This is true, but a senior at google is nothing like the median senior in the valley.

This is the problem with level.fyi; it's good information but too many people point at it and say "look how much software engineers make in the valley". This isn't even close to representative.

It's a bit like looking at biglaw salaries in NYC and saying "look how much lawyers make".

Mean salary isn't a very useful number if the distribution isn't close to normal; Without all the data it's hard to be sure - but that plausibly seems to be the case for SV salaries. Certainly matches my personal networks experience (sample biased as that may be).

Where did you get that 110k figure, by the way? That sounds very high for me for a median across all US software. Maybe California specific?

I haven't checked the data and I'm not sure why you're being downvoted since you don't seem to be breaking any of HN code of conduct.

That said, isn't median a better measure in this context, though? There can be a set of salaries that skews the average by a significant amounts, but most receive ~110k$