and driven to compare their salaries on Glassdoor.
They’re probably interested in comparing their salaries with those of other very-well-paid people. If Glassdoor currently doesn’t attract interest from many of those, that probably means it will continue not to.
Agree—Glassdoor is mainly designed to appeal to job seekers. The way they get their data is by only granting access if you reveal your salary. So the salary data ends up tilted towards the people who are seeking jobs.
There’s also a sampling problem. Google has ~10,000 engineers, but there’s probably only ~100 who earn $1mn+. Large companies normally only have a couple of responses, so even if you sampled everyone randomly, you’d only get ~1 top earner in the sample.
Still interesting to know that there are so many GS VPs getting paid so little though, isn’t it? I would expect that if what you say is true, and GS VPs are well-paid like the consensus from other sources indicates, we’d see very few salary reports from people at the VP level (they’re not seeking jobs!) But in fact there are 102 VP salaries, contrasted with 127 Senior Analyst Salaries and 536 Associate salaries… it seems like associates occur at at least a 5 to 1 ratio with VPs within the organization, if not a higher ratio.
Does Glassdoor actually do anything to verify that (e.g.) someone claiming to be a VP at Goldman Sachs actually is? It seems like that would be difficult. But if they don’t, then we have a fourth candidate explanation, which I think is probably the right one. Not “GS VPs are paid surprisingly little”, nor “Only underpaid GS VPs bother with Glassdoor”, nor “GS VPs understate their salaries on Glassdoor”—but “People who aren’t GS VPs are going to Glassdoor and lying about their role and compensation”.
(May I just remark that for those of us who are neither in the US nor in the finance industry, it feels really really weird to be talking about what a terribly low salary $350k/year + substantial bonus is?)
[EDITED to fix a grammatical screwup arising from messed-up redrafting.]