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 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.]