[nerfhammer]

From the article:

> Google, like the others, used a “salary algorithm” to ensure salaries remained within a tight band across like jobs. Although tech companies like to claim that talent and hard work are rewarded, in private, Google’s “People Ops” department kept overall compensation essentially equitable by making sure that lower-paid employees who performed well got higher salary increases than higher-paid employees who also performed well.

[AutoCorrect]

I'm in Atlanta, and our company does this too. So it's not just SV that is keeping salaries low.