3.1 Base salary

In early 2020, levels.fyi shared their data with me, which includes self-reported direct compensation details of 18.8k tech workers. This data is US-focused with 80% of the entries are US-based (40% from California, 24% from Washington State) and 40% are from FAAAM companies. 65% of the entries are software engineers. The 7 most popular jobs account for 88% of all the entries.

The reported compensation packages follow a skew-normal distribution with a small percentage making outlier amounts of money -- tech workers in India or Russia can make under $20k, while top engineers at Google, Facebook, OpenAI can make millions a year.

The median yearly compensation is $195,000, while the mean is $225,000.

These numbers are higher than the results of the StackOverflow survey in 2019, which states that in the US, the median salary for an Engineering Manager -- the highest paying engineering position in the survey -- is $152,000. This might be because levels.fyi data is FAAAM-focused and includes the whole package -- base salary, equity, and bonus -- while StackOverflow surveyed only salary.