Method
How to read a band
Every seat is drawn on a shared scale. Solid fill is cash — base to typical. The vertical tick is the number people quote (OTE or TC). The wash past the tick is observed top of book, not a promise. A hollow cash bar means the seat is still market-only. A solid bar means a majority of reports came from a work inbox.
The board
Talk is public and ranked like Hacker News. A thread has to be about a company or a seat. Hiring and founder posts are a different mark, not a different site. We do not hide disagreement — Contested is the sort for that. We hide spam after enough flags. Work-email verified handles carry a mark. A raised hand is not an application. It is a signal to the hiring side of that company.
What a number is
Each seat is an estimate of US typical pay for that company and role: base, OTE or typical total comp, and the top of the observed book. Sales seats use OTE. IC seats use typical TC in the OTE column.
Sources, in rank order
- Work-email report. We send a code to a company inbox. Only then does a number count as verified. The envelope on a row means a majority of that seat’s sample is verified.
- Market composite. Trailing public ranges — filings, posted jobs, published surveys. This is the floor every seat starts from.
- Public posts on X. Cited on the seat when we used one. Link goes to the post. Not verified. Never outranks a work-email report.
The score
Authority is 0–99. It is how much we trust the seat, not how well the company pays. Work-email share is the heaviest input. We do not publish the rest of the recipe. 80+ is a seat you can take to a negotiation. Below 50, treat it as a sketch.
What we will not do
No private HR scrapes. No screenshot-as-proof. No selling identities. Only the email domain is public.