I'm familiar with NYC, not Seattle. This is not particular to any type of development - at a startup in the publishing space, a hedge fund, a marketing company or big bank, these are low salaries for the caliber of developer rethink is trying to hire.

But it's important to note, I'm not talking about the average developer here. I'm talking about the top 5% who think "reverse a linked list" actually is a warmup question, and can maybe even explain how a binary tree speeds up finding ordered objects.