Levels.fyi 2022 Pay Report

Yeah these are based on numbers from Levels, which is known to report salaries from top tech companies. I'm sure numbers from BLS or even something like Glassdoor are far more accurate when thinking about the industry as a whole.

These salaries definitely have reporting bias, and the top paying companies are definitely outliers by definition. But one important point with regards to BLS data is that they don't account for total compensation, which is a large part of compensation especially in tech, sometimes greater than 50% of one's total package.

Couple of potential ideas off the top of my head:

- continued rise in remote jobs means larger percentage reports from lower cost-of-living areas, pulling down the average.

- pull-back in tech markets reduces the dollar-denominated equity piece of compensation

- balance of power is shifting back to employers given current market sentiments

These are aggregate metrics. As such, individuals may have seen their salaries stay the same or even go up, but if the employees at the top of the pay scale are removed (layed off, or even a simple selection bias in the dataset), the median will still drop.