[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

The "outliers" are the companies paying these insultingly low salaries for technology development. That's why there's so much low-quality software in the world.

FAANG (and a few FAANG-adjacent) companies are the only ones paying close to decent wages, and even they've been making frankly egregious cuts to their protein-bar budgets lately.

Let's not sit around manufacturing skewed datasets that give people the wrong idea about what software engineers should get paid.

[ponector]

Not everyone who works on faang codebase receive a decent wage. Don't forget an army of cheap external contractors sold to faang by bodyshops.

[romanhn]

While I agree that FAANG data should be present/available, I will say that the only reason those companies are able to pay such amounts are due to their outsized valuations and the market shares they have captured. Vast majority of companies do not bring in per-employee revenues on par with the FAANGs, so it's not realistic to set one's definition of "decent wages" at those numbers and expect everyone else to pay them. Lots of high-flying startups made a play for fast growth and paid similarly high comp, with the end result of laying huge numbers of people off when the market demanded accountability.

TL;DR: I love being an engineer in the Bay Area, but we truly are a bubble.