It makes me "sad" too, kind-of, until I realize that... * This all about a relatively small number of companies, all large, mostly trendy, mostly webby. * mos

It makes me "sad" too, kind-of, until I realize that... * This all about a relatively small number of companies, all large, mostly trendy, mostly webby. * mostly Bay area and their satellite campuses in a few other places. * base salaries are higher than what I'm used to but not crazy higher unless one counts stock grants. When danluu casually drops numbers like 400K he's really talking about senior/principal folks in very elite job-tracks WITH very high stock grants. * the data comes from people who have had "career trajectories" that brought them to this salary escalator. Career-changers, those of us with weird and varied backgrounds and those with rough starts are, generally-speaking, excluded from these kinds of salary expectations.