[neckardt]

www.levels.fyi will get you a salary range for most companies. Based on my own compensation and that of trusted friends the real numbers are actually a bit higher than what's on levels.fyi right now. (Seattle)

When you apply the best thing is to just be clear to the recruiter what you will accept. If you tell them you won't accept less than $200k any good recruiter would tell you whether that's reasonable or not. If they lie to you, please come back to HN and make an angry post about it. You'll get my upvote.

[jmtulloss]

This. levels.fyi is quite accurate both in first-hand data and when discussing salaries with folks that are coming from companies represented on the site.

I speculate that one of the things that makes it hard to square with market data is that levels.fyi leads with total compensation which will include stock based comp. afaict people report their stock comp differently, sometimes it's the original offer value and sometimes it's the value at that time (which might be years after the grant was given). Since things are really going up right now... it can lead to some big numbers. These numbers are still real, but not necessarily what you would see in an offer.

The salary numbers, however, are spot on in my experience.

[mkhpalm]

I agree, the salary numbers look pretty spot on for me as well.