This doc gives the guidelines for levelling and determining compensation, and the reasoning behind the model. The calculator for managers is at slite.com/salary. It may suffer small updates throughout the year.
Overview
We've based our compensation model on a few sources of the most current salary benchmarks in the industry, including Option Impact and Culpepper.
We would not want to break down all existing roles out there bringing a lot of complexity.
We wanted to have something that's fair, easy to understand and use, and scalable.
Salary formula
Gross salary = Level (€) x Role (%) x Location (%) x Setup (%)
Calculator
Use the spreadsheet at slite.com/salary to see how it works live. Make a copy to edit.
Growing up the ladder doesn't need to be everyone's goal and everyone can choose where to stay from the level C. It's also a personal and professional choice to be an individual contributor or people manager.
The level of expertise and impact is given by a unique grade (A to F+, X for executives). It's the same company-wide, regardless of the team.
For each grade there is a description of the related impact and responsibilities. Each line of work can have their own career framework where each level is expanded in more detail and made team-specific (see Engineering career framework).
Someone may be successfully executing skills of next levels without having first excelled at their current level. There must be consistent and stable performance in all areas of a level before progressing to the next.
Role
Traditionally, companies would benchmark each role locally. This may make things more accurate but it brings another level of complexity and often undervalues certain business roles. For instance, the difference between tech and business roles is wider in Portugal than it would be in the US. We want to base this on the impact each role has instead.
To avoid this and aim for equality at Slite, we've decided to fix the index according to the trends in the tech industry that seem most competitive.
Location
There's a wild difference in cost of living in each country. We use the location index to adjust pay in each location based on:
In most countries we pay based on the capital or main tech hub. In the US and Canada, we split the country in zones from 1 to 5 (from highest paid to lowest, respectively). We avoid being extremely specific for the benefit of the team, e.g. even though there are 3 pay zones in the greater area of New York and New Jersey, we group them all in the highest paying zone.
Setup factor
We have three different setups at Slite:
Employees in France
Contractors around the world
EOR (In Canada, US and Spain for now): employment offered through a Deel entity.
For contractors, we compensate for what they're missing if they were being employed:
Slite pays social contributions for employees that go towards social security and pension funds but can't pay these contributions for contractors
Contractors don't pay or pay less social contributions
In return they don't have private healthcare and have to take care of their own contributions (like social security).
That's why we pay contractors more. We base the contractors' additional income on local employment contributions. These are usually the same for entire countries and vary slightly in each State or Province in the US and Canada.
As we're able to offer statutory benefits through EOR, we don't give extra compensation in this setup.
Exchange rate
Local pay was cross-checked to make sure that it's still competitive. Compensation is fixed and we do not make exchange rate adjustments. Everyone's paid in their local currency.
Despite using France and the Euro as an index, we make offers and pay based on everyone's local currency. In the salary model, we use the average exchange rate of the past 4 years to avoid extreme lows or highs.
Executive levels
Executives (VPs, C-suite, etc) have been excluded from the calculator and pay is benchmarked upon offer. There are wide differences between roles/areas and the compensation given usually includes a very competitive equity package.
The same applies for founders, as in their case there's a great deal of personal investment, risk, equity involved.