Is it a case of only people making the most money are more apt to report their earnings?
Why would that be? I suspect that's more because the pool of people I know is biased than because the pool that posted is biased -- some orgs in Microsoft will match offers from other companies even though average compensation is relatively low, so if you're new and you know a lot other people who are new, the sample of people you know is probably biased high.
To be clear, I think that's bad both for Microsoft and for Microsoft employees. I'm just trying to figure why the Microsoft data is anomalous relative to the numbers people have personally told me. The reason it's bad for employees is obvious. The reason it's bad for the company is that it's pretty common for people who have been here a long time to shop around, find out that they can make much more elsewhere, and then get a matching offer from MS. Once word gets around that the best way to get a fair raise is to interview elsewhere, people start interviewing elsewhere, and some of the people who interview are going to leave, even if that wasn't their original intent.
Isn't that true pretty much everywhere?
There is a market for doing user submitted comp analysis, but the real value is building trust, which takes a very long time and is expensive.
Surely scalping a ton of mid level engineers at major tech firms for sharing their salaries online will fix that pesky problem of soaring profits and thick margins...
IMO sharing salary data is the perfect first step for some sort of software engineers association/guild/professional body.
And perhaps more relevant to the thread, I know two types of people who talk about their salary, people who make a lot and people who make a little. Their is just so much bias present to me to give any credibility to these lists. Take the google spreadsheet where the employee was fired, do you think the engineers who thought they did better then their peers in negotiations listed their wages?
At it's simplest level I think something like the SAG or profession sports players associations. Kept out of the way, stars can rise, and there if you need them. It'd be useful to be able to have an organization that I can say "Hey, I'm interviewing at Github, based on your verified compensation data that you keep, what can I expect?"
The fact is, our employers share and buy each others compensation data similarly for use in negotiations and when setting compensation. It only makes sense that the parties on the other side of the table do the same thing.
The taxes on equity are a huge PITA when equity is a large fraction of your salary. This is because they withhold at only 25%, even if your tax bracket is higher. This means you have to file quarterly estimated tax payments or over-withhold from your salary.
I much prefer Netflix, where I just get salary. I might even be able to do my own taxes again!
But it's also a tax hassle...though it's hard to complain about it.
Or a hybrid (pay a reasonable amount in estimated taxes but don't put any serious effort into getting it exact).
Sheesh!
I had been working remotely for a long time for a small company, and making what I considered to be good money, considering that I lived in a fly-over state. When I was hired at Google, it more than doubled my salary after a while, when stock grants began to vest.
I now work for Netflix, and I am making even more than I was at Google. To this day, I cannot believe I am paid so much.
All-in-all, I work less, and have a far better work-life balance than I did a few years ago, when working for the small company. In that company, I had sole responsibility for an entire product area, and often worked over 80 hours per week.
As an afterthought, I actually worked far less at Google. Probably about 45 hours a week. It was like a vacation. Being a cog in a machine and not on-call 24/7 was refreshing and enormously freeing after years of constant pressure.
You could also try comparing with visadoor.com or another source of H1B data for the same companies to try to see where they fit in. There may be a systematic difference between H1B salaries and the larger employee base at these companies, but at least you're not limited by self-reporting.