Data scientist here. “Average” tech comp (the study used the mean in this case) is so misleading as to be useless and was probably chosen to promote an agenda.

Data scientist here. “Average” tech comp (the study used the mean in this case) is so misleading as to be useless and was probably chosen to promote an agenda. The distribution of tech comp is extremely skewed by the top earners. Median would have been much more representative. (Although I will add that $275k is about the median at FANG companies). I think I remember reading that Americans, on average, have $700k saved up for retirement. When I dug further into the data, the median was many multiples less than that.