[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.