Engineering specializations
What's new?
Carta will now provide salary + equity benchmarks for the following engineering specializations:
- DevOps + Site Reliability
- Quality Assurance
- UX/Frontend
How can I assign an employee to a specialization?
You can assign an employee to an engineering specialization by:
Visiting the Employee Scorecard page for a particular employee and selecting “Edit” next to the employee’s role and then selecting “Job area and level” on the Update details page.
- Select the “Specialization” dropdown to assign an employee to one of the listed specializations.
Note: specialization benchmarks are currently limited to DevOps + Site Reliability, Quality Assurance, and UX/Frontend for the engineering job area.
How do I see benchmarks for engineering specializations?
You can view benchmarks for engineering specializations by:
- Visiting the Bands page and selecting “Engineering” under Area. Once the engineering job area is selected, you can change the engineering specializations by selecting the Specialization dropdown.
How do engineering specializations affect the Employee Scorecard?
The compa-ratio is a quick way to compare an employee's compensation to your plan's target rate for a given job area, level, and location. The compa-ratios for an employee assigned to the DevOps + Site Reliability, Quality Assurance, or UX/Frontend engineering specializations will now be calculated using the target compensation for the specializations.
Improvements to the Employee Compensation Timeline
We’ve improved the employee compensation timeline to make it easier to discern between the various types of equity awards an employee has been issued.
Benchmarks version 2022-04-13
What changes can I expect from these benchmarks?
We’ve added more than 10,000 new salary data points to our database since the last benchmark update in January. This has allowed us to significantly improve the quality of our model as we compare results to the underlying statistics. Given the increase in the sample we are able to be more granular in our modeling as we look at different job areas and types of employees (ICs and Managers vs. Executives).
While changes to the benchmarks are largely a reflection of modeling improvements, the changes will also reflect salary movements in the market since January.
This benchmark version also includes engineering specializations for DevOps + Site Reliability, Quality Assurance, and UX/Frontend.
What were the largest areas of movement from these benchmarks?
With this benchmark update we observed larger than expected movement across several job areas, driven largely due to increased sample and refinements to our modeling, and less by overall market dynamics. Many of the decreases we observed were in valuation peer groups of $50M and below. The increases we observed were mainly in valuations higher than $50M. In both cases our benchmarks moved closer to the underlying statistics in our database.
Looking by job area, we saw the largest average increases (ranging from 6.5% - 10%) and decreases (all less than 1.5%) in the following job areas:
Increases:
- Project Management
- Customer Success
- Data
- Sales
Decreases:
- Administrative
- Design
- Human Resources
- Marketing
How do I update my plan to use the new benchmarks version?
You can update your compensation plan to use the latest benchmark versions either by:
- Visiting the Plan page and clicking on the "Update available" link in the Active Plan window.
- Navigating to the Bands page and clicking on the "Update" bubble in the top left.
You will have the opportunity to preview the new plan with the updated benchmarks version and assess their impact on your scorecard before accepting the new plan.
What’s next?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released 2021 data for US-based geo adjustments. Carta will release a May benchmark update that will include improvements to the geo adjustments within the Total Compensation product.
