I've always found the Robert Half salary guides to be the most comprehensive guides available:
There's, of course, many factors that make this type of employment quickly changing, quite dynamic, and different from standard corporate employment.
Also, I wonder how best to account for stock units vs options as far as equity awards go.
I think you're living in a willfully ignorant echo chamber
Are you saying that there startup job offers aren't inflated? Or that they are?
Are you assuming I live in SV?
Aren't. Conventional wisdom is that folks who work for a startup take a significant haircut vs. working for an established company.
I made the comment because I find that startups (or the recent brand of startups with crazy valuations and relatively cheap operating costs) are the ones that push 80K/90K+ salaries (at the very least) for people straight out of college and nice office perks.
A few years ago (and probably still now), people could get hired by big companies like HP/Dell/Intel/Oracle (or other big companies whose main competency isn't necessarily computing) with relatively low salaries (lets say 60K or 70K). This only really applies to recent grads/relatively young developers though, I guess.
I see now that I had it backwards.