Anecdote: The "average" salary reported for New York is very close to the entry-level starting salary for college graduates at most large (names you've heard of

Anecdote: The "average" salary reported for New York is very close to the entry-level starting salary for college graduates at most large (names you've heard of) tech employers in NYC. Companies routinely check what each other are doing and adjust entry-level pay packages yearly to compensate for competition, inflation, demand, etc. which makes data from each successive previous year not as relevant for someone interested in making a decision now. I do not think it is hard to imagine that more senior employees that are currently not interested in another job do not have any incentive to report pay to these sites, particularly if their pay is higher than what the site is reporting. (i.e. selection bias) Related -- I believe the distinction between "engineer" vs "developer" being discussed here lately is less relevant than people think. Many people choose their own title when reporting information on sites used as sources in the article and companies may choose to post job listings using a completely different title. Even if the data could be traced back to an actual official title at each company, a large well-paying (or low-paying) company in a particular city could skew the entire number based upon whether they randomly refer to their employees as developers, programmers, or engineers internally. Similarly, a social trend to prefer "engineer" could skew all the anonymous reporting on these sites but actually had no bearing whatsoever in how salaries are determined. Given the noise in the data, I don't see how distinctions can be drawn from the outside.