Do Open Source Companies Pay Competitively? What 5 Years of Levels.fyi Data Says

Most engineers in India have a mental ranking of where to work: FAANG-India first, Indian product companies next, OSS companies somewhere lower or off the list entirely. The reason usually is an assumption that OSS pays less.

I wanted to know if that's true. I pulled 5 years of Levels.fyi data on 38 OSS companies (categorized in pure OSS, Enterprise OSS, and closed-source with strong OSS presence) and compared it against 23 FAANG+ companies and 23 Indian product and services giants. The dataset is about ~4K OSS engineer salaries.

Some metrics from the numbers I ran

• OSS in India pays significantly more than Indian product companies at fresher and mid levels, in some cases by 2× or more.

• FAANG comps are inflated because of their ever-growing equity values

• OSS companies hire remote at significantly higher rates than FAANG or Indian product companies

• In this talk I'll break these down in more detail — comparing salaries across India and globally, across different levels and years of experience, and a head-to-head case study comparing a proprietary company against its OSS alternative.

• How OSS companies actually compensate engineers, broken down by YoE, level, location, and work arrangement.

• The trend of OSS companies pay over the last 5 years

• Breaking down compensation so you don't get played while accepting an offer

• Why pay transparency matters, case for OSS companies publishing salary bands publicly (GitLab, PostHog, etc), and what changes when they do.