[gregdoesit]

The data points on pay gap by gender and ethnicity are ones I’ve not seen before and it’s great that this dimension is visualised.

A surprising finding here - that doesn’t match what I would have expected - is how Engineering is compensated 90% in cash. I would have assumed equity is pretty heavy for software engineers, especially in senior and above positions.

I do wish there were more takeaways to what seems to be data confirming these:

1. Compensation is going up, and especially software engineering compensation.

2. Startups are starting to compete stronger on cash compensation (thanks to a strong funding environment, and the market).

3. Remote work is slowly eroding regional differences in the US (and, as a note, globally, as well).

Sadly, there’s no data on remote work here, nor is there anything on what % the market moved up the last year in various disciplines. At least for engineering, the past year has been a major jump upwards in compensation.

[PragmaticPulp]

> A surprising finding here - that doesn’t match what I would have expected - is how Engineering is compensated 90% in cash. I would have assumed equity is pretty heavy for software engineers, especially in senior and above positions.

FAANG and similar jobs are equity heavy, but standard engineering employment is often more cash-heavy.

Working outside of FAANG, my base comp was significantly higher than FAANG base comp, but of course the total comp at FAANG would edge out my total non-FAANG comp.

[bradleyjg]

An average from a bimodal distribution occludes more than it reveals. These days we all have a bit of a fetish for what appears to be data driven analysis even when it involves something like this where it makes things actively worse.

[lotsofpulp]

The hiding of the data’s distribution always makes me sad.

It is not costly to provide quintile or decile data, yet no one ever does when that is where the meat and pickles are. I assume most of the time, averages (and especially unspecified averages where you do not know if it is mean or median), are used to invoke emotions and land more clicks.

[xapata]

Comparing averages is nearly useless without knowing the distributions.

[marcos100]

You mean _totally_ useless.

[gwright]

In most of these types of salary surveys I've seen they report a single average salary for a position. I wish they would break that down by years of experience -- probably have to pay for the "full report" to get that level of detail.

[davey48016]

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

This is from Europe, but I think it's true in the US as well. Software engineers at large tech companies and venture funded startups get paid a lot, including equity. Software engineers at consultancies or doing internal development at businesses with several thousand employees are on a different salary scale.