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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to exclude FAANGs and other large corporations? Mixing smaller companies and soul-draining leviathans all in the same pot does not produce meaningful results.

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Smaller companies are also soul-draining in many cases. Why to exclude only faangs? Let's exclude banks, insurance etc

You're getting caught up on "soul-draining," but FAANG's and adjacent are generally acknowledged to have the highest TC. It would be useful to know what the statistics are with these outlier companies removed.

The "outliers" employ a quarter million software engineers. You are asking for reality to be warped and censored to suit your weird vibes.

No one called for reality to be censored - simply a toggle that shows the summary stats with and without outliers included. This is the kind of thing folks learn in Stats 101.

How are you defining "outlier"?

You can obviously exclude the top 25 percentile of salaries, since the app shows breakdowns by percentage, but I doubt levels.fyi has accurate data on the number of employees of each company in a particular region.

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.

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.

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.

Why to exclude only faangs?

Because they skew the numbers upwards. Most of the market doesn't pay their wages.

My job at a smaller company was much more soul sucking than my jobs at larger companies

The default view is for median TC which is resistant to outliers.

Even in Silicon Valley, not all large employers pay FAANG rates. In general, older, “enterprisey” companies (think HP, IBM, Cisco, and Intel, to name a few) pay considerably less than FAANG and its peers, which tend to be younger and sell consumer-facing products and services.

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