> Outliers never come out and talk about their compensation to be frank.

My experience is that only outliers ever come out and talk about their compensation, leaving the audience with the impression that most everyone is either a $400k/year Googlecorn or a $40k/year code slave.

I don't need to see your W-2. I'm not replying to you to accuse you of lying--you're probably not. I'm replying for the benefit of other readers who read comments like yours and start believing that $300K, $400K, $500K etc. are normal salaries for software engineers, only to be confused and frustrated at what they actually see out there in the real world. All of those salaries are likely at least 3 standard deviations from the mean. I don't know what your definition of "outlier" is, but those are extreme outlier salaries. Congratulations on being so fortunate!

Your aim to "increase awareness" does nothing for a normal or even above average software engineer negotiating their offer at a non-outlier company. How does this help them? "I think $200K is reasonable because somebody on the Internet told me that some people at Google make $400K?" Is that really going to fly, basically anywhere?

EDIT: Another source:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm

Well thanks for the info then!

God do I need to get out of the startup world and start working for one of the unicorns....